Category: Media

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.

See the source image

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. 

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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.”

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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.

CNN Once Again Shows How Leftists Miss the Point on Gun Control

A CNN opinion columnist recently revealed she knows as much about the gun issue as Alec Baldwin does about gun safety (too soon?). Author Jennifer Tucker recently published a piece titled “Now that guns can kill hundreds in minutes, Supreme Court should rethink the rights question,” in which she argued that the types of firearms one could carry should be limited even further.

In the piece, Tucker referred to the “Theoretical Lethality Index” (TLI), which was developed by a U.S. Army colonel named Trevor Dupuy, who conducted a study in 1964 to examine the effectiveness of various weapons. The study produced a table in which various weapons are ranked by how many strikes can they can achieve in an hour. For instance, a mid-19th century rifle could strike 102 times while a World War II-era machine gun could strike 3,463 times, making it the more lethal weapon.

Tucker seems to indicate that certain guns like the AR15 have the potential to be exceedingly lethal firearms. She writes:

In the 20th century, bullets became smaller and lighter, enabling soldiers to carry more, while design changes increased the damage they caused upon entering the human body. Today, the highly popular civilian AR-15 is a vastly different and substantially more lethal machine than the flintlock muskets that were in use when the Founders crafted the Second Amendment.

The author continues, recalling the tragic Las Vegas shooting which occurred in 2017 when a gunman murdered 58 people and injured 850 others within a span of 10 minutes. “This would have been physically impossible for a single shooter to do in 1791,” she writes.

Then, she makes an argument typical of anti-gunners: The Founding Fathers did not anticipate the evolution of weapons. She argues:

If the Constitution had been written in the 1880s instead of the 1780s, the Framers would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. The Founders lived in an era when they could be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because — as the TLI shows — the killing power of the basic flintlock hadn’t changed in the previous 150 or so years. Dramatic changes occurred, however, during and after the Civil War.

The author insists that “given the rapid technological change we’ve seen in firearms over the last century and a half, the notion that guns should be viewed equally across all times and places is logically flawed.”

She goes on to contend that “just as courts don’t regard the bleeding and purging of patients as the gold standards of health care … “common sense dictates that the law must take into account technological change in firearms.”

Her overall point can be summed up in this statement:

There is room for looking at the lethality of modern firearms when considering the constitutionality of gun regulation. The court implicitly acknowledged this in its Heller decision when it stated that machine gun bans were acceptable. It’s a difficult concession to explain unless the court is considering the modern capabilities of firearms outside of the historical scope of regulation.

The Supreme Court is set to adjudicate what could be a landmark case when it comes to gun rights. The judges will review New York Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, which is a case targeting New York’s gun licensing scheme. The plaintiffs allege that the state’s approach to deciding who is allowed to possess a license to carry a firearm violates the Second Amendment.

In her piece, Tucker argues:

Weapons designed with an ever-increasing capacity to kill large numbers of people in battle, with long barrels and large-capacity magazines, have no place in public spaces, supermarkets, and shopping malls — not on the grounds of a generic right to self-defense. When it takes up this new gun case, the Court should take technological innovation into account and acknowledge that guns are now exponentially more lethal than they were when the Constitution was written.

We’ve heard these arguments before, haven’t we?

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Guy posts this on Facebook:

PORTRAIT OF A DOMESTIC TERRORIST, 2021.

Then 30 minutes later……….

Censorship at its finest when your message simply cannot be permitted to contradict the narrative.

Elite Media Can’t Stop Lying About Guns in America

The mainstream media lies to us. They feed us propaganda. They don’t want us to know that gun ownership is widespread and that armed defense is common. I was at a conference for minor-media this weekend. There, an associate talked about being turned away from most of his local news stations because “we don’t run pro-gun stories. No self-defense.” Let me show you where the propaganda starts at the top.

Dr. John Lott looked at the five largest newspapers in the US. They ran 1 self-defense story for every 1300 stories of criminal activity with a gun. (more here)

The good news, and there is some good news, is that we know better. We have data that comes from outside the media bubble. We caught major US newspapers lying to us. We can actually measure the amount of media distortion.

We use a firearm for defense far more often than the thugs use guns during a crime. We legally defend ourselves about four times more often than a criminal uses a gun to threaten or injure us (467 thousand criminal incidents vs 1.4-2.3 million defensive gun uses).

We can quantify the media exaggeration. Honest reporting would tell us when we were attacked and also tell us when we defended ourselves. That isn’t what we get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. Each time it occurs, these major US newspapers were over 5 thousand times more likely to run a story of victimization than defense. Distortions of that magnitude can’t be an accident. That censorship is the result of deliberate editorial policy.

That is serious. That biased reporting distorts public perception of violence and defense. It twists public policy, and it isn’t an accident. Media propaganda isn’t a fault, but a deliberate feature that was bought and paid for.

Anti-gun billionaires paid millions of dollars to twist the news. They ran “educational” conferences for the media on how to report self-defense as “gun violence”. They also pay propagandists to recommend movie and TV scripts that distort the truth about civilian self-defense.

You can prove it to yourself. We defend ourselves more often than the police, and ordinary citizens make fewer mistakes with a gun than the police. So, when was the last time you saw an honest portrayal of armed defense on the TV cop dramas where an ordinary person used a firearm responsibly? I couldn’t find a single one.

Media apologists have said that self-defense isn’t news. I disagree. The biased media buries armed defense stories even in incidents where armed citizens stopped mass murder. Again, the media was too busy lying about us and our neighbors to report the truth.

I’m reminded of the Chinese immigrant who said he never watched the news when he was in China because he knew the news was filled with lies. Again, let me close by sharing some good news. We’re walking away from the lying media. CNN lost half its viewers in the last year.

Find real news and listen past the lies.

Just another confirmation that the editors at the Washington Post are clueless morons.

 

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Nobody on The Washington Post’s editorial board noticed the irony of putting these two paragraphs back-to-back? Does on the opinion side of D.C.’s biggest paper even know what the gun laws there are? washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
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WaPo’s editorial board says solution to the accidental shooting it highlights is to pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and a safe storage law. But, the place it happened ALREADEY HAS all of those laws. 
Here is DC’s assault weapons ban: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…
Here is DC’s law that requires all sales, and even transfers, only occur between people who have a registration certificate which requires a background check and more: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…
Here is DC’s safe storage law. Anyone who stores a gun in a way that minor is likely to gain access to it could face up to 5 years depending on the circumstances: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…

Observation O’ The Day
Another reason may just be the concentration of ownership of major media in the hands of a few, very wealthy, people. Wealthy people have feared armed commoners for most of recorded history, and especially since the invention of reliable, concealable firearms, so publication of news likely to encourage gun ownership is discouraged.

There Are Far More Defensive Gun Uses Than Murders in America. Here’s Why You Rarely Hear of Them.

While Americans know that guns take many innocent lives every year, many don’t know that firearms also save them.

On May 15, an attacker at an apartment complex in Fort Smith, Ark., fatally shot a woman and then fired 93 rounds at other people before a man killed him with a bolt-action rifle. Police said he “likely saved a number of lives in the process.”

On June 30, a 12-year-old Louisiana boy used a hunting rifle to stop an armed burglar who was threatening his mother’s life during a home invasion.

On July 4, a Chicago gunman shot into a crowd of people, killing one and wounding two others before a concealed handgun permit holder shot and wounded the attacker. Police praised him for stepping in.

Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP
According to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes.
Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP

These are just a few of the nearly 1,000 instances reported by the media so far this year in which gun owners have stopped mass shootings and other murderous acts, saving countless lives. And crime experts say such high-profile cases represent only a small fraction of the instances in which guns are used defensively. But the data are unclear, for a number of reasons, and this has political ramifications because it seems to undercut the claims of gun rights advocates that they need to possess firearms for personal protection — an issue now before the Supreme Court.

Americans who look only at the daily headlines would be surprised to learn that, according to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes, and far more frequent than the fewer than 20,000 murders each year, with or without a gun. But even when they prevent mass public shootings, defensive uses rarely get national news coverage. Those living in major news markets such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are unlikely to hear of such stories.

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Biden’s Withdrawal From Reality

The Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media keep asking the American people variations on a single question: What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

From the Trump/Russia collusion fantasy and concocted claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” to ongoing efforts to cast an America that has never been freer or fairer as a nation riddled with “systemic” racial oppression, they keep insisting that we reject clear and convincing evidence and embrace politically driven falsehoods.

The latest example is President Biden’s refusal to even acknowledge the catastrophic failure of his withdrawal from Afghanistan. The nation heard him say on July 8 that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would overrun the country. The Washington Post reports that his senior leadership team was caught so unaware by the Taliban’s August advance that many were on vacation when Kabul fell. Then came the images of chaotic panic at the airport, a grim scene turned violently grisly when a suicide bomber murdered scores of people, including 13 Americans.

Biden subsequently described the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” even as he left behind lethal state-of-the-art military equipment worth billions of dollars as well as many Americans and Afghans who had aided us during the 20-year struggle – including the interpreter who helped rescue Biden himself in 2008.

Slowly but surely the mainstream press, which initially covered the debacle forthrightly,  is beginning to embrace Biden’s narrative. Ezra Klein offered his New York Times readers a fatuous counterfactual defense: “A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one.” Jonathan Karl of ABC News played the Trump card: “The truth is that Biden accomplished exactly what Trump had tried to do in his final year in office. The only real difference is that Trump wanted to withdraw more quickly and with less regard for the Afghan citizens who worked with the United States.”

Expect to hear more of the same in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.

Why do they do it? The obvious and most important answer is that they can, and it is incredibly useful. The spread of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory helped them hobble a presidency just as the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story helped them win an election.

They are able to get away with it because they have convinced their allies in the press and millions of voters that our nation is locked in an existential battle with an evil enemy: the Republican Party. False narratives that kneecap the enemy are serving a higher truth; admissions of error are taboo because they will only strengthen the opposition. Give no quarter is their mantra.

There is also a politico-psychological dynamic behind this posture. Democrats are the party of well-educated elites, whose position in society and sense of self are anchored in their belief in their intellectual merit. Likewise, the Democratic Party’s argument for an all-powerful government is based on claims of competence and expertise. Acknowledging errors undermines their claims to authority.

This helps explain the lack of accountability. Firing, say, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley for the Afghanistan debacle would suggest that our brilliant leaders are not so brilliant.

To admit the obvious, yes, Republicans practice deception all the time. And it is also corrosive. But they do not control the government or, more importantly, the news. Their lies are almost always exposed, while those of the Democrats are often propagated.

This is at the root of our country’s deep divide. Even thoughtful conservatives are rightly skeptical of most everything they are told. This increasingly knee-jerk antagonism not only leads some to seek the truth, but also others to reject honest information, such as the efficacy of vaccines.

When you don’t know who to trust, you don’t know what to trust. As long as our leaders keep trying to subvert reality, this is the reality we are consigned to inhabit.

The juvenile ‘It’s horse paste!’ critique of ivermectin.

The Nobel Prize in medicine in 2015 went to two scientists whose experiments on a type of bacteria and subsequent modifications produced a compound that led to “a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases,” in the words of the Nobel Prize committee.

That compound is ivermectin, which “turned out to be highly effective in both animals and humans against a variety of parasites, including those that cause River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis.” The FDA approved the drug in 1996.

That’s why U.S. doctors wrote more than 100,000 prescriptions a year for ivermectin, which comes in tablets but also in a lotion. In 2020, the FDA approved one ivermectin lotion as an over-the-counter lice treatment.

So why does the major media want you to believe that ivermectin is simply a “horse paste”?

The answer is probably because the media are more interested in scoring cheap points in the game of culture-wars by mocking rednecks and conservatives than they are in informing their readers.

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Why Southerners Don’t Care About New York Times Op-Eds

I was born and raised in the Deep South. I have a deep affinity for the place of my birth, one that I wouldn’t have imagined I’d have in my teenage years.

Down here, we have our issues, to be sure, but one thing we’ve never been really big on are people from the North trying to tell us how to live our lives. Call it a holdover from Reconstruction or just plain stubbornness, but when the New York Times tries to tell Southerners how to live, it usually doesn’t work out well.

Yet, that’s pretty much what the Times decided to do with an op-ed titled, “Southern Republicans Cannot Be Trusted With Public Health.”

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Gold Star Mother Locked Out of Facebook Account After Sharing Her Story on Meeting President Biden

The grieving mother of a fallen Marine, Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikou, met with President Joe Biden on Sunday at the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base.

The mother, Shana Chappell, took to social media to share her agonizing story of meeting the president, which didn’t sit well with the Facebook and Instagram censors. She was locked out of her social media accounts for what she had to say about the president.

“President Joe Biden, This [message] is for you!” Chappell wrote. “I know my face is etched into your brain! I was able to look you straight in the eyes yesterday and have words with you. After I lay my son to rest you will be seeing me again!”

Image credit: Shana Chappell/Facebook

“Remember I am the one who stood 5 inches from your face and was letting you know I would never get to hug my son again, hear his laugh and then you tried to interrupt met and give me your own sob story and I had to tell you ‘that this isn’t about you so don’t make it about you!!!!’” she wrote.

“You then said you just wanted me to know that you know how I feel and I let you know that you don’t know how I feel and you do not have the right to tell me you know how I feel!” she said.

“[You] then rolled your f***ing eyes in your head like you were annoyed with me and I let you know that the only reason I was talking to you was out of respect for my son and that was the only reason why,” Chappell added. “I then proceeded to tell you again how you took my son away from me and how I will never get to hug him, kiss him, laugh with him again, etc.”

“[You] turned to walk away and I let you know my sons blood was on your hands and you threw your hand up behind you as you walked away from me like you were saying ‘ok whatever!!!” she continued.

“You are not the president of the United States of America Biden!!!!” Chappell wrote. “Cheating isn’t winning!!! You are not leader of any kind! You are a weak human being and a traitor!!!”

“You turned your back on my son, on all of our Heros!!! You are leaving the White House one way or another because you do not belong there!” Chappell continued. “MY SONS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!!! All 13 of them, their blood is on your hands!!!!”

“If my president Trump was in his rightful seat then my son and the other Heros would still be alive!!!!” Chappell added. “You will be seeing me again very soon!!!”

“[By the way] as my son and the rest of our fallen Heros were being taken off the plane yesterday I watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!!” she said. “What the f*** was so important that you had to keep looking at our watch????”

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Comment O’ The Day:
“Not if you want to tamp down panic over who’s running the country.”

Should ABC publish the full, raw video of the Biden-Stephanopoulos interview?

Answer: Yes. Will they? Not on your life. Joe Biden’s strange, emotionally disconnected interaction with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos yesterday raised more than a few questions, especially given Biden’s non-sequitur speech yesterday on COVID-19 and refusal to take any questions. At points in the interview with Stephanopoulos, Biden didn’t look entirely engaged, and when he was engaged, it was to scoff at the suffering of the Afghans as so four days ago, man:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But we’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling–

BIDEN: That was four days ago, five days ago.

That answer and its complete lack of empathy will haunt Biden and Democrats for a long time to come. It drives a stake through the heart of the myth of Biden’s supposed compassion, which was the only quality that could compensate for his lack of competence.Curiously — at least according to the edited cut — Stephanopoulos never followed up on that response, not even to correct Biden to say it had happened two days earlier. That and other aspects of the released clips raised the question of whether Stephanopoulos coached Biden, or at least cosseted him in a way that couldn’t have happened in a true press briefing. If so, that might be powerful evidence of intentional bias on ABC’s part, as well as evidence of non-competence on Biden’s part. Our friend Hugh Hewitt has demanded that ABC produce the raw video showing the full Biden/Stephanpolous performance:

ABC has responded by releasing the full transcript. That’s not necessarily the same thing, and it doesn’t answer the real question. Just how much did Stephanopolous do to prop up Biden, and would ABC News transcribe any such support? Duane Patterson makes the explicit case:

News organizations only rarely publish the raw tape of interviews in their entirety. Of course, when it comes to David Daleiden and James O’Keefe, that’s the gold standard they apply (“heavily edited tapes” is a cliché in such reporting). In this case, if the tape exonerates Stephanopoulos, perhaps ABC News will release it to quash this criticism. If they don’t, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from their lack of transparency.

However, any action they take now won’t address a more basic issue with this stunt. Joe Biden has avoided taking questions from the White House press corps for over a week in the middle of the worst foreign-policy and military debacle the US has suffered in at least 46 years. Why did they let Biden off the hook with this one-on-one, quarterbacked by a former Clinton staffer, rather than with their own White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, an actual reporter rather than a morning-show host? All this does is give Biden an excuse not to answer these questions in the future by claiming he’s already answered them and brushing Afghanistan off as old news … while thousands of Americans remained trapped behind Taliban lines.

Even the raw tape won’t answer that criticism. The whole effort was nothing but a free pass. And in the end, Biden couldn’t even handle that competently.