Category: RKBA

WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) – The lead Republican negotiator in U.S. Senate efforts to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill walked out of the talks on Thursday, while the lead Democrat remained optimistic that lawmakers could vote on legislation before leaving for a two-week July 4 recess.

“It’s fish or cut bait,” Senator John Cornyn said after hours of negotiations that included his fellow Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema.

“I don’t know what they have in mind, but I’m through talking,” Cornyn said.

However, Tillis and Murphy later said the talks were close to reaching agreement and added that legislative text for a bill could emerge in coming days……………..

Analysis: Guns Are Normal and Normal People Use Guns

As I hope to write regularly for The Reload, I thought my first contribution ought to say something about how I generally approach American gun culture, which bears on the fierce debates over guns taking place across the country.

I am a sociologist who has been studying American gun culture for the past decade. My approach to the topic differs considerably from most of my gun studies colleagues. Rather than focusing on crime, injury, and death with firearms, my work is based on the proposition that guns are normal and normal people use guns. This is not an article of faith or belief statement for me; rather, it is based on my empirical observations of guns and gun owners.

When I say guns are normal and normal people use guns, I mean it in two senses. First, guns and gun ownership are common, widespread, and typical. Second, guns and gun ownership are not inherently associated with deviance or abnormalities.

The normality of guns runs deep in human history. The use of projectile weapons is behaviorally normal for Homo sapiens as a species. Today’s widely owned civilian firearms are part of an unbroken thread of what Randy Miyan calls “the human-weapon relationship,” stretching back to rocks in the uniquely evolved hands of our prehistoric ancestors. As paleoanthropologist John Shea concludes, “Projectile weaponry is uniquely human and culturally universal. We are the only species that uses projectile weaponry, and no human society has ever abandoned its use.”

Although most societies today – consensually or not – give over to the state a monopoly on legitimate violence and hence the ability to restrict civilian ownership of projectile weaponry, the United States is an outlier in having a significant portion of the population insist upon their right to own firearms independent of the state, a right written into the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions. In early American history, guns were widely owned by those who could legally do so. One reliable estimate found guns in 50 to 73 percent of male estates and even 6 to 38 percent of female estates. These rates compare favorably to other common items listed in male estates like swords or edged weapons (14% of inventories), Bibles (25%), or cash (30%).

Even as the nation has become more settled, more industrial, and more urbanized, levels of firearms ownership remain exceptionally high. Accounting for under-reporting of gun ownership in surveys, a reasonable estimate is that 40% of all American adults personally own a gun, over 100 million people. According to the Small Arms Survey, there are some 400,000,000 privately owned firearms in the United States. Actually, if the average gun owner owns 4 to 5 guns, then the actual number of civilian firearms could be closer to half a billion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, shooting guns is also very normal in the United States. In 2017, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center asked, “Regardless of whether or not you own a gun, have you ever fired a gun?” Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said YES. In population terms, nearly 180 million adults in America have fired a gun. Pew also asked, “Just your best guess, at what age did you FIRST fire a gun, whether you owned it or not.” 63% of respondents answered that they were under 18 years of age when they first shot a gun.

None of this denies that there are what Claude Werner calls serious mistakes and negative outcomes with guns. These range from unintentional discharges to mass public shootings. But huge denominators in terms of gun owners and guns owned means the absolute risk of accidental injury or death, homicide, or suicide is quite small.

I have previously illustrated this using conservative estimates of guns and gun ownership and broad estimates of negative outcomes (including accidental and intentional deaths and injuries as well as non-fatal criminal injuries and victimizations with firearms). I found that just 0.15% of guns and 0.79% of gun owners are involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimizations involving firearms annually.

Looked at the other way around, 99.85% of guns and 99.21% of gun owners are NOT involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimization involving firearms annually.

Of course, the normality of guns and gun owners is not just an academic question. It is reflected in the way many gun control activists and politicians approach guns. At a time when people use terms like “insane” and “addiction” — or worse — to characterize gun culture in America, it’s important to remember that guns are both commonly owned and generally non-problematic here.

Unfortunately, normality is unremarkable. It is not headline news. It is not of concern to social scientists. And yet it is my dominant experience of guns and gun owners.

Will We Choose Hard Work to Protect Our Children in School?

Set aside what you imagine about guns and protecting students at school. Keeping our kids safe is hard work. It is ugly and almost always unappreciated. We don’t want appreciation for what we’ve been forced to do if a murderer comes to school. It is far better to be known for what we prevented. Defending our students from media-fueled narcissistic psychopaths is a dull job. Being present every day so you can stop a murderer is easily ignored because it is out of sight. Contrast that grinding job with the one-click solution of “gun control”. Gun-control politicians say they can put a few more words on paper, hold a few press conferences, and it will be as if evil simply went away.. or did it? We’re conducting several large-scale social experiments at the same time. Our children’s lives depend on what we do.

Each day brings us something new. Our children live in a world where they are exposed to millions of online “friends” they’ve never met. Many of these friends might not even be real people. These online identities influence how our children think and feel. I’m not sure about the benefits, but the downside has been a surge in both narcissism and anorexia. Today, our children constantly compare themselves to an image on a small screen.

We also have millions of children growing up in broken homes. Many of these children are raised by the entertainment media and by electronic games. That isn’t good for healthy children, let alone the children who lack a healthy mom and dad. We also know that we are not all the same and that electronic games are catastrophic for some people. These gamers already feel alienated to an unusual degree. They think they deserve more recognition. Immerse these fragile youngsters into hundreds of hours of violent first-person roll-playing games, and something happens. The psychopaths eventually think to themselves, ‘I’d kill to get this much attention.’ Our voracious news media is ready to oblige. That is new.

In contrast, firearms have been a part of society for a relatively long time. We have lived with guns for at least the last four centuries. We’ve lived with semi-automatic rifles for over a hundred years. The so-called “assault rifle” is over 80 years old. What changed is that we’ve never grown up with mass media in our pocket 24-7 starting when children are 6 years of age. We don’t know what that does to people, and we’re conducting the real-time experiment on our children and on our society. We learn new things every day.

We’ve seen the mass media turn the last murderer into an instant celebrity by giving him a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign. The next murderer notices the attention poured on the last murderer. That creates a new generation of “celebrity-murderers”, a term that didn’t exist as little as two decades ago. We’ve seen over 80 copycat murderers after the attack on Columbine High School, but that data is now several years out of date.

Not only are our children ill-prepared to deal with the media, but adults and politicians do only a little better. The public is influenced by the most outrageous claim that can be taken from a situation or statement. The media and unscrupulous politicians feed us a series of false choices. Please consider each of these claims for more than a minute and you can easily see a context in which each statement is clearly right. You can also see a context in which the claim is clearly wrong.

  • You don’t care if our children die since you won’t disarm everyone,
    • but we’ve seen mass murders where firearms are banned.
  • It doesn’t help to put mental health counselors in school because we have to insure patient privacy and confidentiality,
    • but we’ve seen mental health counselors help, and we’ve also seen counselors be completely ineffective at identifying and treating violent patients.
  • Violence isn’t the answer,
    • but we have to use violence as necessary to stop the attacker or else we’ll perpetuate the next cycle of media-fueled murderers.
  • Don’t turn the murderer into a media celebrity,
    • but we have the right of free speech and freedom of the press.

Let me say it again that we are not all the same. Psychopaths are part of our population and always have been. We’ve seen the behavior of psychopaths change in our modern media environment. Today we see psychopaths target innocent victims in gun-free zones because that behavior rewarded by the mass media. Examined in hindsight, the murderers spent years happily planning their attacks. The threat of celebrity-violence is increasing as a greater number of fragile children are immersed in electronic media, and news outlets reward the latest murderer with greater and more sensational coverage.

We should be hungry for facts about protecting our children. Of course, we worry about what would happen if we allowed volunteer staff to be trained and then to go armed at school. But we already know what happens. We already have millions of man-hours with trained and armed-school staff on campus. Despite what we imagine, these staff have not had firearms accidents at school. More importantly, we have not seen a successful attack at a school when trained and armed school staff were present. We need to set our fantasies aside.

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2 Countries In America: Those Who Cherish the RKBA & Those Who Don’t

It is time for us to think outside the box and form two countries. Instead of civil war I propose civil separation. We are two countries, so ideologically opposed that each feels victimized and dominated by the other. Political leaders need to step up and brainstorm next steps. Clearly lay out the two ideologies and give each state a vote as to where they belong.” ~“Opinion Letter” from reader of The New York Times posted on June 5, 2022, responding to May 27, 2022 “America May Be Broken Beyond Repair,” by the Political Progressive Columnist for the Times, Michelle Goldberg. The letter writer, Dawn Menken, a Psychologist, from Portland, Oregon, is the author of “Facilitating a More Perfect Union: A Guide for Politicians and Leaders,” published in 2021*

If the American public didn’t know the truth before, it knows it now: the battle for the very Soul of the Country is on the line, and Ground Zero of that battle isn’t Uvalde, Texas. It’s New York City, New York, with the Bruen case shortly coming down the pike.

The Nation is indeed “two Countries,”—no less so now than at the time of the American Civil War: friend against friend, brother against brother, uncle against cousin, father against son. But what is different today is that ideologies cut across and into the very notion of what it means to be an American. There are those who hold to the meaning and purport of our Nation as set forth in our Constitution and especially in the Nation’s Bill of Rights. And there are those who wish to jettison all of it in the erroneous belief that our Nation is at its core, immoral, even evil. They wish to destroy the very fabric of a free Constitutional Republic.

But the salient difference between these two Countries rests on this:

Those Americans who embrace and cherish their fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and others who do not.

Those who embrace and cherish their fundamental right to keep and bear arms also recognize and embrace their sovereignty over Government. They understand that government exists to serve the interests of the people. They recognize that Government is the servant and the American people are the sole master.

Unfortunately, many Americans are of a different mindset. Such Americans have bought into the psychological conditioning programmed into them that guns are awful and gun owners are to be despised. Such Americans care not that Government is their servant, not their master. They recognize not and care not that by ceding their God-Given right to keep and bear arms, they have laid the foundation for their own demise: loss of Selfhood, loss of Dignity, loss of Self-Reliance, loss of mastery over their own destiny.

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Double whammy; SloJoe’s antigun policy and military increases ‘going back to cold war era postures’, look to be cutting into civilian ammo availability

Biden Administration Moves to Cut Off Lake City .223/5.56 Ammo From the Commercial Market

Apparently not content with its efforts so far to make gun ownership more difficult and expensive for America’s 100 million firearm owners, a source tells TTAG that the Biden administration is taking steps to reduce the availability of .223/5.56 ammunition available to the average shooter.

A person with knowledge of the situation tells us that, more than just “considering” the move, Winchester, which operates the US Army’s Lake City ammunition plant, has been informed that it may no longer sell M855 and SS109 ammunition produced in excess of the military’s needs on the civilian market.

How would that affect the civilian supply of .223 and 5.56 ammunition? We understand that as much as 30% of the commercial market’s sales volume of .223/5.56 is produced by Lake City.

Apropos of nothing in  particular……….

Well, they’re liars, so…..

THE DUPLICITY OF GUN CONTROLLERS IS IN FULL ARRAY

There’s an interesting phenomenon occurring with those demanding gun control lately. They’ve abandoned pretenses of “common sense.” Now, it’s not gun control. It’s gun rights elimination.

President Joe Biden leads the gun control charade parade. The president chides gun owners for not supporting his gun control agenda while at the same time expanding his gun ban wish list.

President Biden spoke to the American public from The White House on June 2 to explain his desire to push for expanded gun control.

“The issue we face is one of conscience and common sense,” President Biden said following the tragic murders by a madman in Uvalde, Texas. “For so many of you at home, I want to be very clear: This is not about taking away anyone’s guns.  It’s about… not about vilifying… gun owners. In fact, we believe we should be treating responsible gun owners as an example of how every gun owner should behave. I respect the culture and the tradition and the concerns of lawful gun owners.”

The Real Joe

That statement, however, stands in stark contrast to what President Biden told a private group of Beverly Hills, Calif., Democratic donors just days later. He told a story of his Senate days pushing gun control measures and gun owners confronting him on his radical agenda.

“They’d say, ‘God darn, Joe, what the hell are you doing taking my gun away?’” President Biden said according to a Breitbart report. “And I said, ‘Let me ask you a question.’ I said, ‘How many — when you go deer hunting, how many deer are wearing Kevlar vests?’”

“‘By the way, if you need 30, 40, 60, up to 100 rounds to fire,’ I said, ‘you’re a danger to yourself, man,’” he continued.

That’s an interesting stand for the president, who admits to owning at least two shotguns and once absurdly told his wife to blindly “fire two blasts” into the dark if she ever feared someone illegally entering their property. It’s not unexpected though. This is the same president that lectures America on the Bill of Rights as if it were a laundry list of government-approved needs.

President Biden told Americans in a tweet, “No one needs an AR-15. Period.” He’s continuously called for a ban on standard capacity magazines. He tried to convince Americans that no one needs 9 mm handguns, calling those too “weapons of war.”

Hollywood Hypocrisy

Liberal antigun darling Michael Moore has never been shy about disclosing his animus toward lawful firearm ownership. These days, he’s dropped any equivocation and is calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed outright.

“We need to start a movement to repeal the Second Amendment and replace it with something that says it’s not about the right of somebody to own a gun, it’s the right of all of us to be protected from gun violence,” Moore said in his podcast, according to Fox News.

Instead of guns, Moore suggests getting a dog. For concealed carry options, there are always small breeds, one might imagine. It’s also wishful thinking by Moore that criminals will suddenly drop their illegally-obtained firearms. Law-abiding gun owners aren’t the problem, but criminal actors are, since they’re already ignoring laws and harbor no respect for life. Of course, there’s a path for Moore to achieve this. It only takes two-thirds of both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, or two-thirds of the states to agree to a Constitutional convention and that new amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or state conventions.

“I make no apologies for it because I understand the history of this country and I don’t think we should be afraid to say this. Repeal the Second Amendment,” Moore said. “I said it then and I’ll say it now and I’ll keep saying it and I want you to say it with me, repeal the Second Amendment. This sentence in our Constitution, it was written 235 years ago. Repeal the Second Amendment.” So was the First Amendment, but whatever.

At least Moore is honest, if not completely out of step with America. Criminals, assuredly, would love this idea.

Pro-2A Gun Control?

David Hogg, the front-man for March for Our Lives gun control, wrote in a Fox News op-ed a call-to-action for even NRA members to join in his gun control demonstrations.

“I want to state unequivocally that I am not anti-gun. In fact, the movement I helped to start has been pro-Second Amendment from day one,” Hogg wrote.

That’s in direct contradiction with the demands from March for Our Lives, which include a national licensing and registry scheme, bans on so-called “assault weapons” or semiautomatic Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) and standard capacity magazines. The March for Our Lives’ website attests that “there is a national mental health crisis,” yet Hogg was quoted telling U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) that, “Mental illness is a bulls–t talking point,” according to a Time report. That was on the same whirlwind Senate splash where he attempted to shame Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), accusing him of snubbing a meeting with Hogg because it would “trigger” the senator. The senator’s chief of staff caught him in the lie, pointing out they had a 2 p.m. meeting scheduled, which was canceled when it was clear Hogg was using the meeting to self-promote.

Hogg attempted an apology, citing a scheduling mistake.

The mistakes here aren’t schedules. They’re a matter of getting caught up in their own duplicity.

Second Amendment still as relevant as in 1789

People are clamoring for oppressive and dangerous gun laws.

So-called common-sense laws like universal background checks and red flag laws that even proponents admit would not have stopped any of the shootings motivate their desire. All with hidden elements that will unfairly and oppressively affect the law-abiding and honest.

There are typically over 2,000 children each year who die from child abuse. There are thousands more who die of various preventable causes. Where is the moral outrage?

How about the thousands of teens who die needlessly of drug overdoses? Where is the moral outrage? Where are the demands for more laws regarding abuse, securing the border or stopping the influx of fentanyl, heroin and other drugs?

The purpose of the Second Amendment is not fighting our military, hunting, target shooting or even defense. The purpose of the Second Amendment is deterrence. Pure and simple.

A single armed individual can deter dozens of heavily armed law enforcement officials, as we saw recently in Texas, yet an unarmed individual is easily taken into custody at five in the morning by 20 or so heavily armed storm troopers while CNN films the entire affair.

There has been no gun confiscation because millions of firearms are owned by law-abiding citizens. This is the deterrence that the founders knew would be needed when corruption ultimately prevailed in Washington.

Corrupt politicians along with their naïve cohorts on both sides of the aisle are in a dead heat to make firearms ownership too complicated, too difficult and too expensive for the average individual.

If successful, only the elite will have armed security. The rest of us will be statistics for politicians to pontificate about when they talk down to the unwashed and ignorant masses, begging them for law and order.

I’m not willing to compromise on this because compromise is just losing at a slower rate. When it comes to individual liberty and rights there can be no compromise — especially when the proposed compromises do nothing to address the mentally ill, the evil, the criminal and those intent on doing harm.

Every proposed encroachment on our rights is just that — an encroachment with no net benefit.

While many have compromised on perversion, distortions of reality, acceptance of idiocy, alternate realities and indoctrination of their children, I for one will not compromise on the Second Amendment … period.

Give up your gun rights and more freedoms will fall

“He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire (Psalm 46:9).”

Would-be dictators, be forewarned. In the meantime, into day’s world, those who would pound their swords into plow shares, will plow the fields for those who don’t. Never ever give up your rights. Ever.

Americans are freeborn and proof of that is our God-given rights. Any gun legislation infringing on the right to self-defense chips away at that freedom. Beware the false promise of peace through disarmament.

They’ve been ‘beginning’ since 1934….

Democrat Admits Senate Gun-Control Plan ‘Just the Beginning’

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23) admitted something we all knew last weekend at the March for our Lives rally in Parkland, Florida, when asked about the gun control “framework” that a bipartisan group of 20 Senators have said they support.

It’s just the beginning, she said, and more “significant” gun control is coming.

“We were expecting moderate reform at best, I wasn’t expecting anything of significance,” Wasserman Schultz told MSNBC’s Alex Witt.  “Anything you can do to put an obstacle in the path of someone who would do themselves or someone else harm and save a life, is a step we should take while saying we should push for a lot more. This is only the beginning, it has to be only the beginning, not the end.”

Wasserman Schultz added that “extremists” will now likely target Senate Republicans and “everyone in congress.”

“We absolutely have an opportunity to move forward, and let me just be clear, Alex, for those of us who support much more significant reform, this is just the beginning,” she said. “We have to begin to make some progress, I’m glad that those 10 senators had the courage thus far.”

In Congress, Wasserman Schultz is far from being a back-bench first-termer. When she makes an admission like this – that the Senate plan is just the beginning and more gun control is coming – she is certainly not speaking out of turn. She has been in Congress since 2005 and serves as the Chief Deputy Whip of the Democratic Caucus. She was the first woman to chair the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee, and she also serves on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, which according to her website, “has vast jurisdiction over the government and private sector, and plays a key role in overseeing the Biden Administration.”

Wasserman Schultz’s comments prove that if we willingly give the gun banners a slice of bread every time we sit down with them, eventually, they’ll have the whole loaf. She just said the quiet part out loud. There will be no appeasement if we agree to let them infringe on our constitutional rights. All the Senate plan will do is whet their appetite.

It is clear based on the Congresswoman’s comments that their true goals remain “assault weapon” and standard-capacity magazine bans and restricting firearm sales to those over 21. These were their goals before the Senate “framework” agreement was announced. These remain their goals today.

Anyone who thinks that the bipartisan Senate plan will somehow stop the gun banners from trying to achieve their ultimate goal of total civilian disarmament is deluding themselves. They will never stop. There will be no appeasement, regardless of what happens in the Senate.

The Latest Wave of New Firearm Owners Shreds Another Anti-Gun Narrative

First, I’m shocked NBC News would write a story like this about gun owners. Second, it’s about yet another hurdle anti-gunners have to scale when pushing their ‘take all the guns’ initiatives. This isn’t necessarily a new trend. Nonwhite Americans and women have flocked to gun shows and concealed carry permit classes. In fact, there are so many female concealed carry holders that they’re changing the industry. Female participation in shooting sports spiked during the Obama presidency. That alone is a problem for anti-gunners and Democrats. It’s never a good idea to go against what middle-class women like—that’s a long-established political reality. You’re gambling there.

Now, you have to factor in that the latest wave of new gun owners are black Americans—and you have to tread carefully about the silly talking points about gun ownership and the Second Amendment (via NBC News):

Two days after a white man shot and killed 10 Black people in Buffalo last month, Michael Moody reversed his thinking about possessing a firearm. He had watched the aftermath of the carnage on the news, the anguish of the victims’ families, and decided he “needed a gun. Needed, not wanted,” he said……

Moody’s sentiments represent one reason the sale of guns to Black Americans rose 58 percent in 2020 — the year George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesota police officer, sparking a nationwide social justice movement — according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms trade association. It was the highest bump in gun sales of any ethnic group that year.

Further, in the first quarter of 2021, another NSSF report revealed 90 percent of gun retailers reported a general increase of Black customers, including an 87 percent increase among Black women.

“And you wonder why?” said Moody, who works for the federal government. “You look at Buffalo and the feeling of ‘This could have been me’ is there. We could be the next target. And when it’s you, what are you going to do? Are you going to run and hide? Or are you going to be able to protect yourself? Protect your family? I didn’t want a gun; I’m not a gun person. But this world has made me get one. Getting one for my wife next.”

The foundation said 40 percent of the overall gun sales in 2020 were to first-time gun purchasers. Black gun owners, old and new, say the rise is a byproduct primarily of a heightened fear they could be targeted like those in Buffalo or at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, when nine Black church members were killed by a white supremacist.

To that point, anti-Black hate crimes rose nearly 40 percent in 2020, the latest year available, according to FBI statistics. There were 2,755 reported incidents targeting Black people in the U.S. that year, the most besieged racial group by a large margin.

Two weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol in Washington, Destiny Hawkins, a divorced mother of one who lives near Atlanta, waited in line to purchase her first gun, a Glock 43. “It wasn’t the gun I wanted because their selection was so low; people were buying guns like crazy,” she said……

This increased interest in firearms delights Philip Smith, who started the National African American Gun Association in 2015. A human resources executive in Atlanta, Smith said he owns “about 30” weapons, including the lethal AR-15-style rifles used in the Buffalo mass shooting and the Uvalde elementary school massacre in Texas on May 24.

The increased number of Black gun ownership represents “an awakening,” Smith said. “It’s a value-add to their family household, as opposed to, let’s say, 10 years ago or six years ago. This is a movement in a certain direction, and I think it’s a good direction.”

His organization has 48,000 members nationwide, he said, and has gained more than 1,000 or more each month since 2020. It has nearly 107,000 followers on Facebook.

Sure, there are differing opinions about possession in this piece, but it’s clear that Black Americans are exercising their Second Amendment rights which is a good thing. Ideally, everyone should. Ideally, every household should have a firearm.

Whether the reasoning is a stalker, Antifa, terrorism, a spike in crime, and yes—a crazy white nationalist shooting up a market, you have the right to own a firearm in this country and use it for self-defense. That’s what is so great about the Bill of Rights. They’re all connected. They’re all equally important with regards to upholding the other amendments. There is no graduated scale here; only liberals think that way. There’s no cafeteria support for the Bill of Rights either. It’s either you support them or don’t. There’s no filleting of the first ten amendments. The notion that the Second Amendment is for white Americans only is dead. The notion that the Second Amendment was meant to maintain white supremacy was never real, but it’s obviously not an old white man’s game anymore. Women and minorities are all packing heat. Americans of all stripes are buying guns.

It’s a homemade American apple pie, with a side of 9mm I guess. That’s fine. What we need to worry about is Democrats and Republicans now working to set the foundation that could strip those rights down the line.

I bet he’s weighing the political negatives of the deal vis-à-vis the number of calls he’s getting telling him where to go and how to get there.

Cornyn says “issues” remain in Senate gun deal

It doesn’t sound like Texas Sen. John Cornyn isn’t ready to throw in the towel on the Senate negotiations, but some hangups are apparently starting to emerge as Democrats and Republicans move from a “framework” to actual legislation.

Wednesday morning Cornyn met with a group of reporters to give them an update on the status of the bill, and Cornyn suggested that a deal might not be done this week because of a couple of “issues” that are popping up, starting with the language around giving

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Plot Against Guns Is Not About Safety, but Tyranny

It’s Not About the AR-15

Gun grabbers have a peculiar tendency to invoke guns’ use as sporting devices as a rationale for gun control.

Take actor Matthew McConaughey, who just last week seems to have charmed the pants off of some Americans, and even some gun rights proponents when he argued in favor of gun control intervention to stop gun violence, such as raising the minimum age requirement to purchase an AR-15 to 21.

A few years back, however, he wasn’t so measured and likable in his approach to gun control, calling for an outright ban on “assault weapons for civilians,” saying that doing so is “a no-brainer.”  “And to my friends out there,” he continued, “that are responsible owners of these recreational assault weapons that they use for recreation, please let’s just take one for the team and set it down.” He immediately went on to tackle magazine capacity, claiming that “Texas has a three-shell limit to hunt migratory birds. Do the math.  You get my point.”

What, exactly, is a “recreational assault weapon?”  It’s the silliest description imaginable from someone that, somehow, the public seems to take so seriously on this issue.  It’s at once both oxymoronic and incoherent.  If it’s an “assault weapon,” after all, its purpose is to inflict violence upon other people.  If it’s a “recreational weapon,” its purpose is for recreation, and not to inflict violence upon other people.

What he means to achieve with this deceptive language, as all gun control activists do, is to obscure the purpose of the Second Amendment and to establish a distinction between types of gun owners.  The Second Amendment exists, of course, solely for the purpose of Americans having weapons that can kill other people in defense of life and liberty, and has precisely nothing to do with recreation.  But this narrative framework suggests that those who wish to use guns as recreational devices are good, while those who believe the primary purpose of their gun is to kill other people are bad.

Guns, like any tool, have myriad uses, based on the user’s desire.  A hammer, for example, is equally useful in driving nails into wood as it is in fatally cracking a person’s skull.  The distinction is that a hammer’s primary purpose is to drive nails into other objects.  A gun’s primary purpose, for most people, is not to kill migratory birds, but to kill people who might do them harm.

According to a Gallup survey in October 2021, a full 88-percent of gun owners say that “protection against crime” is a reason for their owning a gun.  That is to say, nine-out-of-ten gun owners keep their guns so that they can potentially kill other people if the need arises.

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You’re being lied to about “mass shootings”. Here’s the truth. – and it’s loaded with USDOJ-funded research.

The latest data on mass shootings from the National Institute of Justice of the US Department of Justice and the Rand Corporation.

There are no standard definitions of mass shootings. There are no easy answers.

Source

National Institute Of Justice-Rand

Article

I was interviewed on a national television show about research-based answers to mass shootings. Beyond condemning those involved, I stumbled. I knew that there were few (if any) firm answers or guidance.

That’s not the case for some doing similar interviews. Many are quick to promote firearm controls or red flag laws or suggest that there are effective answers. That’s simply not the case. The complexities and price tags for the proposals are immense.

For example, we within the justice system acknowledge our inability to keep track of convicted-fingerprinted felons and maintain accurate records. There are vast inaccuracies. Now, we want to do national or state databases for those with ever-changing mental health conditions?

It will be a logistical and financial nightmare with probable ACLU challenges. It’s not going to work beyond those committed to institutions and even then, conditions change.

As of this writing, the latest Congressional proposals are available via CNN.

It’s time to examine the best available data on the subject. Note that varied definitions of mass shootings and whether they were public (inferring unknown victims) or private (inferring known victims) will be difficult to follow. Previous research suggests that most victims of mass shootings were known to the shooter.

There are few firm conclusions based on research. Policy issues are elusive. The emphasis is on assault weapons when the overwhelming majority of mass shootings involve handguns (while noting that many mass shooters carry a variety of weapons).

You’re going to get different policy perspectives from different groups, see Politico.

Policy Solutions to Address Mass Shootings was offered by the National Institute of Justice and Rockefeller Institute of Government in August of 2021.

The Best Available Data

What “is” useful is a 2021 document from the National Institute of Justice of the US Department of Justice and the Rand Corporation (one of the best crime-related research organizations in the nation) summarizing what we know and don’t know about mass shootings. What’s below is from that document. It’s a tool kit for understanding “and” responding to mass shootings.

Most will be a bit frustrated by the lack of clarity as to what constitutes a mass shooting, who commits them, their mental health issues, and what can be done.

Those in law enforcement are exasperated by the national call for cops to be guardians, not warriors which seem wildly misplaced because law enforcement is expected to enter a mass shooting and stop the shooter, which requires endless tactical training and equipment.

In an earlier article, I point out that the great majority of what we call gun violence is street-level violent crime, not mass shooters. I suggest that the explosion of media coverage of mass shootings is somewhat misplaced; the vast majority of victims of gun violence are people of color and society has become immune to that violence.

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Cornyn Proves Senate Republicans Didn’t Negotiate, They’re Giving Our Rights Away For Nothing

Following the weekend announcement of a compromise framework for a gun control deal in the Senate, Texas Senator John Cornyn apparently felt the need to address angry constituents who aren’t nearly as enthusiastic as he is about expanding “red flag” laws, enhancing background checks for those under 21 among other points in the deal.

Cornyn partnered with Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut to negotiate and broker the deal that got nine other Republicans to sign on, greatly increasing the chances of the final bill clearing the Senate once the legislation is actually written.

There’s only one big problem with Cornyn’s much-heralded achievement: his tweet proves that he wasn’t even trying to actually negotiate anything.

It’s pretty clear what his staffers (it’s doubtful he has the graphics skills or computer literacy to do that) were trying to do with yesterday’s tweet — damage control. By showing us all how the deal he struck with Democrats could have been so much worse, he’s trying to frame the agreement as a grand compromise that saved firearm owners from some of the worst that gun-grabbers had in mind.

The way Cornyn portrays it, if he and his fellow collaborators hadn’t rushed in to give some ground, we’d be facing magazine bans, “assault weapons” sales restrictions, waiting periods, safe storage mandates, and more if Democrats went ahead and scuttled the filibuster to force the House gun control bills through the Senate.

Then they could also pack the Supreme Court and we’d really be stuck, right?

I know the comments section is already filling up with “come and take it” and “shall not be infringed” declarations, but I want readers to notice something else — the things that aren’t on Cornyn’s list of rejected proposals that didn’t make it into the Senate deal.

Why doesn’t that list include anything from the Republican side? Why is there no plan for a federal law to allow armed teachers nationwide? Why wasn’t 50-state concealed carry reciprocity considered? How about deregulating suppressors or removing short-barreled rifles and shotguns from the NFA?

Surely if the Democrats really wanted “common sense gun control” as badly as they claim, they’d have stepped up and paid for it with some sort of compromise. Right?

Instead, what we’ve really learned from Cornyn’s sorry excuse at tamping down the blowback he’s undoubtedly getting is that he never really negotiated with Senate Democrats at all.

Cornyn and the other GOP collaborators who agreed to the framework showed up with no demands at all of their own. They were only prepared to haggle with Democrats over how much the rest of us will give up so he can become GOP leader in the Senate some day.

Senators like Cornyn and Romney didn’t give anything up in the Senate deal. They have security details, large houses in gated communities with armed patrols, and plenty of other measures to keep them and their families safe while the rest of us rubes have to fend for ourselves like nearly everyone else who has ever walked the earth.

Just as it’s awfully easy to spend other people’s money, Cornyn had no qualms about giving our rights away for his own political benefit. He never had any plan to actually negotiate for us, to get something in return in an actual compromise with Democrats. Instead, he got rolled and he couldn’t be happier about it.

Cornyn’s just another elitist who wants to see how we can better serve him. He won’t have to face Texas voters again for four more years, by which time he’s betting the folks back home will have mostly forgotten about this. Sadly, he’s probably right.

Analysis: The Era of ‘Assault Weapon’ Bans is Over

There will not be a new federal “assault weapons” ban this year. Or any year in the near future.

It’s not simply because of Senate Republican opposition either. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives won’t pass one. It hasn’t even tried to since the party took control in 2018.

In fact, there hasn’t been a new assault weapons ban in 25 years. Only seven states and the District of Columbia have a ban in place at all. Some of those states, including New York and California, have tightened their prohibitions in recent years. But no state has passed a new ban in recent history.

Gun-control advocates haven’t given up on pushing the policy, though. And some top Democrats, including Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Vice President Kamala Harris, have even advocated coupling a sales ban with a mandatory buyback.

But the hill to climb for successfully passing a new ban has just gotten steeper.

In the first major poll since the shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, Quinnipiac University found support for an assault weapons ban actually dropped. It’s now at just 50 percent, which is the lowest level it has ever been since Quinnipiac started asking about a ban in 2013.

The newest finding puts support for banning assault weapons 17 points lower than its peak just a few years ago. It’s just one poll, of course, but others show a substantial drop in support since the national ban passed back in 1994. One of the oldest polls on a ban found support was up at 80 percent.

The Quinnipiac poll is telling beyond just the raw numbers too. In the wake of horrific shootings, such as the recent attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde, support for gun-control measures tends to increase significantly. For nearly every other policy Quinnipiac polled, that was the case. But not for an assault weapons ban.

And, again, it wasn’t just Republicans driving opposition to a ban. Independents also opposed the ban by a three-point margin.

It’s too early to say for sure this trend will continue. More polling will be needed to have confidence that’s the case. However, America has experienced a similar policy transformation in recent history.

Handguns were once the main focus of gun-control efforts. Brady United Against Gun Violence was initially called Handgun Control Inc. and once partnered with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence which was initially called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.

In 1959, Gallup found 60 percent of Americans favored a total ban on handguns. But, as time went by, that number began to fall. By 2021, the same poll found just 19 percent support. That’s even though handguns are by far the most common weapon used in homicides and other serious crimes.

That attitude shift likely had a lot to do with the increasing popularity of handguns among the general public. Multiple polls over the past decade or more indicate people buy guns primarily for self-defense. At the same time, handguns have surpassed rifles and shotguns as the best-selling category of firearms in the United States.

Assault weapons may be enjoying a similar effect. While “assault weapon” is a fairly nebulous term with a definition that varies from state to state, it’s usually crafted in a way to target guns like the AR-15 and Ak-47. The National Shooting Sports Foundation calls these guns “modern sporting rifles.”

In 2020, they estimated there were nearly 20 million AR-15s and similar firearms. They are the most popular rifles in the country, and the NRA has even dubbed the AR “America’s rifle.” More Americans own ARs than ever before and likely associate them more with home defense, hunting, and sport shooting than with crime, despite their presence in some of the highest-profile mass shootings.

That doesn’t mean further regulation of assault weapons is impossible. After all, handguns are more highly regulated than rifles or shotguns despite the minuscule support for a total ban on their sales. Similarly, support for age restrictions on purchasing assault weapons has polled very well in the wake of the recent shootings, and New York just implemented that change.

Perhaps that’s where the debate over AR-15s and other “assault weapons” will now focus. Because a total ban on sales is not in the cards anytime soon.

The RINOs are out in force on the ‘framework’ for new gun laws

It was news that sent shudders through every person who supports the Second Amendment: ten Republican senators have signed on to a “framework” that will allegedly improve gun safety in America.  You can guess who these RINOs are — it’s the same bunch who will always agree to limit American rights to keep up with their friends on the Democrat side of the aisle.  And while there are a couple of good ideas in the framework, the rest of it is useless, harmful, and/or unconstitutional.

According to a statement from the bipartisan group of senators, they have an agreement in principle for legislation that includes “needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons[.]”  More specifically, the senators have agreed on the following concepts, which I’ve listed along with my comments:

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