Category: RKBA

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.

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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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.”

 

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.

‘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.”

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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While the ‘rifle behind every blade of grass‘ quote has little to no confirmation, what Yamamoto is noted for saying is that it would be necessary to “...march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.” and that would be after conquering everything beforehand. He knew that anything less would not be sufficient, and also that it was an impossible task.
The Chinese commie goobermint should take his words to heart.

China’s Ominous Focus On Second Amendment

The nation of China is a fascinating place. The history and culture are among the most interesting in the world to me.

The government? Not so much.

Luckily, I don’t have to interact with what the Chinese government says or does very much. More correctly, I didn’t. However, lately, Chinese state-run media outlets have opted to pontificate about the Second Amendment and gun control.

Now, to be clear, a lot of countries voice opinions on what other nations do and permit. I actually take issue with China about their human rights record, specifically the whole “herding people into camps, taking their organs, and sterilizing them” thing.

You know, small stuff.

But China is talking about the Second Amendment, a core part of who we are as a nation, and it’s troubling. In particular, why are they so interested in American gun laws? It’s not like they’re that interested in American lives. If they were, they might have taken more care in trying to contain COVID-19. They might even be more open with the rest of the world in trying to find the origins of the pandemic.

They’re not.

So instead, China is doing this for reasons that will benefit them. We, as a nation, would do well to question why.

The most obvious answer, of course, is that they benefit from a divided United States. If we’re arguing and debating domestic matters with such vehemence, we can’t examine what they’ve done and continue to do within their own borders.

Further, by claiming our refusal to adopt gun control is a human rights issue, they’re trying to gaslight the international community to ignore the concentration camps and eugenics taking place within their own borders.

That’s the easy answer, and Occam’s Razor tells us that’s probably the right one. Yet Occam’s Razor also assumes you have all the facts. We may not in this case.

See, China and the US aren’t exactly best pals. China is an aggressive military power that is trying desperately to become a superpower. Arguably, they’re close. Plus, no one is expecting them to be a peaceful superpower.

That means the odds are that sooner or later, the United States and China will clash. If that clash becomes a war, we can’t rule out the possibility of invasion. It’s better to fight in someone else’s yard than your own. That means we must at least consider that any contingency plans include the possibility of invading the US.

After World War II, a story popped up that Japanese General Yamamoto warned his people that if they invaded the US, there would be “a rifle behind every blade of grass.” The story appears to be apocryphal, unfortunately, but the sentiment expressed is certainly valid. As an armed society, we have the means to assist our military in repelling invaders. Plus, since the popular AR-15 uses the same ammunition and magazines as the M-4/M-16, we can easily be resupplied from military stores if need be.

In light of this, China’s opposition to gun ownership in the United States takes on a frightening tone.

It’s not about discord among the American citizenry, but about hopefully pushing the United States to weaken itself so that if an invasion were to take place we would be less able to repel it.

While American gun control activists may actually agree with the sentiment expressed via China’s state-run media, even they should at least question why China is so concerned about a domestic issue. They should be concerned that Chinese interest has less to do with concerns about American lives and more with destabilizing our nation or worse.

Unfortunately, too few are interested in doing anything but echoing Chinese media whenever convenient and never questioning why they care about this at all.

FBI: Over 3.5x More Killed with Knives than Rifles of Any Kind

FBI data released Monday in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) show over three and a half times as many people were stabbed to death in 2020 than were killed with all kinds of rifles combined.

The UCR shows that 454 people were shot and killed with rifles in 2020 while 1,732 were stabbed or hacked to death with “knives or cutting instruments.”

Breitbart News reported that the previous UCR release showed over four times as many people were stabbed to death in 2019 than were killed with rifles of all kinds.

The exact figures for 2019 were 375 killed with rifles while 1,525 were stabbed to death with “knives or cutting instruments.”

On September 30, 2019, Breitbart News reported that the FBI’s UCR for 2018 showed a similar finding, with over five times as many people stabbed to death with “knives or cutting instruments” as were killed with rifles of any kind.

The broad categorization of “rifles” includes a broad swath of firearms, from bolt action rifles to lever action, pump action, breech action, and beyond. It also includes semiautomatic rifles that take a detachable magazine, which the left often classifies as “assault weapons.” Yet three and a half times more people were stabbed to death in 2020 than were killed with all of these various rifle types combined.

Yes, while ‘getting out of Dodge’ is a pretty good idea, personally, I also think shooting the ‘active shooter’ stands a good chance of solving the problem too. To do that, you need a gun.

FBI agent: How to survive an active shooter situation

The fatal shooting at a Kroger in Memphis, Tennessee on Thursday left at least a dozen people injured, one dead and a nation worried as the threat of active shootings in America lingers.

Former FBI deputy assistant director Daniel Coulson joined “Your World” following the tragedy to share advice on how best to protect oneself if found in an active shooter situation. Step one: recognize when you’re in danger.

“The police are minutes away when seconds matter,” he said. “It’s up to you and your family and your friends to take action, to protect yourself in a situation like this. If you’re in the grocery store and you hear firecrackers going off, that’s not firecrackers. That’s somebody killing people.”

Coulson suggested for shoppers to prepare themselves for a shooting incident without being paranoid by locating the exits and planning to take all belongings and run.

“Do I put my child in a basket and run out the door? Yeah, you do,” he said. “And get space between you and whatever’s going on.”

While customers should identify their exits in all departments of the store, Coulson explained that employees should already be aware of an active shooter plan and have designated areas to lock down and buy time. The former FBI official stressed that shooters who are normally in a hurry will not spend time fiddling with a locked door.

“They want to get this thing over with as quickly as possible,” he said. “If they get delayed by a locked door, they move on… Time is on your side here. Buy time, get yourself out of there but more importantly, try to get out the door. Just leave.”

“It’s up to us to protect ourselves,” he repeated. “Get out. Find a place to defend yourself. If you happen to be armed with a pistol, like I am, then maybe you can do some good there. But your best bet is to leave. Get the heck out.”

Coulson said the investigation into the Memphis shooting will attempt to dig up the now-deceased shooter’s motive and run an analysis on Kroger’s response in adherence to the shooter policy.

New Work on Who the Second Amendment Protects

Abstract:

Once mentally ill does not mean always mentally ill. This underlying premise is not only scientifically accepted, but has been long recognized in the history and tradition of our common law. However, rather enigmatically, two circuit courts have deviated from this long understanding to find that once an individual has been classified as mentally ill, that classification is permanent. This flawed understanding has not only created a rupture in our Second Amendment jurisprudence, but it has also produced a significant circuit split between three circuits, in which neither the conclusions nor analyses are uniform. Notwithstanding the judicial disarray, federal law historically—and currently— poorly addresses this issue as well.

Federal law categorically prohibits the possession of a firearm from an individual who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution.” The United States deems this class of individuals worthy of a lifetime Second Amendment ban with only two avenues for relief: one that is nullified; and the other that is non-uniform and arbitrary. While this statute is imposing, it certainly does not lack justification. There is without a question a governmental interest and objective in protecting the citizens through crime reduction and suicide prevention. This objective, however, cannot be reached by categorically denying a constitutional right to a classification of individuals without due process.

This article uses an originalist approach to demonstrate that the classification of “mentally ill” is not a permanent and static one; rather that it is fluid and subject to transformation and development. With this main premise in mind, this article critiques the insufficient statutory response to this issue and offers an originalist judicial approach to resolving the circuit split. In the end, this article analyzes recent circuit court decisions on this issue from the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits and offers a solution that safeguards the constitutional rights of an individual, ensures that due process rights are feasible, and preserves the governmental interest of reducing crime and preventing suicides.

Abstract:

To say that the moral stain of racism pervades American history would be an understatement. One does not have to look hard to find examples where people of color were treated disparagingly or disparately. Thus, it should come as no surprise that throughout much of American history there are examples where race played a role in lawmakers deciding who may and may not acquire, own, and use firearms for lawful purposes, or where race was the principal factor in orchestrating state and non-state sponsored armed violence against people of color. The painful and often tragic historical intersection between race and firearms is indeed a complex and multi-faceted narrative worthy of examination and reflection, including in the area of history-in-law —that is the study of how the law has evolved in a particular area, what events and factors caused the law to evolve, and how, if at all, this history is important when adjudicating legal questions.

Yet in the ongoing discourse over the purpose, meaning, and protective scope of the Second Amendment, the historical narrative of race and firearms is becoming increasingly misappropriated and hyperbolized. There are indeed numerous examples, but two are particularly concerning and exist at the extreme opposites of the Second Amendment political spectrum. The first—often stated by gun rights proponents—is history shows that gun control is inherently racist. The second—sometimes stated by gun control proponents—is that the Second Amendment itself is inherently racist, with some going so far to claim the right to “keep and bear arms” is on historically on par with the Constitution’s morally “indefensible” three-fifths clause—the clause that provided slaves would account for three-fifths a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment.

This article seeks to examine and unpack these extreme historical opposites and explain why their ‘racist’ claims ultimately do more societal harm than good. This article is broken into three parts. Part I critically examines how and why the ‘gun control is racist’ narrative came to be. Part II then critically examines how (and the elusive why) the ‘Second Amendment is racist’ narrative came to be. Lastly, Part III outlines why accepting either of these ‘racist’ narratives do more harm than good, particularly in the confines of history-in-law.

Abstract:

Gun control in the United States has a racist history. Nevertheless, federal courts and academics have invoked Southern gun restrictions enacted after the Civil War to suggest that history supports stringent regulation of the right to bear arms. We argue that courts’ reliance on these restrictions is illegitimate. Drawing on original research, we reveal how the post-war South restricted gun-ownership for racist reasons, deployed its new laws to disarm free Blacks, yet allowed whites to bear arms with near impunity. We then show how modern reliance on these laws contravenes the Supreme Court’s decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, which deemed similarly tainted statutes unconstitutional. Since the Court will soon consider the validity of modern limits on concealed carry, placing Southern gun restrictions in their proper historical context matters today more than ever. While Southern gun control after the Civil War might tell us something about how the South sought to preserve white supremacy, it tells us almost nothing about the true scope of the Second Amendment.

BLUF:
The First and Second Amendments peacefully co-exist as equal rights in the vast majority of states, which is as it should be. The ACLU’s insistence that the Second Amendment take a back seat to our freedom of speech and our right to peaceably assemble flies in the face of the Constitution, and it’s truly shameful than an organization ostensibly created to protect our civil rights would argue for the demise of one of them, to the point of giving the thumbs up to mandatory prison sentences and felony convictions for those New Yorkers caught carrying a gun without a state-issued permission slip.

ACLU: Restrict The Second Amendment To Protect The First

The American Civil Liberties Union has always had a blind spot in defense of Americans’ individual rights; our right to keep and bear arms. The group has defended the First Amendment rights of even the most controversial of groups and individuals, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Kluk Klan, but they won’t support the right of the average citizen to bear arms in self-defense. The organization has long viewed the Second Amendment as a collective right instead of an individual right, and I don’t know why the ACLU website states that they are reviewing their position in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case, given the fact that they’ve had 13 years to change their mind and have yet to do so.

It would be one thing if the ACLU simply remained neutral and silent on the issue, but instead the groups is actively pushing to keep New York’s restrictive carry permitting laws in place. In a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the group argues that the laws preventing the average citizen from lawfully bearing arms in defense of themselves and others “reasonably furthers the peace and safety conducive to robust civic engagement, and therefore does not contravene the Second Amendment.” In other words, restricting the Second Amendment rights of New Yorkers somehow protects their First Amendment rights to speak their mind and to publicly assemble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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