Certainly more to his brand of proggie politics. Good riddance
FYI CNN+ is supposed to come online early next year as an internet ‘streaming’ channel
Chris Wallace Leaves Fox News for CNN+
On Sunday, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace announced that is departing the network “effective immediately,” and will be joining CNN+ to host a weekday show. Wallace announced his abrupt departure at the end of Fox News Sunday, the show which he had hosted since 2003, according to CNN….
Lefties Freak out on Conservatives for Doing Exactly What They Told Them to Do
Libs: "Go build your own social media and publishing platforms!"
Conservatives: "Alright"
Libs: https://t.co/3m0oQBGgmn pic.twitter.com/lIk2VkD5rT
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 6, 2021
and someone asked for an example of the leftist echo chamber?
Question O’ The Day
So… what’s the point of this article? They’re arguing that self-defense cases involving guns demands a higher level of scrutiny than self-defense cases that don’t involve guns, then seem to imply that there is a systemic issue of allowing judges to determine foregone conclusions (like they can in many contexts) when deciding the facts of a case. Then they proceed to use two high-profile cases as an example, then admit that neither case involved a foregone conclusion.
Seriously, what point are they trying to make, exactly?
Both the display of a firearm and the pointing of a firearm at another person are threatening acts that ordinarily would create a reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily injury in another person, and thus should be viewed as prima facie evidence of aggression.
This is their point:
They want the mere existence of a visible gun on your person to remove your right to defend yourself.
When it comes to guns and claims of self-defense, juries need guidance
As a general matter, a criminal defendant loses the right to claim he acted justifiably in self-defense if he was the initial aggressor or provocateur
Jurors in two recent high-profile homicide cases involving guns and claims of self-defense have spoken. In one case, the jury found the defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse, not guilty on all homicide charges. In the other case, the jury found Greg and Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan guilty of murder in the death of Ahmaud Arbery.
Important factual differences contributed to the different verdicts in these cases. The skill sets of the attorneys and dispositions of the judges involved played a role as well.
One thing both cases had in common, however, was that each judge gave the jury an initial-aggressor or provocation instruction. The fact that the juries in the two cases were given such an instruction yet reached opposite conclusions indicates that the mere giving of such an instruction in self-defense cases will not predetermine the outcome.
Until these two cases, few people were aware of the initial-aggressor limitation on the defense of self-defense. Now, that limitation has become part of the national conversation.
How to Lie About Guns, New York Times Style
One of the easiest ways to lie and not get sued for libel is to simply do so through exclusion. The New York Times is famous for this and if you don’t know enough about guns they can make things sound pretty bad, just by leaving out a little bit of information. In the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict we ought to brush up on the tactics of far-left media. To do so, we simply just need to look to the past. Back in March of 2021, I found an article so egregious that I decided to go ahead and fill in the blanks. I believe the resulting work should be saved and used to inform anybody who is arguing for more gun control without all of the facts. For reference the original article can be found here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/us/ruger-ar-556-boulder-shooting.html
You’ll see that the author is attempting to paint Ruger’s AR-15 pistol and the 5.56 round in a darker light than it deserves.
The article opens with the basic facts and uses that tired old phrases like “military-style semiautomatic rifle and pistol.” Of course, the author leaves out that they are “military-style” in appearance only. Camouflaging a Kia doesn’t make it an M1 Abrams tank. As the piece starts to “develop,” the author also goes on to write, “Statements from the police and the charging documents did not make it clear which of the weapons was used in the attack, but it appeared at least one is a semiautomatic derivative of the assault rifles that have long been used by the American military.”
For starters, holy long sentence Batman. I had to read it a few times to keep up with it all, leaving just the catchphrases like “assault rifles” and “American military” to stand out. However, if you read it a few times you pick up what is being said. The guns being referenced are derivatives as opposed to copies because they are semi-automatic, like a common pistol. This is unlike the military’s fully automatic M4 carbines. Only folks who know guns are going to know that and only a few are going to be that dedicated to pull all of that from this poorly structured sentence.
Later on, I found what is arguably the poorest display of journalism in the entire article. The author goes on to state, “According to a police affidavit, the suspect charged with 10 counts of murder, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic weapon, essentially a shortened version of an AR-15 style rifle marketed as a pistol, six days before the killings took place. It is also unclear if that weapon was used in the shooting on Monday.”
Wait…if it’s “unclear” that this gun was used at all, why does this article include this statement? Actually, why is there even an article entitled “What we know about the gun used in the Boulder shooting” in existence? The Times didn’t need 284 words to put this piece together, thanks to this statement I can do it with just one, “Nothing.”
About halfway through is where I found the most manipulative piece of information and this is where the author states “Both the AR-15 style rifle and the Ruger version fire the same small-caliber, high-velocity ammunition, which was first developed for battlefield use.” Sure, the 5.56 was built for the military… To replace the current, larger cartridge that was regarded as uncontrollable and too powerful for common battlefield use! I’ve had enough with media like this trying to make the 5.56 round out to be some sort of baby-killing monster. It’s one of the least-potent centerfire rifle rounds on the market, considered by most to be too small even for deer hunting. Is it more powerful than a pistol round? Sure, but almost any given rifle has more power than any given handgun.
As things begin to wrap up the author proceeds to attempt to make large-format pistols look like the “ideal” tool for mass shootings where she says “Based on their size, ‘AR pistols’ are much easier to conceal than a typical AR-15 carbine or rifle. According to the manufacturer’s website, the Ruger AR-556 pistol comes with either a 9.5-inch or 10.5 inch-long barrel, while a typical AR-15 has at least a 16-inch barrel.” Pretty convenient that she left out the fact that common pistols have barrels from 2 to 6 inches and are capable of the same rate of fire and in most cases, capacity. So although an AR Pistol is easier to conceal than a rifle or shotgun, it’s far less concealable than many other semi-automatic firearms.
As a New Yorker, I have been conditioned to read between the lines and sadly that’s where you are going to find the facts in dribble like this. It’s a shame that our publication doesn’t reach the same people who read the Times, because it would be nice to give the Times’s readership a complete and balanced idea of what that this firearm is—and more importantly what it isn’t. This, my friends, is why we must remain vigilant and never shy away from the conversation. We can only change an informed mind and that duty lies squarely at our feet.
Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie
The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.
As far as corporate media are concerned, the massacre in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday was a “Christmas parade crash.”
That’s how the attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others is being described by ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek and others. Not an intentional attack, not a massacre allegedly committed by a violent career criminal already facing multiple felony charges, but merely a crash. The New York Times is calling it a “tragedy.”
Not to be outdone by major news outlets, The Daily Beast rushed to remind its readers that “there are no indications of any additional motive for the Waukesha killings, or any reasons to label it domestic terrorism. That didn’t stop these right-wing trolls.”Oh no we wouldn’t want to assign ideological motives to a case too soon. But these damn right-wing trolls sure will! No mention from the Beast, of course, of the worst possible example of that in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which every major news organization gladly went along with.
Here’s the thing. The next time you read an article in the New York Times or the Atlantic, watch a bit of breaking news on MSNBC or a panel on CNN, or hear a report on NPR, your default assumption should be that what you are reading, watching, or hearing is not true. Either it is an outright falsehood, a distortion of the facts, or not the whole story. That should be your posture toward literally every piece of news you consume from corporate media from now on.
There is ample justification for such a posture. It’s justified by every single major news story in recent years — the Russia collusion hoax, the origins of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the debate over Covid vaccines, the January 6 riot, and especially the Rittenhouse trial, to name just a few. Every one of these stories, and many more besides, were dishonestly reported by a corrupt media establishment that you should never trust again.
The Second Amendment Ain’t That Complicated
When looking at the Bill of Rights, it becomes clear that the Second Amendment is pretty important. After all, it’s second in the list of amendments. Additionally, the First Amendment preserves a number of specific rights, whereas the Second is focused on a single right. That suggests some importance for that particular right.
For many of us, we’ve referred to as the insurance policy on the Bill of Rights. After all, your right to protest or worship as you see fit can be snatched away by any government willing to ignore words on a piece of paper. Having the right to keep and bear arms means a potentially tyrannical government will have to account for a populace that is both armed and outnumbers them.
But some have managed to take this relatively simple concept and make it complicated.
That’s at play in a recent editorial that appeared in several newspapers, but appears to have originated from the L.A. Times:
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a mess, a muddle, a grammatically challenged pair of clauses that allows two or more readers to insist that it says two starkly different things, both of which are of life-or-death importance and each of which can be only partially defended.
To some, it is foremost the militia amendment, plainly referring to “the people” as a collective entity and embodying a young, rebellious nation’s mistrust of professional standing armies in favor of armed citizens banding together at times of crisis.
Yet to others, it is primarily the gun-rights clause, safeguarding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, notwithstanding the clear references to “the security of a free state” and the lack of any mention of individual rights.
The drafters of the Bill of Rights were learned men who knew how to write, so there must have been some reason for them to submit these oddly assembled 27 words that give us such trouble today. They most likely disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. Was their primary and most contentious purpose to defend the nation (against foreign invaders, but perhaps also against the abuses of their own government)? Or was it for shooting squirrels for the dinner table (and defending against slave revolts and Indian uprisings)?
I’m going to give the writer credit. For once, they at least acknowledge that we have an argument at least as equally valid as the gun control crowd’s.
Usually, they simply pretend we’re making stuff up.
However, I have to point out that the Second Amendment really isn’t that difficult to understand.
Let’s start by addressing the militia clause for a moment. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” is an introductory clause, but it doesn’t actually carry much weight grammatically. You can purge it from the sentence and it still makes sense. Trust me, I use way too many introductory clauses in my own writing. I’m well versed in what they are.
But even if it’s not, the claim that “the people” refers to a collective group should be problematic for each and every person in this country, even if you don’t like guns.
After all, “the people” are referred to multiple times in the Bill of Rights. At no other point does it seem to refer to a collective right except with regard to the right to keep and bear arms. Now, why would the Founding Fathers write it that way?
Oh, and it’s highly unlikely that our Founding Fathers disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. These aren’t the vanguard of an ancient civilization lost to time. Their writings still exist, preserved by a society that recognized the importance of their words. We have many comments about preserving the right to gun ownership. We also have stories of these same men carrying firearms with them as they passed through the city.
What we don’t have, though, are any references to them believing that the right to gun ownership should be limited.
I mean, the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue letters of marque, empowering privateers to hunt the shipping of our nation’s enemies. That at least suggests that the private ownership of artillery was on the table. If they were unwilling to restrict cannons, then why should we believe they were accepting of any other restriction.
The fact is that there’s no evidence to suggest our Founding Fathers struggled with the role of guns in our society. Quite the contrary, actually, they not only accepted them but felt that they were a necessity for maintaining a free society.
The editorial goes on later to argue:
In some parts of the country, people still do use guns to put food on the table, for sport or simply as an attribute of their lifestyle. Gun-toting behavior that would be natural and acceptable in, say, rural Pennsylvania, would be menacing and is wisely prohibited in downtown Los Angeles. For now.
In issuing a ruling in the case currently before it, the Supreme Court may well strike down not merely New York’s permit requirements but also California’s, and those of the six other states that reserve the right to grant or deny permits based on the applicant’s reason for wanting one.
States have long made their own decisions about how to balance residents’ safety with their gun rights, based on the values expressed by voters at the polls and their representatives in the legislature.
This, of course, is in reference to the case before the Supreme Court, as is most of the editorial. The editorial board responsible for this one argues that these restrictions are good and necessary.
However, as I’ve already illustrated and as the courts have found, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. That means restricting people from exercising that right based on a subjective interpretation of need is an infringement of that right. You can’t argue otherwise without simply pretending the right doesn’t exist.
The truth is, the Second Amendment isn’t that complicated.
*gasp* Horrors! *faint*
CNN: ‘Americans Are Buying More Guns Than Ever Before’
CNN used a Tuesday column on the decline in gun control support to affirm “Americans are buying more guns than ever before.”
CNN pointed out that Democrat House members have passed gun control that the Senate is not even expected to consider, as “support for gun control just hit its lowest point in almost decade.”
They pointed to a Gallup survey showing only 52 percent of Americans support stricter gun control. That is the lowest level of gun control support since 2014.
CNN also acknowledged a new Quinnipiac Poll, which found 48 percent of registered voters oppose stricter gun control.
CNN observed: “Americans are buying more guns than ever before. In 2020, nearly 23 million guns were bought — a record. That surge has continued through 2021.”
On September 9, 2021, the National Shootings Sports Foundation looked at numbers from the first six months of 2021 and estimated there were 3.2 million first-time gun purchasers during that time-frame.
The USA Today editorial board are liars
The USA Today editorial board is incoherent and/or has a reading comprehension problem and/or is lying. And they tell the lie that they believe an inanimate object can be guilty:
He said the weapon was a key reason he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum during the mayhem. “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would have used it and killed me with it,” Rittenhouse testified during the trial.
Demonstrators saw the shooting and chased after Rittenhouse in an apparent effort to disarm him. One of them was Anthony Huber armed only with a skateboard. Huber grabbed the barrel of the AR-15, and Rittenhouse shot him to death.
“The irony of the case is that Mr. Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre among gun-rights advocates, even though, according to his own defense, it was his carrying of the rifle that put him in danger in the first place,” the Economist noted.
Rittenhouse said no such thing. And they quoted the testimony which refutes their claim! The key reason for all legal use of lethal force is the reasonable fear of imminent severe injury or death. Rittenhouse articulated this well, repeatedly, and the video supports his claims. Without the rifle Rosenbaum would still have been outraged at his dumpster fire, being pushed into a gas station, being put out with the fire extinguisher. And that outrage led to Rittenhouse being chased by Rosenbaum and others. And when they cornered him without the rifle they almost certainly would have caused him severe injury or death. Hence, the rifle cannot be the “key reason” justifying the use of deadly force.
They are also liars:
Such weapons were expressly designed for the battlefield, and that may be a good part of their appeal.
Wrong. Such weapons are expressly designed to be easy to shoot, maintain, carry, economical, and accurate. They are the most common rifle sold in the United States and no AR-15 style rifle has ever been issued to a military for battlefield use (the AR-15 is semi-auto, militaries all use select fire rifles).
The primacy of assault-style rifles in American society is not a Second Amendment issue. When the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 underscoring the Second Amendment’s right to possess firearms, he said the freedom is “not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever.”
This must be a deliberate lie. Here is the complete quote from the 2008 Heller decision (emphasis added):
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”
I cannot imagine having read to middle of page 54 to pluck the “not unlimited” quote they did not read to the top of page 55 and see the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”
Being the most popular rifle style sold in the United States the AR-15 qualifies as “in common use”. Hence, the AR-15 is protected by the Second Amendment.
Main stream media being deceitful… again?
Where’s that Gomer Pyle meme when you need it?
In the wake of the deadly incident at a Waukesha Christmas parade yesterday, media have been circling the wagons around suspect Darrell E. Brooks, touting a narrative that Brooks may have driven his SUV into all those people because he was fleeing from the scene of another crime. Because if that were the case, it would mean that he didn’t mean to injure and kill anyone.
A lot of outlets were going with that.
Well, according to law enforcement — like, law enforcement willing to go on video, on record — Brooks was, in fact, not being pursued by police when he mowed down parade attendees:
Darrell Brooks was not being pursued when he entered the Waukesha Christmas parade. pic.twitter.com/odWRQyd00C
— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) November 22, 2021
Waukesha Police say Darrell Brooks "intentionally drove his maroon SUV through barricades into a crowd of people" at the Christmas parade
5 dead. 48 injured. pic.twitter.com/JaQ7swCWtI
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 22, 2021
Winsome Sears Winsome went on CNN and Dana Bash tried to tell her CRT isn’t in the curriculum of Virginia schools.
Fast forward to 5 minutes in the vid.
Defeat the Lies of Gun Control with Facts
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went on a rant that targeted conservative media and the Second Amendment. It’s one that Second Amendment supporters should pay some heed to, even though Wallace these days is little more than a Beltway version of Regina George.
Wallace may be a NeverTrump “mean girl” these days, but she also was – at least putatively – a one-time Second Amendment supporter (and she worked for a President who appointed two of the five justices in the Heller majority). She also was a White House communications director, and as much as we may want to dismiss her, dummies don’t become White House communications directors. People who show loyalty and competence usually get that job.
This is why her claim that America has a gun crisis needs to be taken on, forcefully. Like David Frum’s lie about responsible gun ownership and the phony bologna claims about the origins of the Second Amendment from Carol Anderson (via the ACLU), we must push back. These lies are not small potatoes.
Some of these facts come from looking over the latest FBI stats. In 2020, a total of 455 homicides were carried out with rifles, with another 203 carried out by shotguns. To put that into perspective, “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet, etc.) killed 662 people or more than rifles and shotguns of all types combined. Handguns and “firearms, type not stated” were used in 8,209 and 4,863 homicides, respectively.
There are roughly 150 million handguns in the United States, according to an NRA-ILA Fact Sheet. That means in 2020, .0054 percent of handguns were used in homicides or one in 18,272.627603. It should be noted that since the landmark Heller ruling in 2008, the Supreme Court has held that handgun bans are unconstitutional.
The next fact that Wallace ignores is that we know what has caused the latest upswing in violent crime: No prosecuting the violent offenders. Take some of the outrageous decisions from Chicago, for instance, or for the prosecutors whose campaigns George Soros has funded. Even if authorities can’t get murder charges perhaps some of the rarely-used provisions of 18 USC 922 and 18 USC 924 could make a dent. The problem is, these aren’t used, and similar state-level provisions also aren’t used.
Second Amendment supporters can debate the wisdom of various gun laws, but the laws that Project Exile enforced can and would make a huge difference in the places that are seeing the worst of violent crime. Part of the way dishonest hacks and anti-Second Amendment extremists will sell the false notion of a ”gun crisis” (especially in the “public health” arena) is to point to murder rates and violent crime.
The ultimate task for Second Amendment supporters is to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level – not to mention in corporate boardrooms and elsewhere. However, to do that, they need to not only prove claims of a “gun crisis” are phony, they need to show that the solution to the real crisis is not found in attacking the Second Amendment.
The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
Take this, for instance, from CNN:
I wonder how they’d feel if someone ‘lamented’ their misuse of the 1st amendment like Toobin is by sliding in lie or two?
CNN Laments Americans Exercising Their 2nd Amendment Rights
National media attention has focused in on the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with murder after shooting his attackers during the Kenosha riots of August 2020. As Rittenhouse took the stand himself to testify, facing harsh interrogation from the prosecution and accusations of faking his own emotional breakdown while on the stand, even CNN’s own experts were forced to conclude that his testimony was compelling. On Thursday, the liberal cable channel took a different tack: actually complaining that people are allowed to carry firearms in public.
CNN’s chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, began by introducing the self-defense case as partly “a matter of public policy. What is a 17-year-old with no training, no gun permit, no ties to this community, doesn’t even live in the state of Wisconsin, going in the night — in the middle of the night to a riot to help out? Just an incredibly stupid irresponsible decision.”
Newsroom host Jim Sciutto appeared very concerned that people can exercise their Second Amendment rights by carrying firearms. Ignoring the fact that Rittenhouse was allegedly in Kenosha to provide medical aid and put out fires, Sciutto asked Toobin, “Do we as a country, in effect, allow people from anywhere to show up anywhere else and sort of self-appoint themselves sheriff, right? Or sheriff’s deputy. Are there any laws that govern that…are there any laws that bar me from showing up somewhere else and saying I’m going to help fight crime?”
Toobin replied by lamenting the fact that he has recently seen more people openly carrying guns:
One of the big changes in state laws over the last two decades are the increasing freedom that is being granted to individuals to carry concealed weapons, to carry publicly you know, visible, visible weapons. I mean, it is such a sea change in, in how the, how the law works. And, you know, I was just in Oklahoma the other day, in Arizona. You just see people carrying guns in public that you didn’t used to see.
He went on to suggest again that Rittenhouse was appointing himself as law enforcement, despite all the evidence in court thus far pointing to him acting solely in self-defense.
This commentary followed a line of questioning by the prosecution in the trial wherein the prosecutor seemed to imply that carrying a firearm is only acceptable when someone is actively in danger. This type of dangerous rhetoric tramples on the Second Amendment and makes everyday gun-carrying citizens into villains, just like the liberal media has attempted to make Kyle Rittenhouse into a villain.
So the leftist media have crap-for-brains….
Do I need to cue the meme again?
ABC News Touts Gun, Ammo Taxes To Fight “Gun Violence”
For the past several days, my colleague Tom Knighton has been covering the ABC News series “Rethinking Gun Violence” and doing a great job of pointing out the bias in the network’s reporting. I’m going to tag in and take on ABC’s latest report in the series, which is all about the supposedly wonderful benefits of taxing the exercise of a constitutional right; in this case, slapping additional taxes on the purchase of firearms and ammunition.
Here is how advocates argue that a tax could be used as one policy lever in a holistic approach to ameliorating gun violence — not with the goal of keeping people from buying guns, but rather to claw back revenue from industry profits to raise billions for American communities.
Does ABC News even understand how taxes work? Any additional tax imposed on the purchase of guns and ammunition doesn’t “claw back revenue” from gun makers. It simply takes more money out of the pocket of gun owners. And why should law-abiding gun owners be singled out for a special tax if the money is supposed to be used to increase public safety for all?
A particularly bloody summer in California this year led lawmakers to propose a tax on guns and ammo to generate revenue specifically to fund community-based prevention programs. AB1223, which would have added an excise tax of 10% on handgun sales and 11% on long guns, precursor parts and ammunition, fell four votes short of advancing by super majority in the state Assembly last summer, but it’s set to be re-introduced in January.
“This tax is for funding gun violence prevention programs,” California Assembly ember Marc Levine, a Democrat who helped draft the proposed legislation, told ABC News. “It’s something everyone can agree on.”
Everyone? I don’t think so. There are certainly plenty of gun owners who are opposed.
Republican opponents of the bill have argued it’s unconstitutional.
“It is a clear violation of the First Amendment,” Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, told ABC News. “It is unconstitutional to require an excise tax, insurance, any monetary requirement before someone exercises an enumerated constitutional right.”
And even some on the Left see this for what it is; a shameless attempt by anti-gun politicians and the gun control lobby to go after legal gun owners instead of actually focusing on violent criminals.
“Unfortunately we have very little information, very little data to work with — there have not been that many really high-quality studies trying to look at this issue,” Robert McClelland, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told ABC News. A tax like the one proposed in California “really punishes people who are high-volume users, who are going to tend to be target shooters or hunters.”
“I don’t know if those people are really the ones that are responsible for most gun violence, but that doesn’t sound likely,” he added. “So an ammunition tax seems like it’s misdirected.”
As for any potential decrease in sales resulting from a tax, according to McClelland, “People who are on the borderline between making a purchase and not making a purchase, to that extent, yes, you would see fewer purchases. I would expect a much larger effect to be people would would simply go to private sales for used handguns and used firearms.”
I’m sure the gun control lobby has an answer for that too. Maybe a ban on private sales or transfers altogether?
I can’t help but wonder what the bean-counters and even reporters at ABC News would think about a special tax on each and every broadcast; something like 10-11% of all the commercial revenue generated, with the proceeds being directed at efforts to combat online disinformation.
My guess is that the network brass would be hollering about unconstitutional attacks on a free press, but I’d be happy to test that hypothesis if any congresscritter would like to conduct an experiment.
So the leftist media are deceitful…Cue the meme.
Without False Claims About The Risk of Concealed Handgun Permit Holders, The Left Has Nothing
Preface: Last Friday, the National Law Journal ran an op-ed by Lisa Vicens and John Donohue with many errors in it regarding a case that the U.S. Supreme Court heard last Wednesday on New York’s concealed handgun law.
The article gave readers very inaccurate information on the academic research regarding the risk of crime by concealed handgun permit holders. This false claim of public safety is really all the state of New York has to base its case on. The left-leaning National Law Journal, a business partner with Michael Bloomberg, is unwilling to respond to repeated requests to correct the record on these extreme inaccuracies, so we are publishing our response here at Townhall. Unfortunately, all the judges, lawyers, and law professors who read the National Law Journal won’t hear the other side of the argument.
Our Piece: “The last thing we need is the infusion of additional guns into New York City,” said New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea on Sunday. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen last Wednesday. New York’s legal team argued to the Court that this would worsen gun violence.
New York is one of seven “May-Issue” states where officials can turn down carry permit requests for any reason (or no reason) at all. The Court is considering replacing this discretionary process with objective “Shall-Issue” rules. That way, people can get a permit as long as they reach a certain age, have no criminal background, pay the fees, and complete any required training.
Since 1976, 18 states eliminated “proper cause” requirements, and gun control advocates have consistently predicted disaster. But in state after state, concealed handgun permit holders have proved to be extremely law-abiding, and Right-to-Carry states have never even held a legislative hearing to consider moving back to “proper cause.”
Those same fears were raised again and again during Wednesday’s oral arguments. Justice Stephen Breyer speculated: “People of good moral character who start drinking a lot and who may be there for a football game or — or some kind of soccer game can get pretty angry at each other. And if they each have a concealed weapon, who knows?”
But, with 21.5 million permit holders and laws over many decades, you should have seen that example at least once. We haven’t.
Observation O’ The Day
Mother Jones couldn’t even put one of their own “beloved” above their cause. He didn’t even use a gun in his suicide, but they stood on his still warm body to promote gun control.
Mother Jones Pushes Red Flag Laws After Gun Control Activist Kills Himself
Mother Jones pushed red flag laws after announcing that former executive director of Everytown for Gun Safety, Mark Glaze, killed himself.
The New York Times noted, “Glaze, who was widely considered a founding figure in the modern gun-control movement, died on Oct. 31 in Scranton, Pa.”
NYT went on to point out that Glaze’s death was a suicide.
A Facebook post from Glaze’s family members reads, in part:
As we celebrate the life of our beloved Mark, we would be remiss not to mention his harrowing struggle with alcohol, depression, and anxiety. In the last years of his life, Mark actively sought help. He completed several treatment programs, with the hope of finding peace and breaking free of the addictive cycle that caused him to feel so desperately alone and in pain. Mark took his own life while being held on DUI charges at the Lackawanna County Prison. While it may be difficult to discuss this specific cause of death, with suicide as the tenth leading cause of mortality in the United States– the numbers and instances are too frequent and increasing to ignore.
Mother Jones reported Glaze’s suicide, then pushed red flag laws
There is no indication that Mark used a gun to kill himself. Still, he was a victim of a scourge he worked to oppose. Nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, according to Mark’s former organization. To fight gun violence is to fight suicide. Research shows that people who have access to guns are far more likely to kill themselves than people who don’t.
Glaze and others in his field advocated for the enactment, in 19 states and DC, of so-called Red Flag laws, which allow local police to confiscate guns from people who have threatened to harm themselves or others. These orders aim to stop not just murder, but suicide. Evidence suggests they are most effective at preventing people from shooting themselves.
Media Hysteria over Efforts to Protect 2nd Amendment
CNN is on the warpath against politicians and gun rights activist organizations for defending the Second Amendment against efforts to erode the right to keep and bear arms, especially when remarks from Joe Biden are singled out.
In a lengthy report Friday, CNN focused on West Virginia Republican State Rep. Brandon Steele, who has been pushing a “Second Amendment Preservation Act” that would “bar state or local police from enforcing new federal gun restrictions the Biden administration might adopt.”
While the story notes Steele has acknowledged the Biden administration has been so far unsuccessful in pressing what was a sweeping gun control agenda unveiled early in 2020. It is an extremist package that includes a ban on so-called “assault rifles,” waiting periods on handgun purchases, so-called “universal background checks” and regulate semi-auto rifles the same as full-auto machine guns.
The story asserts gun rights groups and politicians have been “gunning up fears that Biden wants to… ‘erase the Second Amendment’ and come to people’s homes and take away their guns.”
CNN recalls a Fox News piece that talked about how Second Amendment groups hit the airwaves with a message that if Biden “can force a needle in your arm, he can take away your gun.” That message was sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation, an organization often overlooked by the establishment media, which is content with demonizing the National Rifle Association. NRA had nothing to do with the message.
CNN declared in its report, “The inflammatory rhetoric surrounding these new laws, critics says, is similar and even connected to claims of 2020 election fraud and pushback against Covid-19 vaccine or mask mandates in that they rely on a denial of reality.”
Perhaps it is CNN that is denying reality. The SAF messages broadcast earlier this fall included quotes from Biden during a CNN Townhall in which he admitted he has been working to prohibit not only semi-auto rifles, but 9mm pistols.
At the time the message ran on some 20 different cable networks, Alan Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president, said in a statement, “Over the past eight months since taking office, Joe Biden has evolved from being an annoying gun control advocate to a dangerously ambitious gun prohibitionist. He hasn’t simply climbed on the gun ban train, he’s now the engineer, portraying so-called ‘gun violence’ as a public health epidemic. He’s perpetuating a myth invented by the gun ban lobby to demonize guns, their owners and the Second Amendment that protects their right to keep and bear arms.”
The CNN story quotes Alexandra Filindra, described as “a political science professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, who studies gun politics, disinformation and social media.” She intimates gun rights defenders as being “part of an ideological system, [and believe] that the other side — in this case, the Democrats — are devious and intent on taking political rights away and imposing a socialistic tyranny.”
The Second Amendment does not protect a “political right.” It protects a fundamental right enumerated in the Constitution, gun rights advocates would respond.
But after Tuesday’s devastating election results for Democrats, whose only bright light seems to be the victory of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy while a Republican truck driver operating on a shoestring budget just beat the leader of the state Senate Democrats, probably will put gun control on the back burner, if not the shelf. Virginia voters replaced Democrats with Republicans in all three statewide races including the governor’s race. In Minneapolis, voters soundly rejected an effort to defund and dismantle the police department. In Seattle, voters rejected candidates who had advocated to defund the police.
It just might be a forecast of things to come next November at the mid-term elections. The rush toward the far left by radical anti-gun Democrats just hit a speed bump, and people behind the efforts to protect the Second Amendment were partly, if not largely responsible.
Comment O’ The Day
Can’t decide if the best part is Cheryl schooling this reporter or the VA results scrolling underneath
Watch This Based Mom School A Reporter On Why Good Guys Should Have Guns
It’s no secret that corporate reporters aren’t the most poised or articulate about handling or talking about guns, but a recent interaction between ABC News reporter Devin Dwyer and a mother of five in New York might take the cake.
ABC News aired a segment on Tuesday night previewing the laws and background of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for on Wednesday. The coverage is part of the corporate outlet’s larger “Rethinking Gun Violence” series, which is often used to amplify anti-gun activists’ war on firearms.
In the interview, Dwyer asks Cheryl Apple, a small business owner and recent first-time gun owner, to justify why she felt the need to apply for an unrestricted license to carry her 9 mm pistol. Her response to Dwyer is perfect.
“Do we really want a whole bunch of Cheryls running around with pistols in the grocery store?” Dwyer asked.
“Yeah, we probably do because Cheryl is trained,” Apple replied indignantly. “I feel proficient with my weapon, I feel secure with my weapon, and I feel confident with my weapon. I don’t think the Cheryls are the one[s] out there that are hurting people and committing the crimes and being unsafe with their guns.”
A group of New York gun owners will ask the Supreme Court to establish a fundamental right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home, a view of the Second Amendment that could reshape gun laws nationwide.@devindwyer reports. https://t.co/eqt55bUIVl pic.twitter.com/xsKgqOfu8u
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 2, 2021
Fact Check The Left: Let’s Dive into This ABC News Piece About the Assault Weapons Ban
They just don’t care. Maybe that’s where we got off the wrong foot in our counteroffensive concerning false media narratives on firearms and the Second Amendment. It was never about being accurate. It was about the narrative. We saw that explicitly and in its mature form when the Russian collusion nonsense was in full swing.
The media has long mucked up firearm lexicon and legal precedent. Most of the things the media and the anti-gun Left want are already laws. The rest is beyond extraneous that will do nothing but hurt law-abiding Americans’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights. It also won’t enhance public safety, hence the proposed ATF ban on pistol brace stabilizers. All this will do is put 10-40 million Americans in legal jeopardy for doing nothing wrong. And with the Biden presidency crashing and burning, the media has decided to rehash another lie about the so-called assault weapons ban.
First, it’s a fake term. Second, it’s been repackaged yet again as a law that curbed violent crime. It didn’t. It was a trash law, but there were perks. It helped destroy the Democratic Party during the 1994 midterms and forever split the party on the issue. That’s why after Sandy Hook, an amendment to reimpose it in the failed Manchin-Toomey bill was easily defeated. It was a bipartisan legislative skinning, to be honest. That didn’t stop ABC News from peddling this myth:
…in 1989, an AK-47 was used to kill five children at a Stockton, California, elementary school, leading California to become the first state to enact an assault weapons ban, Klarevas said. That was followed by two other high-profile mass shootings with semiautomatic pistols — one in San Francisco and one on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train — in 1993.
Those shootings were the impetus for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, signed into effect by President Bill Clinton in 1994, stopping the manufacture, sale, transfer and possession of these types of firearms.
The federal law led to a decrease in gun massacre incidents where six or more victims are killed, Klarevas wrote in a report he issued last year as an expert witness in a federal court case challenging California’s ban on assault weapons. When compared to data from 1984 to 1994, the U.S. saw a 43% drop in gun massacre deaths and a 26% decline in gun massacre deaths involving assault weapons in 1994 to 2004, according to his report.
The federal ban was not renewed by Congress and expired in 2004. Gun massacre incidents involving these weapons then skyrocketed from 2004 to 2014, jumping 167% compared to the 10 years the federal law was in effect, Klarevas’ report said, and active shooter incidents with different guns overall have been steadily climbing over the last two decades, according to FBI data, which does not break down murders by exact model of gun used.
While there’s no federal assault weapons ban now, Washington, D.C., and seven states — California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have banned the possession of certain kinds of these firearms, and the rules vary state to state. According to Klarevas’ report, “In the past 30 years, accounting for population, states with assault weapons bans in place experienced 54% fewer gun massacres involving the use of assault weapons and 67% fewer deaths resulting from such attacks perpetrated with assault weapons.”
In the decade after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was enacted in 1994, the U.S. saw a 43% drop in gun massacre deaths, according to one report.
After it expired in 2004, the report said gun massacre incidents involving assault rifles skyrocketed 167%. https://t.co/h33TImwWu5
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 27, 2021
You get the gist. The law curbed violent crime. It did not. For starters, rifles and shotguns aren’t used in most firearm-related crimes and homicides. It’s not even close. Second, even liberals who have combed through the numbers honestly know that the assault weapons ban being a major vehicle in crime reduction is a myth. Take Lois Beckett’s piece in The New York Times seven years ago:
…in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.
It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.
In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle.
Banning sales of military-style weapons resonated with both legislators and the public: Civilians did not need to own guns designed for use in war zones.
On Sept. 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law. It barred the manufacture and sale of new guns with military features and magazines holding more than 10 rounds. But the law allowed those who already owned these guns — an estimated 1.5 million of them — to keep their weapons.
The policy proved costly. Mr. Clinton blamed the ban for Democratic losses in 1994. Crime fell, but when the ban expired, a detailed study found no proof that it had contributed to the decline.
The ban did reduce the number of assault weapons recovered by local police, to 1 percent from roughly 2 percent.
“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a Department of Justice-funded evaluation concluded.
Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago.
Now, granted violent crime has spiked due to Democrat-run cities gutting cash bail and declaring all-out war on law enforcement. It’s nowhere near 1993 levels, but it has become a topic on the minds of voters. The fact that most Americans didn’t know gun crime had dropped 49 percent since 1993 and remained that way even after the ban lapsed is a media oversight. The liberal media didn’t do their jobs because—well—it went against the narrative.
It’s handguns you want to target if you want to get heavy-handed on gun crime but look at the polling regarding a handgun ban and you’ll see why no one will touch it. It’s insanely unpopular and unconstitutional. And ABC News also had a piece about handguns being the most used firearm when it comes to homicide, so stop lying guys. The data is there. They ignore it. It’s about the narrative for them, so this ABC News piece is straight garbage—but there are enough liberal dolts who will believe this tripe.
As with anything now, expect most, but not all, pieces from these guys to be intentionally misleading.
I’ll say that using the First Amendment to protect a lie is a threat to the whole Bill of Rights.
The – well known to be leftist hacks- editors of The Atlantic see the ability of their political enemies to defend their rights as a problem for the advancement of their agenda…..and it is.
The Second Amendment Has Become a Threat to the First
Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives.
This is not hyperbole. Since January 2020, millions of Americans have assembled in public places to protest police brutality, systemic racism, and coronavirus protocols, among other things. A significant number of those protesters were confronted by counterprotesters visibly bearing firearms. In some of these cases, violence erupted. According to a new study by Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), one in six armed protests that took place from January 2020 through June 2021 turned violent or destructive, and one in 62 turned deadly.
These kind of data fill a void in ongoing debates about the compatibility of free speech and firearms at protest events. For example, is the phenomenon of armed protests new? Is it frequent? The open display of firearms at public protests, including long rifles and what are sometimes called “assault-style rifles,” is a relatively new phenomenon. Although many states allow firearms in public places, until recently few Americans have openly toted firearms to political demonstrations. The Everytown/ACLED study examined thousands of protests, showing a marked uptick in protests at which people were visibly armed following the police murder of George Floyd. It found that at least 560 events involved an armed protester or counterprotester. Loose state firearms laws are part of the explanation for this phenomenon. The incidence of armed protests was three times higher in states with expansive open-carry laws, the study noted.
Such research makes much clearer the implications of open carry for public safety, public protest, and constitutional democracy. Some have argued that open carry will make protests safer. In fact, tragedies were far less frequent at protests that did not involve firearms, the Everytown/ACLED research revealed: One in 37 turned violent or destructive, and only one in 2,963 unarmed gatherings turned fatal.
In short, the visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights. The increased risk of violence from open carry is enough to have a meaningful “chilling effect” on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests. Research thus far has focused on open display of firearms, but further study is needed to evaluate the public safety concerns that may still be present when protesters or counterprotesters bring concealed firearms to demonstrations. In addition, concealed carry may not have the same chilling effect; it’s possible that without weapons visible, protesters will not be deterred. But at the same time, merely knowing that people might be armed could keep people away from public protests.
Diana Palmer, one of the authors of this article, conducted a study on the impact of open carry of firearms on the exercise of protest rights, and confirmed what common intuition suggests but included some surprises. The study found that participants were far less likely to attend a protest, carry a sign, vocalize their views, or bring children to protests if they knew firearms would be present.
Participants were asked about their willingness to participate in protests in two groups. In the control group, firearms were not mentioned in the questions. In the experimental group, they were. The questions did not specify whether the participants were visibly carrying firearms or not. The participants in the experimental group were much less willing to participate in expressive activities than participants in the control group to whom firearms were not mentioned.
That hesitation was present regardless of respondents’ political ideology. It was experienced by gun owners and nonowners alike. Survey respondents’ explanations as to why they would refrain from participating in protests where arms are present revealed the significant chilling effects of guns at protests. Among other things, respondents indicated:
I feel like I would be antagonizing [firearms carriers] and that could lead to me being injured.
If they started shooting, I would be concerned they would target me for what I said.
I’ll let the people with the guns do the talking.
Nothing is important enough to be shot over.
Some open-carry proponents insist that they bring firearms to protests to defend themselves against potential violence or to ensure that the First Amendment rights of all participants are respected. However, the Everytown/ACLED study concluded that 77 percent of armed protests during the observed period were “driven by far-right mobilization and reactions to left-wing activism.” The study also found that 84 percent of armed protesters at Black Lives Matter protests were counterprotesters from extremist groups such as the “boogaloo boys,” the Proud Boys, and other right-wing groups. Rather than being motivated by self-defense or civil-rights concerns, the decision to carry a gun tends to follow far-right political ideology.
Whatever the motives of firearms carriers might be, the clear social perception of would-be participants is that armed protests are unsafe. That finding is crucial to understanding the potentially devastating effect that bringing guns to protests can have on the exercise of First Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court will soon decide whether there is a Second Amendment right to carry firearms and other weapons in public places, a question it has yet to weigh in on. A pending case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, involves restrictions on concealed-carry permits. To decide it, the Court will need to determine whether the Second Amendment applies outside the home. As the studies show, the answer has profound implications not just for public safety but also for constitutional democracy. As courts and legislatures consider gun regulations, they ought to bear in mind not just the physical dangers of armed protests but also the social harms associated with them. For many—perhaps an increasing number of—Americans, participation in armed public protests may simply not be worth the risk. Even if public protest survives, only those willing to risk their life, or who are inclined and able to carry weapons in defense of their own right to protest, may want to participate. Rather than serving as a democratizing means of expression, protest may become an armed contest and the exclusive preserve of the non-peaceable. Most concerning is that public protest as we know it may cease to exist at all. That would deprive Americans of participating in one of the greatest traditions of this country: expressing their views, engaging in public life, and advocating for democratic change.
