Preventing teachers from carrying firearms is just one of Joe Biden’s gun control goals. See his other priorities for rolling back Second Amendment rights here.
The idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings burst into the national conversation after Parkland, when President Trump raised the possibility in listening sessions with grieving parents. Shortly after the 2018 shooting at the Florida high school, he told attendees at the 2018 CPAC that as many as one out of every five teachers should be carrying a gun.
It provoked an uproar. But often lost in the bluster of that moment was the reality that teachers had already been carrying guns in U.S. schools for over 10 years. Trump had just become the policy’s highest-profile advocate yet. The first serious proposals to arm teachers cropped up after the Columbine shooting in 1999, and the first school district to announce such a policy was in Harrod, Texas, in 2008, after Virginia Tech.
The decision to let schools arm teachers is left to state governments. Since the 1990s, 19 states have passed laws and created programs to arm some teachers and other school staff, like principals or superintendents. In 24 states, school boards have the discretion to authorize anyone of their choosing to carry a gun on campus. A 2019 investigation by VICE News found that in the year after Parkland, the number of school districts arming their teachers more than doubled, from around 215 school districts to nearly 500, encompassing hundreds of thousands of students.
President-elect Joe Biden has said he strongly opposes arming teachers, but because it’s up to state legislatures—which stayed resoundingly Republican this election, including in armed-teacher states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah—it’s a policy that may be here to stay.
Some call it firearm feminism. According to gun trade groups, more women are buying guns than ever before.
One recent survey indicates self-protection is the main reason, but first-time female gun buyers are also citing fear of civil unrest, election uncertainty and the coronavirus as influencing their decision to buy firearms.
Business owner Angela Geotz says she wants to be legally armed if trouble comes her way.
“I just want to be able to protect myself if I have to, my family,” Geotz said.
Geotz is not alone. Jessica Howard is a first-time gun owner.
“There is a lot of crazy stuff going on and I’m a single mother,” Howard said.
Firearm sales to women are up 40% from 2019, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The trade group surveyed gun retailers. The survey finds personal protection is the primary reason and semi-automatic pistols are the most popular.
First-time gun owner Vickie Hayes bought a semi-automatic pistol after someone broke into her home.
“It kind of scared me a little bit, so I thought a good way to protect myself would be to get a handgun license. So, I did and I purchased a gun,” Hayes said.
The firearms industry noticed the surge beginning in March with the coronavirus outbreak.
Since then, concern over civil unrest is the biggest reason for the surge, that’s according to a poll conducted by national firearms group A Girl & A Gun:
On a cold winter morning last February, a woman named Samantha assembled her AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in the parking area next to Timbrook Public Library in Campbell County, Virginia. Her husband, Chad, had his AR-15 in hand and commented, “I would trust going into a gun fight right next to my wife. I’ve seen her shoot.”
Samantha was one of a handful of women attending the call for volunteers to join a group calling itself the Campbell County Militia. Along with Chad and Samantha (who asked to have their last name withheld), over 200 people were at the event, most of them carrying arms.
Kurt Feigel, a gun rights activist and militia organizer, told the group, “We are here today to send a clear and collective message to any would-be-tyrants that would attempt to disarm us: We will not comply.”
The formation of the Campbell County Militia is part of a larger movement organized by gun rights activists pushing back against gun laws Virginia enacted in 2020. They claim the new regulations, which include a “red flag” law and universal background checks for gun purchases, infringe on their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Virginia lawmakers shelved more controversial proposals that would have banned semi-automatic guns and high capacity magazines. Still, gun rights activists are bracing for a possible future ban.
“We won’t comply. We won’t give up our guns,” said Feigel.
Gun policy has long been a divisive issue in the United States. Even as support grows for stricter gun laws, the country remains deeply divided along partisan lines. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found 60% of Americans think gun laws should be more strict, up from 52% two years earlier. But the same survey also found 80% of Republicans think it’s more important to protect gun rights than to control gun ownership, while just 21% of Democrats agree.
In Virginia, gun rights supporters pushed back against the Democratic legislative majority. Over 90 counties and municipalities in the state passed Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions opposing the enforcement of certain gun laws. And there were calls to form local militias to give their movement some “teeth.”
“If we have the numbers, we can back up the statement — we will not be disarmed,” said Feigel. “[The Second Amendment] is not about hunting. It’s not about self-defense. It’s about shooting tyrants in the face.” Continue reading “”
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has reportedly drafted “anti-mob” legislation that would expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow armed citizens defend themselves against violent rioters and looters.
Written after violent rioters caused billions of dollars of damage to America’s cities over the summer, the proposal would expand the list of under Florida’s self-defense law to justify the use of force against rioters who engage in looting or arson that “results in the interruption or impairment of a business operation.”
“The draft legislation put specifics behind DeSantis’ pledge in September to crack down on ‘violent and disorderly assemblies,’” the Tampa Bay Times reported. “Other key elements of DeSantis’ proposal would enhance criminal penalties for people involved in ‘violent or disorderly assemblies,’ make it a third-degree felony to block traffic during a protest, offer immunity to drivers who claim to have unintentionally killed or injured protesters who block traffic, and withhold state funds from local governments that cut law enforcement budgets.” Continue reading “”
As of late, I’ve noticed many left-leaning gun owners tend to engage in willful ignorance or blissful naivety when it comes to the rather blatant in-congruent relationship they have with democrat politicians and guns.
So when I came across an article titled, “Biden’s gun control plan is terrible for working class firearm owners”, I lazily assumed it was written by a right wing conservative who was making the point about Joe Biden’s gun control plan that I’ve been making about gun control in general for years.
I was wrong
Kim Kelly wrote the article. You don’t have to know who Kim Kelly is to conclude that she’s anything but a right-wing conservative; all you’d have to do is make it to the latter half of the article or read her short author bio underneath the article image.
All things considered, even she recognizes that Joe Biden’s gun plan negatively affects the people who likely voted for him the most.
A record number of Americans have exercised one of the most important rights affirmed by the founders of this great nation: the right to keep and bear arms.
The FBI NICS office conducted 3,305,465 background checks last month – breaking the record for the month of October by nearly a million checks. Each month in 2020 has broken the record for background checks in that month. October was the fifth busiest month ever for the NICS office, which has now run 32,131,914 NICS checks in 2020. We – the American people – broke the annual record last month; this year has now seen 13% more checks than the previous busiest year for the NICS office.
Thirty-two million background checks so far this year, and we haven’t seen Black Friday or holiday sales yet.
Not all of these checks are related to the sale of a firearm. Some may be related to the sale of multiple firearms and some are permit applications that result in the permit holder being able to lawfully acquire a firearm without a NICS check (as the permit itself involves a NICS check). Continue reading “”
According to the media, Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States. Who knows, maybe when all is said and done, he actually will be. Regardless, there are legal challenges to the election outcome in enough states that you just don’t know how things will shake out in the end.
Regardless, Biden is acting like the president-elect. It’s not like the media will call him on it, to be sure.
So what precisely does Biden have in mind for his first days in office? Oh, nothing much.
Joe Biden has a lot of plans for his first day as president, and some of it can actually happen in a single day — a fair amount of which he can set in motion right away even though Democrats have so far fallen short of capturing the Senate.
Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, reverse President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of public health and environmental rules and call allies worldwide to reassure them, all on his first day in the White House. Before that day is done, he says he will put in place a national strategy for containing the coronavirus pandemic, rejoin the World Health Organization, end the ban on immigration from several predominantly Muslim nations and expand rights for Latin American asylum seekers.
Biden has also promised swift action on housing, labor, gun control, LGBTQ rights and government reform.
Yep. Old Sleepy Joe has his sights set on our guns, the same as always. Continue reading “”
“There’s a direct correlation between gun control and black people control.” – Stacy Swimp, President of the Frederick Douglass Society
Every schoolchild knows that the Declaration of Independence declares that the basic equality of man is “self-evident.” The United States Constitution enumerates what the inalienable rights only alluded to by the Declaration. An inalienable right is one that exists regardless of whether or not it is recognized by the state. For example, you have a right to free speech regardless of whether or not the Constitution recognizes it. Thus any restrictions on free speech are curbs of this pre-existing right, not an actual elimination of that right. One of them is the right to keep and bear arms. Another is the right to a speedy and public trial.
However, particularly with the Second Amendment, there’s long been a struggle between the ideals of America and the reality on the ground with regard to race. What’s more, minorities in the United States are disproportionately the victims of violent crime. Both of these things together make it crucial to understand self defense and the Second Amendment from the perspective of race in America.
Part of the problem is that, unlike European nations which grew organically, America is an invention of a handful of Englishmen. They founded the nation on a set of ideas and there has always been a tension between those ideas and the reality. This is, in some sense, unavoidable: reality will always have trouble living up to an ideal. A failure to live up to that ideal in the past according to terms established today doesn’t make the entire project – or any specific part of it – worthless or suspect.
Before we get into the meat of the matter, we should note that the American ideal has expanded the Second Amendment (and the rest of the Constitution for that matter) to de jure include all Americans. One can be skeptical of the notion of “progress” while seeing the moves to repeal race-based restrictions on firearms ownership as big steps in the right direction.
Finally, it is worth noting – and we will do so at length later – that none of the racially-motivated laws on the books in America are uniquely American. Racism, in the sense employed by the average person not the expanded version used by left-wing ideologues, was not a uniquely American institution, but the norm throughout human history. Continue reading “”
Businesses in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. erected plywood barricades for fear of election day violence. To observers in other countries, the picture of boarded up businesses looked like they came from the third world. To historians, the pictures looked like they were taken from a country descending into tyranny.
We all know who these barriers were built to defend against. They weren’t built to defend against Tea Partiers. They weren’t built to defend against Proud Boys. They were built to defend against Antifa and Black Lives Matter, groups who Joe Biden has repeatedly refused to condemn despite their coordinated violence and property destruction.
Shortly before the election, Biden tweeted that he would ban “assault weapons,” implement “universal background checks,” and enact other allegedly “common sense” gun reform laws.
If he proves the victor, and the Democrats win one run-off race in Georgia, America will see an unprecedented assault on the Second Amendment. A Biden Department of Justice would try to bankrupt gun manufacturers in court. And gun confiscation would be on the table, given that Biden has promised to put Beto O’Rourke, who famously said “Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15s,” in charge of his administration’s gun policies.
Fortunately, over the last six months gun sales – especially to first-time gun-buyers – have shattered all historic records. This is because for hundreds of thousands of Americans, 2020 has settled the gun control arguments they hear so often in the media. The question “what could anyone need an AR-15 for?” has been answered by images of store owners standing guard against a mob with that gun as their neighbor’s businesses burned to the ground.
The argument that “people should rely on the police for protection,” has been countered by the reality that in major American cities our elected officials pro-actively refuse to allow the police the enforce the law. This wasn’t a matter of the police getting there moments too late. What we saw was elected officials refusing to allow the police to enforce the law because they agreed with the political aims of the violent mob. Continue reading “”
The Montana Code Annotated (MCA) Section 7-1-111 provides that local governments have the power to regulate the carrying of permitted concealed weapons. LR-130 would remove local governments’ power to regulate the carrying of permitted concealed weapons. The ballot measure would continue to allow local governments to regulate unpermitted concealed weapons and unconcealed weapons in public occupied buildings
Today, November 5th, LR-130 passed to ensure that your free exercise of the right to self-defense is protected equally across the whole state. For too long, local anti-gun bureaucrats have refused to recognize your freedom by instituting concealed carry restrictions beyond state law. Time and again, they usurp your rights in their quest to diminish your freedoms. LR-130 was put to the voters to end these constant obstructions.
The opposition, with backing from out-of-state interests, launched a campaign of misinformation. Montanans saw through their rhetoric and rightfully sided in favor of the Second Amendment when they went to the polls.
Congratulations to all the Montanan voters who want consistency in their gun laws whether they are in Billings, Kalispell, Missoula, or anywhere else.
The owner of Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colorado, is set to become U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, in the new class of Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill in 2021.
Boebert, a mother of four who snagged her first job when she was 15, was initially in the spotlight in 2014 for the open carry policy at her restaurant, which covered the armed wait staff, and took point on coordinating local concealed carry courses— to include a free meal.
She then shot to national prominence last September by attending a rally for then-Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke and telling him, “Hell, no, you won’t take our guns,” while running the mic on the former Congressman for two solid minutes at his own event. Continue reading “”
Alabama voters have approved a constitutional amendment that provides specific protection to anyone who kills someone in self-defense in a church in Franklin County. The attorney general’s office has said Alabama’s “stand your ground” law already applies inside churches. But backers supported Amendment 5, saying more specific provisions for churches in the northwest part of the state.
Charlotte Heller, a 71-year-old grandmother from Lower Macungie Township, was never a fan of guns.
Then came 2020.
This September, Heller and her 73-year-old husband Ira joined scores of other Pennsylvanians in becoming first-time gun owners during a year expected to break gun purchase records across the country.
“Let me tell you, I’ve never liked guns. I was always kind of afraid of guns,” Charlotte Heller said. “I felt like we didn’t need them.”
But 2020, of course, is a year like no other ― fueling gun sales with a combination of factors, experts say. Start with the coronavirus pandemic and shortage of basic supplies, then add a wave of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota and the resulting property damage and violence, and cap it with one of most divisive presidential elections in modern history, and you’ve got a perfect storm for one of the most basic human emotions. Continue reading “”
That’s the very optimistic take from Stanford Ph.D. candidate Scott Borgeson, who writes in a new column at the Stanford Review that the millions of new gun owners across the country this year heralds the impending demise of the gun control movement.
Borgeson believes that the influx of new gun owners, most of whom have purchased a firearm for self-defense because of concerns over riots and unrest in recent months, has the potential to upend support for gun control laws at both the state and federal level.
Only a victory large enough to preclude the theft of the presidency by the Democrats and their minions in the media can forestall their plans for America’s future.
The rioting, physical violence, and destruction of property estimated in the billions of dollars experienced by Americans since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day was merely practice for the left’s coming exercise of power whether Biden wins or loses.
“It cannot happen here” has been the mantra of those blessed by God with the grace of living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet, aphoristically, “past is prologue” and history is replete with the ruins of civilizations whose citizens believed the same.
Democrats thought their long march through the institutions had succeeded in giving them permanent power. They were convinced when Barack Obama pulled off the unique trick of descending from the heavens to ascend to the presidency.
Academia had long become a social justice warrior training ground with the supremacy of critical theory, implicit bias training, and a cadre of professors better than 90% steeped in leftist dogma having provided an army of reliable Democrats.
During the Obama Presidency, media, always biased and comprised of reporters and editorialists politically mirroring that of academia dispensed with even the pretense of “objectivity” to become nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Truth had become a matter of opinion with talking heads providing the opinions.
Intelligence bureaus, the administrative state, top military leadership, and every regulatory agency was purged of anyone not steadfastly liberal.
The left deluded themselves into believing that cradle-to-career indoctrination, deliberate media misinformation, and politically forced demographic change had finally created a permanent Democratic majority. They were “bigly” surprised when they lost more than 1.000 federal, state, and local elections. Donald Trump was the straw that broke the spavined camel’s back.
They refused to accept the condign defeat of all they worked so hard to trick or treat Americans into believing. What followed was four years of one confected attempt after another to execute a slow-motion, multipronged coup concluding with a failed impeachment on grounds so slim, had it been tried on a President Biden, it would have elicited a collective “C’mon man” from the variegated components of not only the leftist machine but the American population as well.
Fair-minded Americans are not only cognizant of the rules, but willing to obey them. Not so afflicted, the left follow rules only when winning — when they lose, the rules must change.
We saw this with redistricting, a tactic Democrats used for decades to maintain control of the House of Representatives, as well as state and local governments. When the Republicans started beating them at their own game, the process became “unfair,” “unconscionable” even.
A constitutional republic with an Electoral College system and equal representation of each state in the Senate worked fine until they decided it prevented them from ruling all 50 states from the left coast and the Acela corridor. Then, the notion of strict majority rule in all things became popular.
The courts for years were stacked by Democrats with judges willing to bypass the legislative process and enact laws from the bench. They used the filibuster prodigiously to prevent conservative judges from being seated but were outraged when it was used against Obama’s nominees. So, Harry Reid waved “Bye-Bye” to the judicial filibuster.
The seating of Amy Coney Barrett as an Associate Supreme Court Justice, done strictly in adherence to the constitution, Democrats have threatened “consequences and repercussions” including eliminating the filibuster in all things, admitting new states to guarantee more Democrat Senators and Representatives, and a new “balanced” Supreme Court — at whatever number of justices necessary to ensure a liberal majority.
The result is an election that only a Trump landslide can prevent the left from stealing using what Biden called in a Freudian slip, the “most extensive voter fraud organization” in history. Nothing short of overwhelming electoral triumph for Trump will stymie their machinations.
The Democrats already have a plan in place to flood the streets with “mostly peaceful” riots before, during, and after November 3. A Trump landslide will open Americans’ eyes to the left’s usurpation of the nation and perhaps provoke action.
To expedite post-election thievery, riots will again become endemic. Every judge that might rule against the Democrats’ lawfare efforts to steal the presidency will be doxed and confronted. Their families will be terrorized in their homes. Special care will be taken to threaten members of the Supreme Court.
Leftist agents will confront congressmen and senators at their homes, offices, and out in public with their families. If need be, they will block them from returning to Washington D.C. and resuming the functions of government. The same will be done to governors and mayors, lest they try to use the National Guard to regain control.
Cabinet members, military leaders, and their families will also be doxed and intimidated.
All these tools will continue to be used by a Biden Administration to implement their Green New Deal agenda, killing the oil industry, gun confiscation, raising taxes, open borders, and citizenship and Medicare for all.
To have a chance of preventing this, Trump must win reelection by a margin so huge it will be impossible to steal in the courts or on the streets.
A landslide will prompt outraged citizens to fight back and confront the left’s revolution in the cities and towns during the days, weeks, and months after the election. To paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, in the course of these events, good people of our free and independent states have the full power and the right to rise up and prevent the left’s attempt to steal our country.
Trump must win by epic proportions so that this rebellion may be defeated.
The heroes of two Texas church shootings who used their own legal arms to take out the gunmen are warning that Democrat Joe Biden’s “insane” gun control plans will hurt public safety, raise billions in taxes, and force millions to give up their weapons.
“If it was Hunter Biden and your wife and family sitting in those pews at that church, would you still not want me to have this gun to protect them with?” asked Stephen Willeford, who on Nov. 5, 2017, used his AR-15 to stop a shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that killed two dozen.
“The fact is, the only thing that will keep us safe in times of evil are our guns. Evil will always exist,” added Jack Wilson, who, with his pistol, stopped the fatal shooting Dec. 29, 2019, at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas.
They are featured in a new National Rifle Association video that decries the Biden gun proposals that include taxes on gun parts, rifles, and a potential ban of some weapons. Both are NRA members, and the group has endorsed President Trump.
“Biden’s dream is to leave us all defenseless against criminals,” said Wilson. “I put a terrorist down in a matter of seconds with this gun, and it’s not even a weapon of war or whatever that means. You know what Joe told me? That I shouldn’t have been armed in that church,” he added in the video that shows Biden criticizing the use of the weapon.
The duo also raises two key issues worrisome to gun owners — taxes on guns and a ban of online purchases. And they note that Biden has promised to put anti-gun advocate Beto O’Rourke in charge of gun policy and let gun control advocate Sen. Kamala Harris lead the charge.
“All of this is nuts,” said Willeford.
BLUF: “Our final analysis finds that race, gender, political ideas, ideology does not matter” in determining gun ownership, Khubchandani said. “What matters is, have you been threatened? Have you been exposed to violence? Do you know someone who was threatened, and therefore, by default, does that make you a little more protective about your own self and your family?”
When the coronavirus hit American shores, nurses and doctors stocked up on guns, a new study reports.
Researchers at New Mexico State University and the University of Toledo found that being a health care provider was one of the strongest predictors of buying a firearm during the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Sixty-seven percent of people who reported buying a gun during the pandemic also reported being health care professionals.
“One of the things we should see, in my limited view, is these are people who are civilians who are not criminals and they have seen a lot of unrest in the past six months,” New Mexico State University professor Jagdish Khubchandani told the Washington Free Beacon. “And they want to be on the front foot with their own safety.”
Khubchandani said this surprising finding becomes more understandable when considered alongside the study’s other main finding: Gun-ownership demographics as a whole have shifted during the pandemic.
Gun buyers were more likely to be younger, more urban, more female, and less white. As the gun-owning demographic diversifies, then, it starts to look more like the demographics of health care, one of the country’s largest industries.
“America now has more job opportunities in health care,” Khubchandani said. “Almost 15 percent of Americans today have a job in health care. And as that demographic has changed, so has the gun-owning demographic, and they’ve intersected.”
Khubchandani pointed to two recent surveys finding that between a quarter and half of physicians own guns. He also noted recent real-world examples of health care professionals lining up at gun shops to purchase guns. Continue reading “”
CHANTILLY, Va. — Like many Americans, two women a thousand miles apart are each anxious about the uncertain state of the nation. Their reasons are altogether different. But they have found common ground, and a sense of certainty, in a recent purchase: a gun.
Ann-Marie Saccurato traced her purchase to the night she was eating dinner at a sidewalk restaurant not long ago in Delray Beach, Florida, when a Black Lives Matter march passed, and her mind began to wander
It takes only one person to incite a riot when emotions are high, she remembers thinking. What if police are overpowered and can’t control the crowd?
Ashley Johnson, in Austin, Texas, worries about the images she’s seen in past weeks of armed militias showing up to rallies and making plans to kidnap governors. The outcome of the election, she thinks, will be devastating for some people regardless of the winner.
“Maybe I’m just looking at the news too much, but there are hints of civil war depending on who wins,” Johnson said. “It’s a lot to process.”
In the U.S., spikes in gun purchases are often driven by fear. But in past years that anxiety has centered on concerns that politicians will pass stricter gun controls. Mass shootings often prompt more gun sales for that reason, as do elections of liberal Democrats. Continue reading “”
