Category: Media

BLUF
It’s too bad none of the scores of journalism contests out there yet offers a fake news category. If one did, the 14 stories chosen by the Trace would be award winners.

The ‘most memorable gun violence journalism of 2023,’ according to the Trace
If there was a Pulitzer category for gaslighting, the stories chosen by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s antigun empire, recently published their picks for “The Most Memorable Gun Violence Journalism of 2023.”

If there was a Pulitzer Prize category for gaslighting or agitprop, the 14 stories highlighted by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

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This CNN Reporter Just Had a Come to Jesus Moment About Hamas.

A veteran CNN Middle East reporter with two decades of experience now admits that “too many of us treated the group more like an opposition party with occasional violent outbursts than a terrorist organization.”

“Journalists working in conflict zones,” Ilene Prusher wrote in a CNN op-ed this week, “too often pull punches in the interest of appearing neutral, or perhaps to ensure that they stay in the good graces of the gunmen in charge.”

Prusher concludes that “if journalists continue to interview members of Hamas, we should report their words more critically and not take their comments at face value. We should provide context that notes how unverifiable their information is and how poor their track record for accuracy has been.”

There’s a word for that: journalism. Let’s give Prusher two cheers for encouraging her colleagues to actually commit some for a change.

I might fairly ask Prusher, “What took you so long?” It isn’t as though she were ignorant of the Middle East and its major players. But since it’s my policy never to interrupt someone when they’re busy talking their way over to my side of an issue, I’ll leave her be.

“By and large, we reporters ate it up,” she explained without prompting, in no small part because “Our editors wanted us to have access to this shadowy group.”

What is access, anyway?

Last month when I was in Miami for the previous GOP presidential debate, Yours Truly (and the rest of the Townhall crew in town that night) were granted access to the post-debate spin room. That meant we would have the chance to speak one-on-one with the candidates or maybe their managers and surrogates.

Please note: It’s called the spin room because that’s where the candidates, their managers, and their surrogates go to put their spin on what just happened. Spin can be anything from putting a friendlier face on a fierce debate performance to literally (not really) polishing a turd and hoping some know-nothing reporter will pick it up and run with it.

But getting and keeping access can be a whole lot more complicit than anything that happens in a spin room between candidate and reporter.

Infamously, CNN used to downplay Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against the people of Iraq to maintain the network’s access to the Hussein regime. That was a case where the appearance of reporting the news — “Hey, we’re talking to all these Iraqi officials, so it must be real news!” — was more important to CNN than actually reporting the news. They were happy to be lied to and to repeat those lies because it filled airtime and sold commercials.

The mainstream media’s dirty little secret is that so much reporting involves little more than getting and maintaining access to important people by giving them the airtime they desire.

And yet, “How often did that stop us from reporting what they told us?” as Prusher asked in her come-to-Jesus column. “That dynamic was on display last month when many mainstream media outlets immediately repeated Hamas’ claim that an Israeli air strike had devastated a hospital and killed a big round figure of 500 Palestinians.”

Prusher and so many others are — or in her case, was — happy to trade integrity for the allure of access to a “shadowy group” who expertly preyed on their vanities.

Except, of course, for the mainstream media’s reporters and stringers who are all-in with Hamas to begin with and never had any integrity to begin with.

Milwaukee Paper Discovers ‘Gun Death’ Lie

The term “gun death” is popular among gun control advocates and their politicians who push that same agenda. It’s a simple enough term, too. It’s simply the total number of people killed with a firearm, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why.

It might even be a useful statistic in some cases.

However, when talking about guns and gun control, it’s misdirection at best and a case of lying with facts at its worst.

It’s an effort to lump all such fatalities together to make the issue seem bigger than it is. And it seems folks at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got an eye-opener on the topic recently.

Gun deaths are rising in Wisconsin, but the people affected by it might surprise you. The narrative around gun violence is often limited to urban homicides, but the vast majority of deaths by guns are suicides. In fact, a new report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel finds that suicides make up more than two-thirds of all deaths by guns in Wisconsin.…

“Of 100 gun deaths that [occur] in Wisconsin, roughly 25 of those are homicides. And then there’s another one to 2% that are accidents or police involved shootings,” [Investigative reporter John] Diedrich explains. “The idea that 71 out of 100 gun deaths in Wisconsin are suicides was an eye-opener to me and to our readers.”

Diedrich acknowledges that suicides are, in fact, a mental health issue, but he’s paraphrased as saying that when those issues arise, gun owners have a very deadly means to take their own life.

I don’t dispute that fact. However, starting with that last point, if they already have the means to take their own life, what good would new gun control laws do?

Moving back to the deeper point, that Diedrich was shocked by this, I can’t say that I am. We’ve long known that most of the “gun deaths” cited by anti-gun activists were, in fact, suicides. We know why they do it, too. The truth is that when you look at the total number of homicides year over year and consider them against the total population of the United States, it doesn’t look nearly scary enough.

So, they lump in suicides and accidents and call them gun deaths, all in hopes that no one will dig too deeply.

When they do, they get a bit of a wakeup call.

It’s also why I really think we in the gun community need to step up and deal with mental health. We need to be champions of improvement in mental health efforts and be advocates for those in our lives who suffer from mental illness.

If we can reduce the number of suicides, we reduce the number of gun deaths. We take away the gun control crowd’s ammunition, even if that ammunition is based on what amounts to a lie.

In Milwaukee, at least one journalist has woken up to at least part of that lie. The question is whether he’ll realize the rest of it and do his part to combat the constant flow of misinformation from here on out.

Rolling Stone Blames Gun Industry For Mass Shootings – Reveals Greater Fear Of Patriot Rebellion

It’s the old leftist anti-gun standby:  Pretend as if the 2nd Amendment was drafted only to protect hunting and self defense against criminals.  Ignore the fact that the Founding Fathers explicitly created gun rights for the purpose of repelling and overthrowing a corrupt government.  Pretend as if Americans are not supposed to have access to military grade weapons when that is exactly what the 2nd Amendment was enshrined to protect.

Under the Constitution, the American militia was intended to act as the defense force for the nation.  And, the militia was made up of every able bodied male citizen.  The militia was the military (in a sense), and the militia had access to all the weapons needed to fulfill their role.  This included repeating rifles (automatic rifles), cannons, explosives and even naval ships in private hands.  The Founders never intended for a standing military to exist, nor did they ever intend for a standing military to act as a proxy in place of an armed citizenry.

As James Madison noted:

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”    
– James Madison, January 29, 1788, Federalist No. 46     

And, as George Mason asserted:

“I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”
– George Mason, June 4, 1788, Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention

It should be treated as a revealing condition that the establishment and corporate media consistently attack the civilian ownership of guns which they argue are “made for war.”  These guns which they refer to as “assault rifles” (because it sounds scary) are used in less than 3% of all gun crimes in the US.  They are also a small percentage of overall mass shootings in the US, yet they garner almost 100% of the anti-gun lobby’s attention.

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Media in Panic Mode Over Questions About Whether They Knew in Advance About Hamas Attack on Israel

On October 7, four photojournalists who provide reporting and photos for the likes of the Associated Press (AP), CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, and other outlets were allegedly at the Israeli border with Hamas terrorists who committed acts of atrocities against innocent Israeli civilians that shocked the world. Since an Israel-supporting news watchdog website reported the claim, everyone wants to know if these Gaza-based reporters knew in advance about the attack and, more importantly, if they could have saved lives by alerting the world about it. The question arises: Did the AP, CNN, the New York Times, and Reuters know about the Hamas terror attack in advance? 

The allegations have sent major media into panic mode and generated even more mistrust in the corporate press.

The website HonestReporting, which chronicles coverage of Israel by an increasingly one-sided press to contrast the “Pallywood” and crisis actor coverage by Hamas and its agents, asks: “Is it conceivable to assume that ‘journalists’ just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?” 

Hamas terrorists paraglided and drove into the civilian populations that day and committed acts of horrific brutality. They wanted their murders and acts of terror chronicled for the world, which is why they wore GoPro cameras and apparently arranged for these traditional media photographers to go in with them.

HonestReporting reported that “four names appear on AP’s photo credits from the Israel-Gaza border area on October 7: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali.” The news watchdog took a close look at Elsaiah, a “freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.”

Elsaiah “did not wear a press vest or a helmet,” the website reported. He posted a video of himself on Twitter/X saying that “everyone who were inside this tank were kidnapped, everyone who were inside the tank were kidnapped a short while ago by al-Qassam Brigades [Hamas’ armed wing], as we have seen with our own eyes.”

The website later featured an older photo of Elsaiah with the Hamas leader who planned the attack.

In war reporting, journalists are often given a heads-up and allowed to chronicle American troops heading into battle, for example. But this wasn’t an act of war — it was terror. It was murder for murder’s sake. There hadn’t been an Israeli offensive to which the Gaza terror organization was responding. Indeed, if Hamas had been wearing uniforms and acting as an “army” they would be accused of war crimes. As it is, they’re accused of crimes against humanity.

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Observation O’ The Day:
I remember when “serious” figures on the right mocked some of us for our alleged obsession with media bias. – Glenn Reynolds

Propaganda Works

Have you noticed that Republicans have been losing a lot lately?

This, in an environment where most Americans think that Democrats are screwing up the country. Why do you think that is?

Sure, hatred of Trump has something to do with it. Abortion politics has something to do with it. A lot, actually. Each of you can name an issue where Republicans are in bad odor with ordinary people, but add them all together and one thing becomes clear: propaganda works.

Why is Trump so unpopular? Was it because things got worse under his presidency? Uh, yeah, no. Things got immeasurably better, and even a lot of people who hate him will say that.

Is abortion such a drag on Republican prospects because people don’t agree that late term abortions are immoral, except in extreme circumstances? That’s not what the polls say.

Why do people think Republicans are all-in on banning books? Has anybody suggested making the publishing of any books illegal? Of course not. Democrats actively campaign to prevent the publication or sale of books they don’t like, but Republicans don’t.

So what is it?

It is the steady drumbeat of propaganda portraying Republicans as Nazi White Supremacists who want to force 11 year-olds to birth babies, schoolmarms who hate gays, and White Supremacists who hunt minorities in the dead of night. We wanted to kill grandma and deserved to be put in camps:

You can’t escape the propaganda. It is everywhere. In the schools, in the classrooms, on every university campus, and in the MSM.

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Photographers Without Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.

AP: Photojournalists or Infiltrators?

Four names appear on AP’s photo credits from the Israel-Gaza border area on October 7: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali.

Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.

HonestReporting has obtained screenshots of Eslaiah’s now-removed tweets on X in which he documented himself standing in front of the Israeli tank. He did not wear a press vest or a helmet, and the Arabic caption of his tweet read: “Live from inside the Gaza Strip settlements.”

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Ninth Circuit Rules California Law Banning Firearms Advertisements Likely Violates the First Amendment in NRA-Backed Case.

NRA scored a legal victory in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against an overbroad California law that bans firearms advertisements that may be attractive to minors.

In June of 2022, the California Assembly passed and Governor Newsom signed AB-2571 into law. NRA filed suit shortly thereafter. The bill as originally drafted was so overbroad that it effectively banned advertising youth-hunter-education programs. The NRA’s lawsuit pointed that out, and the state promptly amended the statute so that it only bans advertisements of firearms products “in a manner that … reasonably appears to be attractive to minors.” But that didn’t fix the law’s overbreadth problem. It still banned advertisements featuring a parent hunting or shooting with their minor child.

The Ninth Circuit rightly recognized that the law was overbroad and banned truthful advertisements related directly to the Second Amendment—which the First Amendment forbids. The court remanded the case back to the trial court for further proceedings. The state, however, is refusing to accept the obvious. It has asked for an extension of time to seek a rehearing en banc, before 11 judges on the Ninth Circuit.

We look forward to continuing the fight in this case for our members.

The Case is captioned Safari Club International v. Bonta. United States Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation and Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation are also parties to the case.

BLUF
The corporate media refused to correct the President’s lies. Now, Democrat politicians, anti-gun billionaires, and the mainstream media think that ordinary people like you should be disarmed because you’re too dangerous. I have to ask, too dangerous to whom?

Lies My President Told Me

I understand the graft and corruption that are President Biden’s normal mode of business. What I can’t accept are the President’s lies about us. We are far better than he claims, and I refuse to let my neighbor’s be blamed for our President’s failings.

-President Biden said that more children die from being shot than from all other causes. That isn’t true. What the President refused to say is that honest gun owners like you and your neighbors prevented over 30-thousand murders a year because they had a firearm to defend the people they love. Did the President ignore the lives you save because he is too forgetful, or because he is too bigoted against us?

-The President said we have to stop the epidemic of gun violence we hear and see on the news. The President refused to say that the nightly violence we see and hear is from our failing Democrat controlled cities. The president refused to mention that most counties won’t have a single murder this year. He ignored that the worst 2-percent of our counties account for over half of our murders. The worst 5-percent account for about two-thirds of our murders. Even within those failed Democrat controlled cities, most of the murders are within a few zip codes. What our President can’t say is that we are seeing an epidemic of political failure and corruption on the nightly news. Democrats destroyed our once beautiful cities like Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington DC. Now those politicians need to blame you.

-The President said that modern rifles were the cause of this violence. He didn’t tell you that the overwhelming majority of murders, even mass-murders, are committed with handguns. He ignored that more of us are beaten to death with hands and feet than are killed with modern rifles. The President didn’t mention that you and your neighbors use a “modern rifle” to protect yourself thousands of times every month. You didn’t know that because the corporate media refused to correct the old man’s lies.

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From the First Sentence, You Knew This Was Going to Be a Funny WaPo Article About Guns

Let’s be fair for a second: this Washington Post piece on firearms in Texas could have been worse. It could have read like something from a Moms Demand Action pamphlet, but it’s probably as fair as possible for the publication. Maybe I’m being too nice, but the first sentence had me wondering whether this piece would go off the rails. Also, do these people live under a rock?

First, the headline: In Texas, guns are everywhere, whether concealed or in the open.

And the opening sentence: To live in Texas is to live surrounded by guns.

Yes, and yes, Washington Post. The piece is peppered with statistics about gun ownership, carry laws, and interviews with various individuals of all races in New Braunfels, Texas, which rests outside San Antonio. White, black, and Latino residents all offered quotes explaining the culture here, which may seem like an alien world but has been commonplace for generations.

The piece did at least acknowledge that, but a quick review of gun laws would point to some shocking revelations for anti-gun liberals, specifically since while the article frames Texas as gun land, Virginia is just as heavily armed. In fact, for years, Virginia’s carry laws and reciprocity agreements were just as good, if not better, than in the Lone Star State. It’s not just Texas, folks (via WaPo):

Each morning, men here strap guns inside suits, boots and swim trunks. Women slip them into bra and bellyband holsters that render them invisible. They stash firearms in purses, tool boxes, portable gun safes, back seats and glove compartments.

Neighbors tuck guns into bedside tables, cars and trucks. They take guns fishing, to church, the park, the pool, the gym, the movies — even to protests at the state Capitol. The convention center hosts gun shows where shoppers peruse AR-15s and high-capacity magazines outlawed in other states. Texas billboards offer an endless stream of advertisements for ammunition, silencers and other accessories.

It has been legal here to openly carry long guns like rifles for generations. But Texas’s gun-friendly attitude isn’t just a relic of the Old West and ranching: Many restrictions on handguns were loosened only recently. Two years ago, state lawmakers gave those 21 and older the right to carry handguns without a permit; in 2015, they gave those with concealed handgun permits the right to carry on public college campuses. […]

Unlike California and some other blue states, Texas has no state firearm sales registry, no required waiting period to buy a gun, no red flag law guarding against the mentally ill or violent having weapons, no restrictions on the size of ammunition magazines and no background checks for guns purchased in a private sale.[…]

New Braunfels includes one of the top urban Zip codes in Texas for new handgun licenses per capita last year: About 213 per 10,000 people, according to state records; overall, the surrounding county had 155 permits issued per 10,000 people.

By contrast, most San Francisco-area counties had issued fewer than six concealed handgun licenses per 10,000 residents since 2012, according to the most recent California Department of Justice data from last year, although applications surged late in the year following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against local restrictions in New York, and California lawmakers responded earlier this month by passing a law that further restricts who can receive a permit.

The interviews with the residents, probably meant to cast them as paranoid or crazy, are rather mainstream. Their reasons behind owning guns are also not out of the ordinary. Some quoted in the piece owned AR-15 rifles, which means in the eyes of liberals, these people are paranoid. Again, these are law-abiding citizens who own firearms, which isn’t abnormal, no matter how hard the Left tries to make it so. San Francisco is a crime-ridden hell hole, with hordes of homeless people and drug addicts defecating all over the city. These aren’t areas to compare when it comes to public safety.

If you want to glean how law-abiding gun owners live in Texas, this piece has some good insights, but we all know that probably wasn’t the intent. We have a Second Amendment, liberal America. Tens of millions of Americans own a ton of firearms, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Also, it’s funny how they tried to make this place seem like a lawless enclave of America with no red flag laws, waiting periods, or gun registries. Most states don’t have any of those laws on the books. Red flag laws have had mixed success. They sound like good policy, but constitutional guardrails are still lacking. Most states have no gun registry requirement, and waiting periods are also uncommon. If you pass a background check, you get the gun. It’s as simple as it should be for law-abiding Americans.

Charles Glasser – 

The Washington Post: We have to destroy the First Amendment in order to save it. In what has to be the most blockheaded analysis I’ve read in years, The Post ran a story this afternoon titled “Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks.”

Of course the conservatives and libertarians are leading the charge. It’s the fight against government coercing, cajoling or even cooperating with publishers (electronic and otherwise) to suppress right-leaning views.

To paraphrase James Carville: “It’s the Constitution, Stupid.”

The people who want to censor the right have put a new dress on their pig.  The Washington Post painted it thusly:

“The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.”

“See, we have a First Amendment right to figure out how to suppress others’ speech. We’re the real victims here.”

As you may remember, as The Hill reported on Missouri v. Biden:

“A federal appellate court concluded Sept. 8 that multiple White House, surgeon general, FBI and CDC officials likely breached the fine line separating permissible government persuasion and jawboning from illicit “coercion and significant encouragement” when they repeatedly — and often successfully — lobbied social-media companies “to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites.”

At that oral argument, Judge Don Willett had no problem with federal agencies publicly criticizing what they judged false or dangerous ideas. But that wasn’t how Biden’s winged monkeys compelled submission: “Here you have government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on . . . subtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats” said the Judge.

Willett expressed his disgust with the mafia-like tactics of the Biden administration: “That’s a really nice social-media platform you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

 

Random Thoughts on Hunter Biden, Domestic Violence, and Disarming Those Who Haven’t Been Convicted of a Crime.

One of the most entertaining aspects of Hunter Biden being indicted on three gun-related charges due to his drug use is the reaction of those on the left side of the political spectrum. They’re screaming that given how few people are prosecuted for lying on 4473 forms, the only reason he’s been charged is his prominent father.

Note that the Venn diagram of the people who are making this argument and those who blew a blood vessel when a man whose conviction was overturned for gun possession while under a domestic violence restraining order is almost a perfect circle. Yet the legal principles are virtually the same.

In the domestic violence case, US v. Rahimi, the target is a certified scumbag who’d been involved in at least five prior crimes involving firearms and had beaten the hell out of his girlfriend. Zackey Rahimi was the subject of a domestic violence restraining order which prohibited him from possessing a firearm and had been convicted of violating that order.

When the Fifth Circuit circuit overturned his conviction based on the lack of a history or tradition in this country of voiding the gun rights of people who hadn’t been convicted of a crime, the reaction was as if they’d OK’d human sacrifice, dogs living with cats…you know mass hysteria.

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MEDIA WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO BLAME FIREARM INDUSTRY

By Larry Keane

There’s peril when media sets out to confirm a narrative instead of reporting facts. Whether it’s criminal violence in America perpetrated by a deranged lunatic, or by violent drug cartels in countries beyond our borders, some media outlets will find the flawed logic to argue it is American companies that should be punished.

This results in a disservice to readers and erodes public trust not just in their subjects but also in the Fourth Estate.

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The DailyKos (a rabid anti-gun pub) gets pwned by one of its own

Citizens Have An Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms Unconnected With Service In a Militia

The Second Amendment speaks of two separate groups the Militia and the People. If the right to keep and bear arms was meant ONLY to apply to the militia it would read “The right of Militia members to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Or, it would read “The power of the States to maintain armed militias shall not be infringed.”

It reads “The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  It calls for a “Well-regulated Militia” and not a well regulated populace, and all other references to “The People” in the Bill of Rights are also rights of individual citizens.

 The Federal government, the States and their officials hold powers not rights.  For example, Amendment IV “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”  Amendment X “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Article. I. Section. 1. “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” Article. II. Section. 1. “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Note that they read powers and not rights.

Held:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a
firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for
traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
Pp. 2–53.

(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but
does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative
clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it
connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.

This decision wasn’t reached in a vacuum.  The vast majority of law review articles dealing with the Second Amendment conclude that it protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.  In fact, when Dr. Lawrence Tribe, the widely published Constitutional Law scholar, author of the Constitutional law textbook that is standard in many if not most of our nation’s low schools, and strong supporter of gun control, announced that he would conduct a study of the Second Amendment.

Citizen disarmament zealots, their organizations, their media allies, and their apologists were elated for they believed that at last a well respected Constitutional law scholar would finally proclaim that the Second Amendment applies only to the Militia and not individual citizens.

In the end they were disappointed.  Like the Supreme Court Dr. Tribe determined that the framers of the Constitution intended that the Second Amendment confers the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms unconnected with service in a Militia.