Category: RKBA

Gun-Shy Writer Has Second Thoughts About Defenselessness

Since the start of the pandemic and the corresponding Great Gun Run of 2020/2021, we’ve seen millions of Americans embrace their Second Amendment rights for the very first time, and not all of them are conservatives worried about their individual freedoms being taken away. There’s been a rise in the number of self-described liberals with a growing interest in gun ownership over the past 20 months or so as well, including Samuel Ligon, a novelist and teacher at Eastern Washington University.

Ligon recently wrote about what drove him to take class on basic firearms handling as he debated buying a gun, and as it turns out, it was conservative 2A activists that had the biggest impact on him.

This was a few months after the BLM demonstrations in Spokane, Washington, when the militia was out at night with their guns and camouflage costumes. Kate and I saw them on TV and Twitter, in Spokane and all over the West, men with assault weapons ready for war.

I’d seen them in Olympia, too, armed citizens asserting their rights. The third-grade teachers would usher their students back to the buses, their Capitol tour abruptly over. This was before the Capitol grounds were fenced, before people started shooting each other during weekend protests. In August, Kate and I saw a guy at the Country Store shopping with his wife and toddler with a gun on his hip, a posture I found idiotic, intimidating, infuriating. He was why I wanted to go to gun school. I hated him for walking around like that.

I didn’t tell Kate I was going for weeks, and when I did tell her, she didn’t say much. In fact, she didn’t say anything. I considered canceling, but it had been so hard to get a spot. Everyone wanted to go to gun school. The pandemic — or something worse, whatever it was that had been tearing us apart for years — was working our fear, making some of us conclude that we might have to shoot somebody soon, which is what we mean when we talk about self-defense.

For Ligon, it was the armed response to the “demonstrations” that made him want a firearm for protection, but for many others, it was the riots, looting, and violence in cities from coast-to-coast that made them think about their Second Amendment rights for the first time in their lives. And even after the riots and demonstrations subsided, the violence has remained. Ligon doesn’t say anything about the crime rate in Spokane influencing his desire to own a gun, but homicides in the city doubled in 2020 compared to 2019, and I don’t think the “militia” was responsible for any of them.

But it wasn’t just Ligon who was interested in picking up a firearm. His brother told him he’d bought a gun. His brother-in-law admitted he’d bought a shotgun, though he hadn’t yet purchased any shells.

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BLUF:
The public is not rendered “safer” when citizens are disarmed, but rendered only more vulnerable to (and powerless against) those who would do them harm.

11 More Reasons Biden Administration Is Wrong About Onerous Gun Restrictions

The Biden administration last month filed a brief encouraging the Supreme Court to uphold New York City’s de facto ban preventing ordinary citizens from carrying firearms in public.

The administration argued that an onerous “good cause” requirement—giving the city’s police department unmitigated discretion over citizens’ exercise of a fundamental right—is a perfectly reasonable regulation.

This court brief is just one of several high-profile actions taken this year by the Biden administration that underscore its lack of commitment to taking the Second Amendment seriously.

New York City’s law, one of a myriad of serious burdens placed on New Yorkers’ right to keep and bear arms, prevents the vast majority of residents from being able to meaningfully protect themselves in public when the government fails to do so. And the government often fails to do so.

In fact, almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes an article monthly underscoring some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place.

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in August. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)

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When dishonesty is their stock in trade, it’s only logical to conclude these people want to disarm you because they want to do something they know they would likely be shot for.

Everytown Lies Their Tongues Off With Claim on Child and Teen Deaths

Everytown is one of the largest deep-pocketed anti-Bill of Rights organizations out there. They do serious lobbying and litigation. Their “reporting” arm is The Trace, a publication whose bias should be obvious from who is buttering their bread.

Everytown has a documented history of lying to advance their cause. Those of us on the pro-Rights side are jaded by their behavior, but if you thought that their boldness and daring in peddling falsehoods had peaked, you would be wrong.

Back in August, Everytown posted the following tweet:

 

“Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America ages 0-19. Our kids shouldn’t have to die like this.”

Really? Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America? That sounded off, so I went straight to the motherlode of statistics: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC has a page where you can get detailed information on Leading Causes of Death and Injury.

Trying to get a quick answer, I checked out their “Ten Leading Causes of Death and Injury” infographic images. For both 2018 and 2017, the top cause of death is “unintentional injury,” not firearms, as Everytown claimed above. So, I dug in further to see if Everytown’s claim was buried somewhere, and it was all just a misunderstanding. For both 2018 and 2017, the top categories of “unintentional injury” were dominated by traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation. So, again, I decided to give Everytown the benefit of the doubt and dug into an even smaller subset of “violence-related injury deaths.” And yet again, for both 2018 and 2017, I found that the top causes were dominated by traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation. Firearms were clearly not the “leading cause of death” as Everytown claimed.

But what if the infographic images were not providing the accurate picture because the range of years covered (2017-18) was too narrow?

So, to be sure, I ran a custom report on the “Ten Leading Causes of Death.” This report includes all the data available from 2001–2019. Once again, I didn’t see firearms as the leading cause in the report data. Drilling down, the same pattern of traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation persisted. For the 15-24 age range, poisoning made a cameo; diving into that revealed that drug overdoses are listed as poisoning and were the leading cause of death in the poisoning category.

What if the above report was inaccurate because the age groups were too broad? After all, the CDC’s 15+ range went from 15-year-olds all the way to 24-year-olds.

So, I ran another custom report, this one covering data from 1999–2019. (Note that this custom report was not available for 2001–2019.) Under the “Advanced Options,” I was able to set a custom age range from “<1” to 19, which was the age range that Everytown claimed in their tweet. Yet again over this 20-year period, unintentional injury deaths (184,060) – the top cause – were almost 3.5 times higher than homicides (53,628), and almost twice as high than homicides and suicides (44,595) combined. Homicides and suicides included all means, not just those committed using firearms. Again, this report didn’t substantiate Everytown’s claim. Out of curiosity, I limited the age range from “<1” to 17, because 18- and 19-year-olds are voting-age adults; homicides and suicides dropped even lower with these criteria.

I still wasn’t giving up on Everytown; what if I messed up somehow and Everytown was actually correct. So, I ran a final report with the data the CDC has going back to the 1981–1998 period. And yet again, unintentional injury deaths (257,110) vastly outnumbered homicides (60,768) and suicides (38,215); note that the homicide and suicide numbers include all means, firearms, cutting instruments, blunt objects… you name it.

Based on the CDC’s reports and readily available infographics, I was not able to substantiate Everytown’s claim. If Everytown has any data that’s not conjured out of thin air, they need to come clean and disclose it. Until then, their deliberate misinformation needs to be stopped by those of us on the pro-Rights side, using free speech and facts, not by calling for censoring or silencing them.

The Right to Bear Arms: Learning Liberty – Cubs to Bears

Recommended Age Range: 4-12

The Right to Bear Arms is a tool designed to assist parents in teaching children about the Second Amendment and constitutional liberties.  It highlights the time Charisma Cat attempted to take over the forest by using tricks, social shame, and manipulation to convince other animals to give up their teeth and claws.  Only the Bears refuse to surrender their arms.  You can guess what happens next.

The book includes a FREE downloadable lesson plan which discusses the historical events that precede the ratification of the second Amendment and prompts children to think critically about their Right to self-defense.

The back of the book includes seven coloring pages featuring the characters in the book.

NYSRPA Case Exposes Biden’s Anti-Second Amendment Bias, Vindicates Opposition to Garland

Further evidence of Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s contempt for the Second Amendment has emerged in recent weeks.

On September 21, the solicitor general of the U.S. (an office of the Department of Justice that reports to the Attorney General) filed a brief on behalf of the federal government supporting New York’s may-issue carry licensing regime in the U.S. Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That same day, the solicitor general filed for leave to participate in oral arguments. The court granted this leave on October 12. Therefore, on the November 3, the American public will be treated to a verbal presentation of the Biden administration’s disdain for the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense outside the home.

New York’s may-issue carry licensing scheme requires applicants to demonstrate that “proper cause exists for the issuance” of a license, in addition to the standardized requirements attendant most carry permitting regimes (certification in firearm safety training, no serious criminal record, etc.). This structure grants unfettered discretion to government officials to determine who may bear a firearm outside the home for self-defense. In many parts of New York, the “proper cause” regime is used to effectively bar law-abiding individuals from exercising their rights.=

According to the Biden administration, New York’s discretionary approach to administering a Constitutional right “does not violate the Second Amendment.”

Rejecting the Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Biden administration’s brief noted, “A court should uphold an arms regulation if it is validated by text, history, and tradition or if it satisfies intermediate scrutiny.” Of course, the Heller decision did not contemplate a tiered-scrutiny analysis for Second Amendment cases.

Under tiered-scrutiny analysis, a government regulation that impacts a right is examined under one of three rubrics. The severity of the test depends on which right is impacted. Under the lowest tier, rational basis review, the government only needs to prove that the regulation has some rational connection to furthering a government interest. Intermediate scrutiny requires the government to show that a regulation furthers an important government interest in a manner related to that interest. Strict scrutiny requires a regulation to be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest.

The subjective nature of this mode of analysis enables judges to come to decisions that align with their preferred policy preferences rather than the law. This may be why Justice Antonin Scalia eschewed such an approach in Heller.

Moreover, in arguing that restrictions on the Second Amendment right should only face intermediate scrutiny, the Biden administration is making clear that it views the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class right. Under a tiered-scrutiny approach, regulations that implicate fundamental rights are reviewed with strict scrutiny.

Of course, the Biden administration’s entire argument should be irrelevant in light of Heller. As NYSRPA’s reply explained,

Heller held that the Second Amendment protects “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” 554 U.S. at 592. And it explained that the term “bear,” as used in the text, means to “wear” or to “carry … upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose … of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.”

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Well, that ‘we’ isn’t as inclusive as might be thought.

We Still Haven’t Learned The Lessons Of Luby’s 30 Years Later

Luby’s Cafeteria is one of the earlier mass shootings of our modern era. Predating Columbine, it was a nightmare scenario that the city of Killean, TX is still reeling from 30 years later. That’s certainly understandable.

After all, it was something so unexpected that it would be difficult not to reel.

The tragic Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen left survivors, residents, and city leaders hoping and praying such a senseless, murderous incident would never happen again in the United States.

“No community is, or could ever be, prepared for the tragedy which struck Killeen on October 16, 1991,” said a 1991 Herald thank-you-to-first-responders display ad from then-Mayor Major Blair and Killeen City Council. “Our hope and prayers are that a similar event will never again occur in any community.”

At the time, the Luby’s tragedy was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, however, that’s no longer the case.

In the three decades since George “JoJo” Hennard, 35, of Belton, drove his blue Ford Ranger pickup through a plate glass window of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen and murdered 23 Luby’s Cafeteria lunchtime diners on National Bosses Day, America has mourned 111 mass shootings, eight of those in Texas, in which 846 people were killed, according to a mass shooting database by nonprofit Mother Jones.

Two of those mass shootings occurred at Fort Hood, in 2009 and 2014, in which 16 people were killed in all.

In the decade prior to the Luby’s massacre, according to the mass shooting database, America had nine mass shootings, classified as an attack where three or more victims are killed in a public place.

It’s awful.

One thing everyone can probably agree on is that we haven’t learned our lessons since then. The problem is that we don’t agree on what those lessons actually are.

For the anti-Second Amendment jihadists, though, the lessons are “guns r teh badz.” Never you mind that five people were just murdered with a bow and arrow last week, the problem truly is guns.

Yet there was an actual lesson here:

Former state representative and Luby’s survivor Suzanna Hupp, lost both of her parents in the Luby’s shooting. Hupp, who lobbies for looser gun control laws, said she would’ve been able to stop the shooter if Texas had allowed concealed carry in 1991. She had a handgun at the time, but left it in her vehicle because of the law at the time.

DING DING DING! We have a winner!

Luby’s was a target in part because people couldn’t carry a firearm there. There was little to no chance of meeting armed resistance. Hupp would have been in a position to end the attack before it really got going, but she complied with the law. We saw the same thing happen in Virginia Beach, too.

What’s that phrase? “If it saves just one life,” or something like that? Yeah, I think that’s it.

Look, I’m not saying ending gun-free zones will put an end to mass shootings. I think it’ll stop a lot of them, but someone will still try to shoot up places for whatever demented reason.

What I will say is that we can specifically point to two cases–and who knows how many others we’re unaware of–where someone was barred from carrying a gun, so they were unarmed when a mass shooting happened. If it wouldn’t have made a difference in any of the others, it would have at least saved lives in Luby’s Cafeteria and in Virginia Beach.

But I don’t believe they were the only two cases, either. They’re just the two I know of definitively.

That’s the lesson we can’t seem to learn. We can’t seem to grasp that bad things are going to happen. You’re never going to stop that. But you can minimize the damage by trusting law-abiding citizens with the very rights protected in the Constitution, including the right to keep and bear arms.

Impossible!

BLUF:
And again, we were reminded that the bad guys don’t pay attention to signs banning firearms or illegal weapons.  If they were the kind to abide by rules, they wouldn’t be bad guys.

A Pennsylvania mall that bans guns has mass shooting

Although the daily news always provides plenty of examples of people doing genuinely bad things (assault, robbery, rape, murder, etc.), the fact is that most people in America are law-abiding.  And while some will sit passively while a violent rape occurs directly in front of them, many of these good citizens will act when called upon to do so.  Nevertheless, America’s retail stores and entertainment venues insist on disarming the good guys under the delusional belief that it will stop the bad guys.

The latest example of this urge to disarm comes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a shooting occurred at the Park City Center shopping mall on Sunday afternoon:

Gunshots rang out at the Park City Center in Lancaster around 2:30 p.m., according to Lancaster Online.

Two people suffered gunshot wounds and two suspects were in custody, according to police and the website, which said the injuries were not life-threatening.

An argument broke out between four people outside an international food store, the owner of the store told the outlet. One man brandished a gun during a scuffle, and it was knocked away by a man who then opened fire, according to the report.

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CCRKBA: ‘KING COUNTY, WA MURDER SPIKE TYPIFIES NATIONAL GUN CONTROL FAILURE’

BELLEVUE, WA – Authorities in Washington’s King County—epicenter of the Northwest’s gun prohibition movement—are alarmed at the continued rise in gun-related homicides and shooting incidents, but nowhere has anyone acknowledged that gun control laws they have supported are an utter failure, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“Nothing more clearly illustrates gun control lack of success than the situation in King County,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “It is reflective of the national trend revealed in the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2020, showing murders up by 30 percent nationwide. If restricting the gun rights of law-abiding citizens worked, this should not be the case.”

Gottlieb recited the recent failed history of the Seattle-based, and billionaire-backed gun control crusade beginning in 2014 with statewide Initiative 594, requiring so-called “universal background checks” for all gun transfers. This was followed in 2015 by Seattle’s adoption of a special gun control tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition, which has never achieved the revenue forecast of $300,000 to $500,000 annually, and has only driven business out of the city. In 2018, Seattle’s wealthy anti-gun elitists pushed through another statewide gun control initiative, again contending it would reduce gun-related violent crime, but the exact opposite has happened.

“Let’s look at the embarrassing data,” Gottlieb suggested. “According to the report, this year’s 73 gun-related homicides in King County so far have already surpassed last year’s total of 69, and there are still more than two months to go in 2021. Last year Seattle saw 52 murders, and the year before that there were 35. Seattle’s gun tax took effect in 2016, and that year the city reported just 19 murders.

“Statewide,” he continued, “gun control has likewise failed. In 2015, the first full year after I-594 was passed, the state reported 209 slayings, of which 141 involved firearms, according to FBI data. Last year, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, the state saw 302 murders, and their data shows 178 involving firearms. FBI data for 2019 shows 135 homicides involving firearms, so that’s quite a jump.

“Instead of using this data to push for even harsher laws,” Gottlieb said, “it is time for the gun prohibition lobby, not just in Washington but across the country, to admit their agenda has failed. It’s time to scrap extremist gun control laws and try something else like supporting our police and locking up violent criminals.”

Six States Boast More than 1 Million Carry Licenses Each

Six Second Amendment friendly states now boast more than one million active concealed carry licenses/permits each, including Florida with more than 2.5 million licenses in circulation, one of several revelations in the updated annual report on Concealed Carry in the United States from the Crime Prevention Research Center.

The other states are Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Texas.

It is the kind of news that sets off alarms in the gun prohibition lobby. Anti-gunners and their allies on Capitol Hill are determined to reduce the number of armed citizens. But the new CPRC report says the exact opposite has happened over the past few years, especially over the last 12 months. Since October 2020, the nation has seen two million additional permits/licenses approved, bringing the number of legally-packing adult Americans to 21.52 million, and that’s not all. Read the report’s abstract here.

Twenty-one states now have so-called “constitutional carry” where no permit is required to carry a firearm. According to the CPRC report, “While permits are soaring in the non-Constitutional Carry states, they fell in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states.”

Texas is the newest permitless carry state, yet more than a million Lone Star gun owners still have permits, allowing them to be recognized under reciprocity laws in other states.

In all, the report from CPRC’s founder and President John Lott—the researcher and author—and researcher Rujun Wang lists 15 states in which more than 10 percent of the adult population is licensed to carry. In addition to the states mentioned earlier, the roundup includes are Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Tennessee, incidentally, is where Smith & Wesson is moving a large part of its current Massachusetts operation, taking hundreds of jobs out of the Bay State and the accompanying revenue to friendlier surroundings.

The 69-page CPRC report offers several other revelations, among them being that “8.3% of American adults have permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.0% of adults have a permit.”

The Supreme Court on Nov. 3 will hear oral arguments in a case challenging New York’s “proper cause” requirement to get a carry permit, which officials routinely use to deny permit applications. Only the privileged seem able to show “proper cause” while average citizens cannot. The case is known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Another CPRC revelation: “In 2021, women made up 28.3% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender, an increase from the 26.4% last year. Seven states had data from 2012 to 2020/2021, and permit numbers grew 108.7% faster for women than for men.”

Increasing numbers of women are arming up, a pattern that has been building in recent years. With reductions in police manpower as a result of the “defund the police” movement that started in 2020 following the death of George Floyd while being restrained by Minneapolis police.

The CPRC report also notes that in three states where race and gender data is collected, there were “remarkably larger increases in permits for minorities compared to whites.” The report also reveals that four states keeping track of race between 2015-2021, “the number of Asian people with permits increased 93.2% faster than the number of whites with permits. Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 135.7% faster than whites.”

 

Such formalism about whether or not this rises to the constitutional definition of ‘Treason’ is unnecessary academic hair-splitting.
Resistance to tyranny needs no such underpinning.

DOES THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ASSAULT ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT AMOUNT TO TREASON?

THE MEANING OF ‘TREASON’

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
~Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator, in a speech he gave to the Roman Senate in 58 BC as ‘Recorded by Sallust’ in the fictional novel ‘A Pillar of Iron,’ by Taylor Caldwell (1983), ch. 5. ~The quotation bears resemblance to Cicero’s Second Oration in the Cataline war (circa 40 b.c.)

Under Biden’s reign, Americans are slowly losing their fundamental rights and liberties. They have already lost any vestige of a fundamental right of privacy as protected under the Unreasonable Searches and Seizures clause of the Fourth Amendment. And the Right of free speech under the First Amendment is, as well, under tremendous assault today.

And let us not forget the assault on the right of the people to keep and bear arms as codified in the Second Amendment. For without the citizenry’s exercise of the fundamental Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms, the exercise of all other Rights is tenuous at best or becomes altogether illusory, leading inevitably, inexorably to subjugation.

Americans already see that Biden, and his fellow Progressive and Neo-Marxist Democrats in Congress, and legions of unelected bureaucrats of the Administrative Deep State have made substantial inroads curtailing the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But the question is: Do these assaults on sacred Rights truly rise to the level of treason, well beyond the federal crimes of sedition, insurrection, and rebellion, awful as they are?

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Study: More Than 21-Million Concealed Carry Holders, Up 10.5% In 2020

During the Coronavirus pandemic, the number of concealed handgun permits has soared to over 21.52 million – a 48% increase since 2016. It’s also a 10.5% increase over the number of permits we counted a year ago in 2020. Unlike gun ownership surveys that may be affected by people’s unwillingness to answer personal questions, concealed handgun permit data is the only really “hard data” that we have. This increase occurred despite 21 Constitutional Carry states that no longer provide data on all those legally carrying a concealed handgun because people in those states no longer need a permit to carry.

These numbers are particularly topical given that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the concealed carry case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association V. Corlett in November. That case will determine whether those requesting permits need to provide a “proper cause,” which means a good reason for obtaining a permit.

A copy of the report is available here 

 

Elite Media Can’t Stop Lying About Guns in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find real news and listen past the lies.

Biden’s Climb to Institute Gun Restrictions Gets Steeper

The President’s gun agenda has been having a hard time through the first year of his term, and it’s only getting worse.

The House has passed two background-check expansion bills, but they aren’t going anywhere in the Senate. His plan to ban “assault weapons,” including the AR-15, hasn’t even gotten a vote in the House. Neither has his stated top priority of repealing legal protections provided to gun makers and dealers for third parties’ criminal misuse of their products.

He couldn’t even convince the Democratic Senate caucus to vote for the ATF director nominee he was counting on to shepherd his executive-branch efforts to implement gun restrictions. And it’s now unlikely he’ll get another opportunity to confirm a director before the end of his first term. That’s especially true after the new polling we saw this week.

As Americans continue to sour on the President’s handling of guns, his political capital will sink alongside his approval numbers. His approval on the issue dropped 10 points in the Economist/YouGov poll since June. It has fallen by half since the Associated Press measured it back in May.

In an atmosphere where Biden already can’t sway moderate Democratic Senators to vote for a nominee they never publicly opposed, it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll be able to convince them to vote for gun-control policies they have come out against in the past–especially while his standing with the public continues to deteriorate. Senators Angus King (I., Maine), Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), Jon Tester (D., Mont.), and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) wouldn’t go along what Biden wanted when he was polling 10 points better on the issue. Why would they budge on any of the gun bills he wants to pass now?

The odds get longer when you consider how low voters rank the issue of guns on their priority list. The Economist/YouGov poll found only 3 percent of Americans listed guns as their most important issue. That puts it in a tie for the 3rd-least-important issue out of thirteen polled.

As you might imagine, voter apathy tends not to generate action in DC.

So, the President is left with executive action to implement some semblance of the restrictions he seeks. He won’t have his chosen manager to push through those actions, which will handicap him to some degree. But, that doesn’t mean he won’t be able to enact sweeping changes that affect millions of American gun owners.

In fact, his administration appears to be pushing ahead with the effort to increase the ATF’s power by significantly broadening the definition of what constitutes a firearm and the effort to ban possession of nearly all of the millions of pistol-brace-equipped AR-15s in circulation. That’s despite the hundreds of thousands of mostly negative public comments on the proposals. The aggressive executive action hasn’t helped keep his approval on the gun issue up among Democrats, and it has likely driven some of the disapproval among Republicans and Independents.

But, unilateral action is the only viable approach left for him at this point. And, it’s not clear where else he’ll be able to find room to pull it off in a meaningful way. Though, it’s safe to expect him to try and do so.

Women Want One Thing…And It’s Not Going to Make Liberals Happy

Women want one thing— It’s guns. They want lots of guns. This isn’t anything new. For the Left, this might be a massive revelation, but the truth is this trend has been ongoing for years. Women lining up for concealed carry permits is booming. Women-only firearm courses are booming. Gun sales among women are booming. And if there’s one thing we should know about politics and elections, it’s that it’s probably not the best idea to be against something that a lot of women support, especially white middle-class women.

In Clark County, a lot of women have joined the Annie Oakley courses and the reasoning behind the surge is quite simple. It’s for their protection. It’s the great equalizer when confronted by a violent attacker. The summer of riots that occurred last year. The anxiety over the lockdowns during the COVID pandemic—it all played a part. A mother and daughter who were interviewed for Fox5 Las Vegas’ segment on the female participation in the shooting said they bought a handgun after a home invasion. Being smart, the mother wanted her daughter to know how to shoot and handle a handgun safely.

Women are reshaping the gun industry. It’s one of the underreported narratives over the past couple of years, partially because major outlets don’t want to acknowledge it. It shreds all the anti-gun talking points like shooting is a white male activity. That gun ownership, in general, has racist ties. It’s all historically illiterate garbage. Good on these ladies for exercising their constitutional rights.

New California Law Shows Why Gun Registration Must Be Opposed

The bad news about California’s AB 173 keeps coming. First the was the introduction of the bill itself, which allows for the release of all kinds of information about gun owners, including their personal identities, to academics investigating “gun violence.” Then the bill passed out of the legislature and landed on Gavin Newsom’s desk. Shortly thereafter, Newsom put pen to paper and signed the bill into law, and since it’s a budget bill, it takes effect immediately.

All that is bad enough, but as Armed American Radio host Mark Walters tells me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, it’s also going to be extremely difficult to challenge the new law in court. And compounding the danger to gun owners, it’s also quite likely that we’ll see Democrats in Congress attempt to pull a similar move now that the CDC director has decided to make “gun violence prevention” a top priority of the agency (I guess that COVID stuff is all under control).

Walters says that the challenge in bringing a lawsuit against the new law comes from the fact that a plaintiff is going to have to show that they’ve been harmed by the release of their identifying information. The reality is that most California gun owners won’t know if their information has been accessed by researchers or for what purpose. I suppose it might be possible to file a Freedom of Information Act request to determine what materials have been released to particular researchers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if California law gives more privacy rights to those accessing the personal information of gun owners than to gun owners themselves.

Of course, it’s also possible that an unscrupulous researcher with an axe to grind decides to do a mass doxxing of gun owners, or hackers gain access to the files of researchers and publicly post the details of California gun owners, but Walters says that short of something like that happening, the legal bar to show actual harm is going to be hard to meet.

The sad thing is that this bill could have easily been written in such a way to ensure that academics only had access to aggregate information, or even non-identifying details of specific transactions. Instead, California’s anti-gun lawmakers went out of their way to ensure that the personal info of legal gun owners would be available for academics to inspect.

Walters also wonders how useful this research could actually be, given that the vast majority of California’s gun owners will never be involved in an act of “gun violence,” be it a shooting, negligent discharge, or a suicide. After all, if the goal of this research is to prevent gun violence, shouldn’t these anti-gun academics actually be focusing on the individuals who broke all of California’s gun control laws and illegally obtained and used a gun to commit an act of violence?

This law would be bad enough if it were confined to California, but as gun owners know the gun control plans that come to fruition there tend to spread like weeds through the country. It’s not hard to imagine similar legislation being introduced in states like Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Connecticut; all of which have gun registration/licensing requirements just to keep a firearm in the home. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ll see bills introduced in several of these states in time for the next legislative session.

Then there’s the federal government. We’ve already seen how easy it is to tuck anti-gun provisions into massive budget bills, so what’s to stop anti-gun Democrats from providing a few million dollars in grants to states that share their licensing and registration information to the CDC in order to help the agency research “gun violence”? Heck, what’s to stop Democrats from simply demanding that states with gun registration and licensing share that data with the CDC?

This is a major problem, and Walters says the only real chance for relief before the midterms would be a sweeping decision by the Supreme Court in the New York carry case that will be heard in November. A decision broad enough to strike down all licensing and registration laws would make the California “Invasion of Gun Owners’ Privacy Act” a moot point, but honestly, I doubt that the ruling is going to be that broad, particularly given the fact that the Court has framed the question it’s going to answer fairly narrowly. However, there’s also the Young case out of Hawaii that’s currently under consideration by the Court, and if they eventually grant cert in that case I’d say gun owners have a much better chance of a more sweeping ruling.

Mark Walters believes that California’s new law should be a warning to gun owners in those states that don’t have registration or licensing regimes in place, as well as an alarm bell for those Californians who value both their Second Amendment rights and their own personal privacy. I can’t argue with his position, unfortunately.

‘FBI REPORT SAYS ARMED CITIZENS KILLED MORE CRIMINALS THAN POLICE’ 

BELLEVUE, WA – The FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2020 indicates that armed private citizens killed more criminals during the commission of a felony than were killed by police, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms says this data clearly underscores the continuing need for American gun ownership.

“We looked at Tables 14 and 15 in the FBI’s new report that apply to justifiable homicides by law enforcement and private citizens, respectively,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Last year, according to the data, armed citizens killed 343 criminals during the commission of a felony while police fatally shot 298 felons.

“If the FBI data published in their crime report for 2020 is accurate,” he continued, “it is ample evidence that the individual right to keep and bear arms for personal defense is as important today as it was when the Second Amendment was adopted as a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.

“The use of deadly force is not something anybody wants,” Gottlieb observed, “but neither is being injured or killed by some thug during a violent criminal attack. Self-defense may be the oldest natural right, and every time we hear some politician, public official or gun control extremist call for citizen disarmament, we have to wonder which side they’re on. It certainly can’t be on the side of public safety.

“Gun prohibitionists who enjoy their own private security while promoting restrictive laws that take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are world-class hypocrites,” he said. “The same people who want to disarm honest citizens are typically those who support policies that are soft on criminals. They haven’t simply lost perspective; they’ve abandoned common sense.”

CCRKBA has long defended the individual right to keep and bear arms, and encourages gun owners to seek competent instruction on firearms safety and the use of firearms in self-defense. Gottlieb noted how studies show that over 99 percent of cases when a gun is used in self-defense, no shots are fired. The burglar, robber or rapist flees or is held at gunpoint until police arrive, he said.

“This data should send a message to criminals that their chances of recidivism are gradually shrinking,” said Gottlieb, who co-authored America Fights Back – Armed Self-Defense in a Violent Age, and more recently, Good Guys with Guns. “The tide has clearly turned.”

Biden Approval on Guns Continues to Fall

Americans are more dissatisfied than ever with President Joe Biden’s handling of guns.

That’s according to a new poll from The Economist and YouGov published on Wednesday. A majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s performance on gun policy. A plurality strongly disapproves of it, while only 8 percent strongly approve. Only 24 percent approve of Biden’s performance.

That represents a drop of 10 percent in approval and an increase of 5 percent in disapproval from the same poll in June. The approval rating has dropped by half since an Associated Press poll taken in May.

The continued drop in approval could further erode Biden’s ability to institute the gun restrictions he campaigned on. He has advocated for Congress to pass a universal background check bill as well as a ban on the sale of “assault weapons,” including the popular AR-15, but has failed to gain any momentum in the evenly divided Senate. He was also forced to pull his ATF director nomination after failing to secure the 50 votes necessary to get him confirmed.

The numbers come after Biden’s failure to appoint his preferred director and legislative agenda on guns, but they also come as he has pushed forward with unilateral attempts to implement gun restrictions. His administration’s proposal to increase the ATF’s power by broadening the legal definition of a firearm, and a proposal to ban millions of AR-15s equipped with pistol braces, are continuing through the rulemaking process despite hundreds of thousands of negative comments from the public.

The disapproval is primarily driven by Republicans, 79 percent of whom are unhappy with the president’s performance on guns, and independents, 58 percent of whom feel the same. However, even 30 percent of Democrats disapprove of Biden’s gun decisions, and only 46 percent approve.

The poll reveals another significant hurdle for Biden in the form of apathy. While 81 percent of respondents say guns are an important issue, only 3 percent list it as their most important issue. That makes it the second-least important issue polled.

The poll of 1,500 American adults was conducted between September 26 and 28.

The Supreme Court dealt with this in Heller. That the gun grabbers still try to roll it out merely indicates they have nothing left but BS.

UNDOING THE MUSKET ARGUMENT

While Virginia gun owners are trying to take back their state this month from the radical far-left that pushed through most of Ralph Northam’s extremist gun control agenda in 2020, elsewhere around the country anti-gunners will once again fall back on their favorite boilerplate arguments to do the same in your state.

You can have some fun with these people, while teaching them a lesson and making the extremists look really foolish.
Good for the goose …

I’ve lost count of the occasions when someone has tossed up the argument that at the time the Second Amendment was written, there weren’t modern firearms. The Amendment, they argue, should only apply to muskets and flintlock rifles.

Here’s how I’ve responded to the premise: “Look, if you want to roll back the clock and calendar, I’m game. But remember, if that’s where you want to take this debate, there are a few things to consider.”

• When the Bill of Rights — for which the Second Amendment is the cornerstone — was adopted, we didn’t have television or radio, no cable channels, no web offset presses for mass-producing newspapers or the Internet and social media. So, under your suggestion, they wouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment, right?

• We didn’t have organized police departments, and if criminals came to your home, you were expected to deal with the problem, not call 9-1-1 for help because they didn’t have telephones, either.

• Nobody needed a license or permit to carry a firearm. There were no background checks. It was not unusual to encounter armed citizens doing business in towns and villages, and no one raised an eyebrow.

Naturally, they’ll try to ridicule these remarks but the Bill of Rights is an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not a legal buffet from which you can pick and choose those rights you like while discarding those you don’t. The Bill of Rights is a 10-course banquet and it’s still today’s menu, not yesterday’s blue plate special.

This would be a good time to remind your opponent the U.S. Supreme Court could be taking on more Second Amendment cases to further define the parameters of the right to keep and bear arms.

Joe Biden has made a habit of contending the Second Amendment is “not absolute.” Five months ago, when he announced his “Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety,” he told a gaggle of reporters, “The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.”

This is demonstrably false. Mississippi River keel boats were frequently armed with swivel guns; small cannons used to fend off river pirates or raiding war parties. Some on the frontier owned cannons to defend their stockades. Privateers sailed with cannons.
Last year, when quizzed about Biden’s campaign assertion regarding cannon ownership, a fact checker consulted David Kopel, research director and Second Amendment project director at the Colorado-based Independence Institute.

“I am not aware of a ban on any arm in colonial America,” Kopel said at the time. “There were controls on people or locations, but not bans on types of arms.”

In 2020, when the Biden campaign was questioned about his cannon allegation, a fact checker wrote in the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, “the campaign was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons, and historians of the period doubt that any existed.”

Where Humor Stops

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