GOP Rep. Chip Roy Defends The Right To Bear Arms: “Tyrants Disarm The People They Intend To Oppress”
Category: RKBA
The Power to Tax and Regulate Guns is the Power to Disarm Women and Minorities
The world has changed. Racial minorities are buying guns for lawful self-protection more than ever before. Urban women are the fastest growing segment of legal gun owners. That is wonderful news and long overdue. Tempering that good news are the unfortunate conditions in our inner cities that may have provided new motivations to own a gun. Recently we’re seeing gun-prohibitionist Democrats propose huge taxes on guns just as minority members of society become gun owners. We’ve seen this political behavior before, and politicians repeat behavior that works. It looks like Democrat politicians are doing it again, and racism and political advantage are always wrapped in the excuses of public safety.
Do something.
This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9/11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.
“What this means is that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” Trudeau said in a press conference.
In the United States, the rhetoric has tended to be more heated but also vague, though some specific proposals have emerged.
Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an all-out ban of “assault weapons.”
“We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban,” Harris told reporters in Buffalo after attending the funeral of a victim.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden, while speaking from the White House before a candlelit backdrop, called on Congress to pass new gun control legislation, including a ban on assault weapons.
“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked.
The 1994 ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban: A Brief History
There are numerous problems with this proposal, starting with the sticky question of defining what an “assault weapon” is.
Assault rifles, which by definition are capable of selective fire, are already banned under the National Firearms Act of 1934. The vague phrase “assault weapon” is basically a tautology—by definition, any weapon can be used to assault someone—and virtually useless. The term might be effective politically, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the guns politicians choose to define as “assault weapons” typically “are no more dangerous than others that are not specified.”
We know this because the US had a ban on “assault weapons” as recently as 2004, something gun control supporters recently pointed out on Twitter.
“We had an assault weapon ban for 10 years: 1994-2004,” said Dr. Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale University. “The world didn’t end. People kept their (other) guns. They bought new guns. It was hardly an attack on gun ownership.”
The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 targeted firearms deemed “useful in military and criminal applications but unnecessary in shooting sports or self-defense.”
Freeman is right that the ban lasted a decade before expiring on September 13, 2004. She’s also right that the world “didn’t end” and Americans continued to use and purchase other types of firearms.
What Freeman didn’t bring up was the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the government’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Nearly two decades ago the Department of Justice funded a study to analyze this very topic, and it concluded that the assault weapon prohibition had “mixed” results.
Researchers noted there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms classified as assault weapons, but noted “the decline in AW use was offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns.”
In other words, there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms that were banned, but the drop was replaced by crimes committed with other types of firearms that were not banned.
Well, he’s a demoncrap politician, which means he’s a cheat and a liar.
FBI data contradicts [Senator] Murphy’s claims on young adults and active shootings
While the Senate negotiations on a legislative response to the recent mass murders in Buffalo and Uvalde continue, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN on Thursday morning that an attempt to ban adults under the age of 21 from purchasing modern sporting rifles is now “off the table” as the two sides work to find something they can present to their colleagues that might win approval from 10 Republican senators.
Murphy, the Democrat leading the negotiations in conjunction with Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, framed the shift as one of the compromises that will be needed to get at least 10 Republican votes, given the obstacle of the filibuster.
The compromise, Murphy explained, would be adding “additional scrutiny” to 18- to 21-year-olds looking to buy a weapon like the AR-15, though he stopped short of specifying that some sort of waiting period would replace raising the age.
“I think we continue to try to find a path to 60 votes that includes some provision that recognizes these 18- to 21-year-olds tend to be the mass shooters, and that many times, they have juvenile criminal records or past histories of mental health that should prohibit them from buying a weapon,” Murphy said, adding he thinks there is some Republican support for raising the age, but not enough to meet the 60-vote threshold to clear the filibuster.
Here’s the thing: Murphy is just flat out wrong about adults under 21 being most likely to commit these types of attacks, as the FBI’s recent report on active shooter incidents in 2021 clearly demonstrates.
Just 16 of the 61 incidents documented by the FBI involved a killer under the age of 24, much less 21. I took a deeper look into the FBI report and found that only five of the 61 incidents last year involved suspects under the age of 21; less than 10% of the overall number of these heinous crimes. And of the five incidents, two involved the use of a rifle, while three involved handguns.
It seems to me that these senators, including Murphy, are looking more at the killers in Buffalo and Uvalde, who were both 18-years of age at the time of their mass murders, than examining the actual statistics, which completely undercut the argument of targeting specific firearms or a particular age.
Meanwhile, you’d think that corporations would have gotten the message that customers want them to focus on their products and services instead of wading into the culture wars by now, but that’s not stopping the heads of hundreds of business from calling on Congress to pass new gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.
Many of the names on the list of signatories of an open letter to the U.S. Senate, however, are familiar names for Second Amendment advocates, because they’ve been issuing their corporate calls for gun control for several years.
The letter is signed by some of the nation’s largest companies including Bloomberg LP, The Permanente Medical Group, Levi Strauss, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Lyft and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Bloomberg obviously has been in favor of all kinds of new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms for years, and it’s hard to expect anything less from the company run by the gun control lobby’s biggest sugar daddy. Levi Strauss and Dick’s have also been longtime corporate supporters of gun control measures, while Lyft has imposed its own driver disarmament policy that leaves contractors unable to defend themselves from armed robbers or carjackers without their ability to drive for the company being terminated. If they don’t even want their own contractors to be able to protect themselves in their own vehicles, you can imagine the contempt the company has for the right of average citizens to be able to keep and bear arms in self-defense.
The letter was apparently put together by Levi Strauss and Bloomberg’s pet gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, and Axios, who was first to report on the missive says that the document is void of any support for specific pieces of gun control legislation under debate, opting instead of boilerplate language urging the Senate to “take urgent action to pass bold gun safety legislation as soon as possible in order to avoid more death and injury.”
In a fascinating twist, while the CEOs of three professional sports teams (the San Francisco 49ers, San Francisco Giants, and Philadelphia Eagles) signed on to the letter, no one from the Tampa Bay Rays organization lent their name to the anti-gun effort, even though the baseball team recently used its social media platforms to advocate for unnamed gun control laws and to back Everytown for Gun Safety’s gun control mission. The Rays absence from the letter might have something to do with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ even more recent veto of a bill that would have spent more than $30-million in state funds on a training facility that would be mostly used by the team, though the governor didn’t directly tie in the veto to Rays’ gun control messaging.
I doubt that the negotiations in the Senate are going to produce anything that these anti-gun CEOs would truly consider “bold”, and I’m glad to hear Murphy say that a gun ban for adults under the age of 21 is apparently no longer a part of the discussions. Still, based on Murphy’s comments it seems the Senate negotiations are still aiming in the wrong direction by focusing on young adults and modern sporting rifles in spite of what the data actually tells us.
McConaughey Just Picked His Political Party. Huge Mistake.
Matthew McConaughey is a cut above most political celebrities.
He doesn’t spit fire and brimstone like director Rob Reiner or Alyssa Milano. Nor does he bend the truth until it snaps like a branch, as the “View” hosts do on a regular basis.
The Oscar winner is calm, measured and unwilling to demonize the mainstream Left or Right.
In a way, he’s everything we want in a celebrity sticking his neck out on the issues of the day. Except he just made the biggest mistake of his quasi-political life.
He chose a side. And he chose badly for more than a few reasons.
McConaughey’s recent gun control plea, made via the current White House’s invitation, won’t be easily forgotten. His policy suggestions proved generic and unlikely to move the needle on gun violence.
Then again, why would anyone expect the “Dallas Buyers Club” star to set forth any bold new agendas? He’s an actor, not a gun control expert. He brings a layman’s touch to the subject, meaning there’s little reason for him to even be on such an important political stage.
It’s one thing for a celebrity to share a hot take on Twitter. It’s another to travel to Washington, D.C. and demand said take be given the gravitas of a State of the Union address.
Figures like John Lott and Dana Loesch have been enmeshed in guns for years, if not decades. Agree or disagree with their opinions, they’ve studied the topic aggressively and offer sober insights.
What has McConaughey done to measure up?
More importantly, the star has been carefully straddling the line between Democrats and Republicans in recent years. He’s teased running for Texas governor, inserting himself into various narratives along the way.
And he’s done so without choosing a party. That’s no accident.
Embracing generic gun control platitudes, from the Biden White House pulpit of all places, changed that. And he did it at a moment when Team Biden is on its heels, pounded by terrible polling numbers and facing a Red Wave come November.
It’s not politically smart to back the wrong horse.
Not only did McConaughey pick a political side, but he also did so at the worst possible time. Today’s Democratic party doesn’t resemble the one President Barack Obama commandeered just a few short years ago.
It’s angry, uncompromising and beholden to its far-Left base. And that seems to clash with everything the actor represents.
The modern Left looks the other way when its side commits political violence, or it implicitly eggs it on. It gently nods as protesters descend on the homes of Supreme Court Justices, assuming the legal eagles lean to the Right.
McConaughey’s “new” side often demands abortion up until birth, cheers on Big Tech censorship and champions Cancel Culture.
The actor may not embrace those extreme measures, but his new party does. And how will Democrats take to McConaughey’s kinder, gentler approach? They’ll rage against his willingness to defend Trump voters, as he’s done in the past. They’ll steam over his inability to demonize the other side.
Conservatives offer a bigger tent today, witness Dr. Oz’s primary victory in Pennsylvania. Or, closer to Hollywood, look at how the Right rallies behind left-leaning comics like Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle.
No one fought harder for Rogan than the Right, and even he admitted as much.
Republicans might have made room for a center-leaning soul who just so happened to be a movie star. Democrats may cheer McConaughey on as he pushes more gun control measures, but every other time he opens his mouth they’ll demand he shut it, and fast.
The political neophyte will learn that lesson soon enough.
Because the AR-15 Can Deter a Mob
Americans deserve the chance to protect themselves from rampaging mobs and (God forbid) the government itself if tyranny arises.
*****
Now to the point. This is not a piece about dealing with misinformation. Official efforts to combat “misinformation” are laughably political and partisan. This is about gun control. Why do Americans need AR-15s with a high capacity magazine? Because too often, mobs inflamed by planted rumors are allowed (even encouraged) to rampage through American communities. Ask Kyle Rittenhouse. The AR-15 is a jury-approved tool of self-defense against a mob of attackers.
Mobs like these don’t materialize in a vacuum. Tyrants, dating back to the Romans, have employed mobs to influence politics. Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, all developed an “on and off” switch for their street goons. And no, it’s not different when the mob is inflamed by social justice concerns. Every mob since before the Romans claims to be fighting for justice of some kind.
Recall that Kamala Harris rather conspicuously pledged to “stand by” Kenosha rioters and helped raise money for Minneapolis rioters who burned down an entire police facility. Biden excused the Kenosha riots on the grounds of “the original sin in this country . . . slavery, and all the vestigages of it.” One should not hold one’s breath for help from the Biden Administration if one’s city descends into chaos.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey and Kyle Rittenhouse have demonstrated that the AR-15 with a conspicuous high-capacity magazine is the appropriate tool to deter a mob (in the case of the McCloskeys) and may be wielded as a legitimate instrument of self-defense (in the case of Rittenhouse). And, as I pointed out in 2020,
Americans can also see that powerful rifles are turning up in the possession of violent rioters and looters. In this video, one can clearly see Raz Simone, then a noted leader within Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,’ handing out an expensive, tricked-out AR-15 to a complete stranger.
Simone somehow went from an Airbnb host to a Tesla-driving, arsenal-distributing mogul in the space of a few weeks. As shown in this video, a militant left-wing militia group called NFAC . . . staged an armed protest in Kentucky during which an accidental discharge wounded three people.
Unfortunately, we live at a time when social and legacy media help agitators spread lies to incite mob violence. And for a variety of reasons, one may not be able to count on law enforcement to engage a violent threat. Once the threat materializes, it’s possible that the police will “maintain a perimeter” while “waiting for equipment and backup,” while people continue to die. Jurisdictions governed by the Left have been particularly brazen about selective protection based on politics. The University of California recently was forced to settle a lawsuit charging that UC Berkeley withheld security and protection from conservative speakers.
Americans deserve the chance to protect themselves from rampaging mobs and (God forbid) the government itself if tyranny arises. And they should not take for granted that their Republican representatives will stand firm to protect these rights.
Things are different now. Gun confiscators are willing to weather the backlash of moderate gun owners to achieve their greater objectives. Indeed, the hopeless condition of their midterm prospects leaves them with little to lose. It’s in the air. The NRA is bankrupt and compromised. Anti-gun forces (not all of them Democrats) control Congress and the White House. And before you count on the Supreme Court, remember the mob now knows where each of the conservative justices live. The Second Amendment has never been in greater peril.
House passes huge gun control bill. Now on to the Senate, where none of them are even talking about what the House passed.
House passes package of gun control bills
The House on Wednesday voted 223-204 to pass a package of gun control bills that were introduced in the wake of the deadly shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.
Driving the news: The omnibus legislation was dubbed the “Protecting Our Kids Act” and is unlikely to get 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate.
- The bills would raise the legal purchasing age for semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21 and ban the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of large-capacity magazines, among other provisions.
- It would also establish requirements to regulate the storage of firearms on residential premises and create criminal penalties for violations.
What to watch: With the House action all but certain to fail in the Senate, a bipartisan group of senators is instead focused on crafting a gun control deal that can pass the chamber — even if it means compromising…..
CNN’s anti-gun cop:
The AR-15 is a terrible self defense weapon
Same anti-gun cop:
Cops have AR-15s for self defense
“meant for use only on the battlefield”
Calls for all semi-auto rifles to be NFA
Here’s the reason people tell me they want to buy an AR-15. And it’s simply ludicrous
“Michael Fanone is a CNN law enforcement analyst who served for 20 years with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. ”
Read it if you want. It’s the typical I’m an expert!™ ‘appeal to authority’ BS meant for the ignorant, that’s so commonplace these days.
Where Gun Groups Stand On Red Flag Laws
WASHINGTON, D.C. -(Ammoland.com)- One proposed gun control that has support on both sides of the issue is extreme risk protection orders (ERPO), better known as “red flag” laws.
Red flag laws allow a gun owner’s firearms to be stripped from them by police if they are reported to be a danger to themselves or others. In most cases, the gun owner isn’t aware that an ERPO has been taken out until police show up to execute the order. The gun owner then must prove that they are not a danger to anyone to get their property back. They must hire a lawyer at their own expense, meaning that poverty-stricken gun owners are less likely to fight an ERPO.
Many in the firearms community believe that red flag laws not only violate a person’s Second Amendment rights, but it also violates the gun owner’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Many claim that ERPOs violate the right to due process and flips the burden of proof to the gun owner.
Since this gun control measure is the most likely to pass in Congress, AmmoLand News has decided to look at gun rights advocacy and industry groups’’ opinions on red flag laws. AmmoLand News has reached out to various national groups to gauge where the gun world falls into the red flag debate. It is essential to understand where these groups stand.
GOP attorney general candidates look to expand gun rights
MILWAUKEE (AP) — The two frontrunners for the Republican attorney general nomination say they want to expand gun rights for nonviolent felons.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported that former state Rep. Adam Jarchow and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney both said during a debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night that gun rights should be restored for people convicted of nonviolent felonies when they re-join society. Jarchow said he’s heard from nonviolent felons who are frustrated they can’t use guns to hunt with their grandchildren.
“Is there a narrow way we can restore Second Amendment rights to folks without giving career criminals guns?” Jarchow said. “Maybe.”
Jarchow also jabbed Toney for charging 10 people with violating Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Tony said he later dropped the charges and his office never convicted anyone or shut down a business or church and attacked Jarchow over his lack of prosecutorial experience.
Karen Mueller, a conservative attorney also running for the GOP nomination, said she wants to investigate baseless claims that hospitals routinely killed patients with COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines have proven safe.
The primary is Aug. 9. The winner will face incumbent Democrat Josh Kaul in the November general election.
Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.
RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.
ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.
Let’s read that first paragraph a little closer
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.
Those ‘conventions’ were the state delegations who’s members were concerned that the Constitution’s forming of a government, supposedly of limited powers, still might give enough power so that a corrupt government could mis-construct them and in abusing them become, in effect, ‘legally’ tyrannical.
These men were prescient.
The demand was a listing of certain rights that the people possessed and that the government power was restricted from interfering with.
This is the mass deception we see today; ‘The Second amendment didn’t allow the people to have X-Y-Z.’
That is a lie.
Neither the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights – as Madison called them – gave or allowed the people anything. The people already had these rights. The amendments restricted government, not the people.
Constitutional Rights vs. Ideological Rights
On 31 July 1982 I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign, and domestic. Today I am the Executive Director of the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU).
As a career military serviceman and combat veteran, I believe the oath that I took then has no statute of limitations. As a Member of Congress, that oath was my guiding principle and light, as the Constitution is our rule of law.
The U.S. Constitution was established to restrain the powers of the federal government. As a matter of fact, when you read Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution you will find the (18) enumerated duties of the legislative branch, the most powerful of our three branches of government. Article II and Article III lay out the duties, qualifications, duties, responsibilities and scope of the executive and judicial branches. Our founders intentionally described and limited the federal government.
Unfortunately, the left does not subscribe to these limitations. Today there exists competing philosophies of governance — constitutional conservatism and progressive socialism. Leftists do not believe in the absolutism of the Constitution, our rule of law, and certainly not the ideal of constitutional rights. Leftists believe in the dangerous concept of ideological rights.
The left in America embraces an ideal that is the antithesis of our constitutional rights. They believe their ideology defines our rights. They believe they can grant and take our rights away.
I find very disconcerting the repeated assertion by the current occupant of the oval office, Joe Biden, that no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. His current focus is the Second Amendment, whose language is quite simple and forthright. His line has been parroted by many progressive socialists, elected officials and media pundits.
The Second Amendment is part of our individual Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. It is established in our founding documents, along the principle of natural rights theory, that our unalienable rights and all individual rights come to us from our Creator God, the Judeo-Christian God. They do not emanate from the government, and that is codified in our Declaration of Independence which Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “laws of nature and nature’s God”.
Here we have the President of these United States of America who took an oath to uphold the Constitution declaring our constitutional rights are not absolute.
The left tells us that we have a right to healthcare. We have a right to free college education. We have a right to change our gender. None of these are enumerated rights, but they are ideological rights of the Left.
Once upon a time, during the Carter administration, the Left told us that every American had a right to own a home. They passed legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act which led to the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown some 30 years later. Just last week a Democrat Congressman from Rhode Island publicly stated that he deemed constitutional rights as bovine excrement. Yes, a US Congressman who is supposed to have taken an oath to the Constitution says constitutional rights are BS!
Now you can see why we need an organization called the American Constitutional Rights Union?
If no amendment to the Constitution is absolute, then I guess the left wants to make me a slave again? Recall, Democrats did not support the 13th and 14th Amendments. Today, this same group, who now embraces socialism and Marxism, is promoting economic enslavement.
If the left in America is able to define our rights based upon their ideological agenda and have it enforced by the rule of the mob…America faces dark days ahead. And if the Left is successful in disarming the American populace, their sponsored mob, Antifa, will leverage coercion, threats, intimidation, fear, and violence against anyone not in compliance.
If the progressive socialist left does not like our Constitution, they can go through the amendment process. Passing ideologically based laws, or issuing edicts, orders, mandates, and decrees, does not override our constitutional rights.
Recall, our respective States would not ratify our constitution until it had an individual Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment clearly states, “All the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the States and to the People.” If the 10th Amendment is not absolute, then the leftists in America become the repository of all power in America.
America is the longest running Constitutional Republic because of individual constitutional rights…not rights based upon progressive, socialist, statist, Marxist ideology.
Steadfast and Loyal.
President McConaughey makes the case for gun control compromise at the White House
The average joe doesn’t pay attention to daily political claptrap, especially when it’s coming from a figure as underwhelming and predictable as the president. But have an A-list actor revisiting the most gruesome and heartbreaking details of a mass shooting and some will perk up.
I wonder if the true target of having McConaughey speak today isn’t Congress but Greg Abbott. In an alternate universe, McConaughey is running for governor against him right now. He’s sufficiently well-liked at home that having him champion a cause like this in an emotional way after a catastrophe might affect some Texans. If McConaughey ends up as an advocate for red-flag laws at the state level, that’ll put pressure on Abbott.
He said we need laws to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys. Bad guys don’t care about the laws. That’s why they are bad guys.
— Thought Criminal Rob (@tripodcat73) June 7, 2022
Another point is; Why does anyone give these people ‘authority’? I could not care less what a movie actor believes I should or shouldn’t do, own, believe, or think.
Violence isn’t a disease, it’s a behavior. They only call it a disease as a willing participants in the gooberment attempts to acquire power to control the people
Why doctors are calling gun violence in the U.S. an epidemic.
A growing number of health care providers say gun violence is a public health issue……
Click on the pic for a large image
Here’s another take on the moronic crap-for-brains CBS article about Japanese gun control laws. And an interesting statistic
Why comparing gun violence here to Japan is stupid
Japan and the United States don’t have a lot in common. Culturally, we’re quite different, though not necessarily incompatible. After all, while legions of Americans consume bits of Japanese culture as if it were the greatest thing ever, other legions in Japan do the same thing with American culture.
But there are profound differences between the United States and Japan.
You wouldn’t really know that if you saw this story going on about their low rates of gun homicides.
As the U.S. gun control debate intensifies, some Americans are looking overseas for ideas on how to prevent mass shootings. Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. There were more than four firearm homicides in the U.S. per 100,000 people during 2019, compared to almost zero in Japan.
As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports, Japan’s strict laws on private gun ownership have surprising origins in the United States. She met Raphael, a well-known Japanese YouTuber who decided to take skeet shooting lessons. Despite being ex-military, he had to jump through all the same hoops that any Japanese civilian must clear to get a gun license.
There’s mandatory training. You have to pass a written exam, plus a physical and mental health evaluation. Even then, the police will go and ask your family and friends whether you have any violent tendencies.
The point, of course, is very clear. Japan good, America bad. (The article later goes on to point out the irony in the fact that their gun laws are the result of American occupation following World War II.)
However, for all of Palmer’s questions, she never bothered to dig beyond the surface level.
Japan’s total homicide rate is 0.3 per 100,000 people. That’s for all weapons, and yes, that is incredibly low by anyone’s standard. It’s easy to see why some would look to Japan and try to see what they’re doing in hopes of replicating it here.
If our gun homicide rate were only 0.3 per 100,000, that would probably be a rate we could live with, right?
Except, our non-gun homicide rate is 1.6 per 100,000. That’s more than [5] times greater than Japan’s total rate.
In other words, whatever is making Japan so relatively safe has little or nothing to do with their gun laws. After all, the Japanese government can’t ban knives, hammers, sticks, or body parts–all of which are used to kill plenty of people here in the United States.
Instead, whatever has created such a low homicide rate is likely something that has nothing to do with weapon restrictions and more to do with culture or, at least, some other regulation.
Unfortunately, that’s beyond the modern media to delve into. That’s a question they never bother to think to ask because they’re apparently conditioned to not think of homicide as anything other than a gun issue.
The thing is, though, if you managed to make all guns go away overnight from every hand in the country, we’d still have a higher homicide rather than Japan–at least five times higher, though I suspect it would increase since you have to assume a large percentage of those who kill with guns would simply shift to another weapon.
So yeah, Palmer skimmed the surface and never dug any deeper, which is par for the course in this day and age.
Feminist Naomi Wolf takes the red pill and takes the first tentative steps on the path to see reality
BLUF
Without the brilliantly-conceived and clearly-worded Second Amendment, without the deterrent to state and transnational violence of responsible, lawful, careful and defensive firearms ownership in the United States of America, it is clear that nothing at all will save our citizens from the current fates of the people of China, Australia and Canada; including the children; who are facing — unarmed, defenseless as their parents sadly are — even worse fates, perhaps, still ahead.
Rethinking the Second Amendment
I wrote this essay some weeks ago, but I kept waiting to publish it til tragic mass shootings were no longer in the news. But that day looks as if it will never come, so I am publishing it anyway, with grief and mourning for those lost to gun violence, as we must nonetheless have this difficult conversation.
The last thing keeping us free in America, as the lights go off all over Europe- and Australia, and Canada – is, yes, we must face this fact, the Second Amendment.
I can’t believe I am writing those words. But here we are and I stand by them.
I am a child of the peace movement. A daughter of the Left, of a dashingly-bearded proto-Beatnik poet, my late dad, and of a Summer of Love activist/cultural anthropologist, my lovely mom. We are a lineage of anti-war, longhaired folks who believe in talking things out.
By the time I was growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s, weapons were supposed to have become passe. When I played at friends’ houses in our neighborhood in San Francisco, there were posters on the walls: “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” Protesters had iconically placed daisies in the rifle barrels of unhip-looking National Guardsmen.
We were obviously supposed to side with the daisies.
Weapons were archaic, benighted — tacky. A general peace was surely to prevail, in the dawning Age of Aquarius.
Observation O’ The Day
“Our ‘elites’ are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.”
Common Sense? CBS Urges U.S. Adopt Japan’s Occupation-Era Gun Control
On Monday’s CBS Mornings, the network continued their series globetrotting for gun control laws. This time they left Europe and jetted over to Japan where senior foreign correspondent (and friend to the Iranian regime) Elizabeth Palmer touted their oppressive system where a citizen could wait a year or longer to get a gun license as authorities prod their lives and a gun shop owners need to get permission to buy ammo. All imposed on them during the post-WWII occupation.
So much for “common sense” gun laws.
“As the U.S. gun-control debate intensifies, some Americans are looking overseas for ideas on how to prevent mass shootings. Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world,” co-host Nate Burleson announced at the top of the segment. “Seems like it’s about time we adopt some of those laws,” he pushed at the end.
Hanging out with Japanese YouTuber Raphael at a skeet shooting range, Palmer praised the “mandatory training” citizen had to go through, in addition to a “written exam, a physical and a mental health evaluation, and even then the police can go and ask your family and friends whether you’ve got any violent tendencies.”
“It took me a year,” Raphael told her. She also noted, “the police had even interviewed his wife.”
She also touted how Japanese citizens were only allowed to buy firearms from three categories and the ridiculous fact that gun store owners needed permission to restock ammunition:
He’s proud of the buck he shot in northern Japan with a rifle, one of only three types of guns a civilian can own. Air guns are also allowed, he said, as shotguns, but that’s it.
I’ve heard that there’s very strict control on ammunition, as well. I see you have some rounds here in the cabinet.
“Yes,” he tells me. “When a gun owner runs out he needs police authorization to buy more.”
“Does he think the law goes too far? Not a bit. Like most Japanese, he supports it as the price for almost zero gun violence,” she boasted.
Palmer was absolutely giddy to note that the reason Japan had such strict gun control laws was because of the United States. “And how’s this for ironic? Japan owes its strict gun laws to America,” she mocked. “When the U.S. occupied Japan after World War II it disarmed the country.”
She even threw in a soundbite from an old documentary where the narrator proclaimed: “To the scrap heap went the guns.” Palmer conveniently omitted the part where the U.S. also banned Japan from having a military.
“Americans shaped the legislation that took firearms out of the hands of civilians, and to this day, that means getting hurt or killed by a gun in Japan is an extremely long shot,” she jabbed as she wrapped up the report.
Palmer is essentially praising the American confiscation of firearms for there to be a smoother occupation and pacification of a citizenry, the exact opposite of what the founders intended. And given the fact that the Democratic Roosevelt administration put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, perhaps looking to that era for guidance is ill-advised.
Since all the previous laws didn’t work, let’s try it harder!
New York governor signs gun control package into law
The Supreme Court has yet to officially opine on the constitutionality of New York’s “may issue” permitting laws for concealed carry licenses, and now a host of other newer restrictions will likely be getting court attention in the days ahead. On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed several sweeping new restrictions into law, including a ban on sales of so-called assault weapons to adults under the age of 21, new registration requirements for all owners of modern sporting rifles, and an expansion of the state’s “red flag” law that could have some unintended consequences for those in need of mental health services or counseling.
The laws were rammed through the Democrat-controlled legislature last week as a response to the mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store in which ten people were murdered by an 18-year old suspect, and during today’s signing ceremony Hochul and other Democrats made it clear that even more restrictions are on the way.
