Category: Mendacity O’ The Day

Second Amendment Myths and Misinformation

False Claim #1: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Has Always Been Heavily Regulated.

FACT: Restrictive gun control laws are a distinctly modern phenomenon in the United States. For the first century of American history, serious state-level regulation of individual gun ownership or usage was almost non-existent for law-abiding citizens. For example, despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary, nothing prohibited private citizens from owning cannons. In fact, private cannon ownership was apparently so common that one of the first types of arms restrictions imposed by some towns were ordinances restricting the times and locations where people could fire off those cannons inside town limits.30

Similarly, because gunpowder at the time was very unstable and prone to easy ignition, a number of states and cities limited the amount of gunpowder that could be stored in private residences, hoping to reduce the risk of accidental explosions or fires in urban areas.31 But beyond these sorts of “time, place, and manner” regulations, the right to keep and bear arms was virtually unrestricted in most states until the end of the 19th century.

Restrictive gun control measures are an even more recent phenomenon at the federal level. The first major federal law regulating firearms was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which was relatively tame by today’s standards.32 It merely required that machine guns and certain types of “short-barreled” long guns be subjected to a special tax and be registered with the Secretary of the Treasury. The federal government did not even prohibit certain categories of individuals (such as felons) from possessing firearms until the Gun Control Act of 1968, and did not require licensed gun sellers to conduct background checks until the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.33

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False Claim #2: Armed Civilians Stand No Chance Against Modern Militaries Equipped With Fighter Jets and Tanks, so the Second Amendment No Longer Serves a Purpose.

FACT: This claim misunderstands the importance of the protective role of federalism, in which each state already has well-trained and well-equipped organized militias of their own that can be mobilized and used in tandem with armed civilians. These National and State Guards are better equipped than the entire national militaries of many countries, with their own fighter jets, tanks, heavy artillery batteries, and special forces units. A handful of states even have their own naval militias. It is highly likely that, should a tyrannical federal government attempt to impose its will with the might of the American military, these state-level military entities—acting under the direction of liberty-loving state governments—could be deployed as a meaningful countermeasure, just like the colonial governments mobilized existing militias against the British army during the American Revolution.

Likewise, in the case of sudden foreign invasion, armed civilians would not be expected to act on their own in some ad hoc or unorganized fashion. Just like the colonial militias worked together with the professional soldiers of the Continental Army, armed civilians and their private weapons would, during any modern invasion, be integrated into the nation’s existing military structure and mobilized according to a coherent national or state defense strategy.

Beyond this, the right to keep and bear arms continues, of course, to protect countless Americans in their everyday lives against far more common threats to life and liberty.

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False Claim #3: The Founders Had Little Understanding of How Firearm Technology Would Develop and Would Be Horrified to See Modern “Assault Weapons” in Civilian Hands.

FACT: This common assertion assumes that modern guns have a fundamentally different nature than weapons that were available in 1791 when the Second Amendment was ratified and 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. In reality, small arms have changed very little, especially when compared to other advances in technology. The Founders would likely be far more dumbfounded by the internet or smart phones—and their implications for the First and Fourth Amendments—than they would by guns that merely fire projectiles at a faster rate without having to reload them as often. Indeed, by 1791, the idea of rapidly firing dozens of bullets in quick succession or even at the same time was already well developed. By the time the Second Amendment was ratified, repeating rifles capable of firing more than 10 rounds in rapid succession had been around for centuries. By the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, their possession and use by ordinary Americans was very common.34 If anything, modern firearms are much “safer” than 18th and 19th century firearms because they are far less prone to accidental discharges or misfires that injure the shooter.

But, most importantly, this is simply not how we understand constitutional rights. Just like the Constitution protects the broad concept of “speech” instead of particular modes of speech, it protects “arms” as a general concept of weaponry. The idea was not to protect a specific type of weapon, like a musket, any more than the idea of the First Amendment was to protect a specific mode of speech, like a quill pen or printing press. That is in large part because the Framers of our Constitution and the people who ratified it knew that while technology and circumstances would undoubtedly change in unanticipated ways, these broader concepts of self-defense and free speech would remain vital to a free society.

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We only saw “fact checkers” appear when the truth started getting out.

The Crusade Against ‘Malinformation’ Explicitly Targets Inconvenient Truths.

The legal challenge to censorship by proxy highlights covert government manipulation of online speech.

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According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the “censorship-industrial complex,” I had committed the offense of “malinformation.” Unlike “disinformation,” which is intentionally misleading, or “misinformation,” which is erroneous, “malinformation” is true but inconvenient.

As illustrated by internal Twitter communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation can include emails from government officials that undermine their credibility and “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” The latter category encompasses accurate reports of “breakthrough infections” among people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of “true vaccine side effects,” objections to vaccine mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity.

Disinformation and misinformation have always been contested categories, defined by the fallible and frequently subjective judgments of public officials and other government-endorsed experts. But malinformation is even more clearly in the eye of the beholder, since it is defined not by its alleged inaccuracy but by its perceived threat to public health, democracy, or national security, which often amounts to nothing more than questioning the wisdom, honesty, or authority of those experts.

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So when an LEO has one it’s called a “patrol rifle”.
But when a citizen has one it’s a called an “assault rifle”. Got it.

Observation O’ The Day
This is a perfect example to show how media purposely directs the narrative instead of simply reporting facts. They would have called the exact same rifle an “assault rifle” if had been stolen from a non-cop, and there would have been discussion about how unsecured firearms in people’s possession are how criminals obtain guns and that private ownership of these “weapons of war” makes us all less safe as a result.

Patrol rifle stolen from trooper’s cruiser overnight in Malden, Massachusetts State Police say

MALDEN, Mass. — A department-issued rifle was stolen from a Massachusetts State Police cruiser overnight in Malden, according to the State Police.

The burglary happened with the Ford Explorer cruiser was parked in a garage of a residential complex in Malden, state police said.

“A Department-issued patrol rifle was stolen from the cruiser,” State Police spokesman David Procopio said in a statement, adding, “the cruiser was locked and the rifle secured in a mount.”

Forced entry was made into the cruiser, Procopio said. Sources tell WCVB the incident was not a smash-and-grab, but a professional break-in.

“At this time, we have no indication of the rifle being used subsequent to its theft,” Procopio said.

The incident is under investigation. Police are focusing on security cameras in the garage — but they’re not sure they were working overnight — and Malden city cameras outside the garage.

The cruiser was towed from the scene on a flatbed.

BLUF
It was a cover-up from the beginning, and the media colluded in it every step of the way. The only question now is what kind of accountability can be applied, and whether we have stopped playing with GOF entirely at this point.

Former CDC director: Gain-of-function research “probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen”

No kidding. However, don’t consider Robert Redfield a johnny-come-lately to the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19’s origin. Almost exactly two years ago, just after the former CDC director took his leave of the Biden administration, Redfield stunned CNN host Sanjay Gupta by declaring his conclusion that the pandemic started as a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and resulted from gain-of-function (GOF) research funded in part by the US despite warnings against it.

Two years later, Redfield declared himself even more convinced today of his conclusions. Redfield testified today at a hearing of the House select subcommittee on the pandemic, and he didn’t hold back:

Redfield also argues that GOF created the virus, and the global pandemic, just as scientists warned would happen in 2014:

This brings us back to the reasons why the lab-leak theory got so enthusiastically suppressed by both the government and the media. In 2014, a group of scientists formed the Cambridge Working Group to urge governments to stop funding GOF, as both too dangerous and not valuable enough to pursue. When Francis Collins lifted a moratorium on GOF in December 2017, CWG founder Marc Lipitsch offered a prescient warning about what would happen, as I wrote earlier:

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TUCKER CARLSON’S EXPOSE BLEW A RATHER LARGE HOLE IN DEMS ‘DEADLY INSURRECTION’ STORY

Carlson has promised to reveal additional footage on Tuesday night.

For over two years, Democrats have portrayed the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a deadly insurrection staged by supporters of then-President Donald Trump and elevated the threat it posed to our “democracy” to the level of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

They did so by cherry-picking the surveillance footage the public was allowed to see and keeping the rest under wraps for “security reasons.”

On his Monday night show, Tucker Carlson shared some of the previously unseen footage and it told a remarkably different story than the one that has been force-fed to the American people by the highly partisan and duplicitous House Jan. 6 Committee.

Before airing the clips, Carlson told viewers:

It doesn’t answer every question from Jan. 6. Far from it. But it does prove, beyond doubt, that Democrats in Congress, assisted by [then-Reps] Adam Kinzinger [R-IL] and Liz Cheney [R-WY], lied about what happened that day. They are liars. That is conclusive.

The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress. Instead, it shows police officers escorting protestors through the building.

Carlson acknowledges that while a small minority of the protestors turned violent, breaking windows and injuring Capitol police officers, the vast majority of them were peacefully protesting what they believed had been a fraudulent election. Numerous irregularities had been identified and detailed in sworn affidavits from approximately 1,000 poll workers at battleground state vote-counting centers. Additionally, Big Tech and the legacy media had conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

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Whistleblower: FBI’s D.C. Office Tried To Sic Local Agents On Innocents After Bank Of America Volunteered Gun Records

An FBI whistleblower told congressional investigators that the D.C. field office pushed local offices to open criminal investigations into Americans based solely on financial transactions Bank of America tracked and voluntarily provided to the bureau, according to testimony reviewed by The Federalist.

“Bank of America, with no directive from the FBI, datamined its customer base,” whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Hill’s testimony.

Hill had identified himself last month as one of the whistleblowers cooperating with congressional investigators when speaking with Just the News’ John Solomon about the disclosures he made to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition. A review of Hill’s testimony confirms the details the military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst told Solomon. It also reveals more troubling details.

According to the material reviewed, Hill testified that on either Jan. 7 or 8, 2021, Bank of America provided the FBI’s D.C. field office a “huge list” of individuals who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then elevated to the top of the list anyone who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm.

There was no geographic or date-range limit to the search for firearm purchases, Hill stressed, meaning the individual would be flagged at the top of the list had he “purchased a shotgun in 1999” in Iowa, and used a Bank of America credit card to check out of a hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, in the Northern Virginia area, following a trip that could be completely unrelated to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The D.C. field office, which oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation, distributed the Bank of America list internally to field offices throughout the country, Hill testified in his deposition. Hill further explained that his supervisor at the Boston field office refused to open an investigation on the individuals flagged on the list because there was “no predication.” “There’s no crime that was committed by using a [Bank of America] product in the District or around the District,” Hill testified, explaining his supervisor’s reasoning for why no “further action” was required.

But the D.C. field office pushed back, according to Hill. The D.C. field office told Boston’s supervisory special agent, or SSA, he needed to open up the cases. When the local office’s SSA refused, the D.C. field office threatened to call the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the local office, Hill told the congressional committee. The SSA stood firm in his refusal, as did the local ASAC, Hill said, even though the D.C. field office then threatened the ASAC that it would escalate the matter to the office’s special agent in charge, or SAC.

The D.C. field office then pushed the office’s SAC to open investigations into the targeted Americans. But to the SAC’s credit, he refused, Hill noted, saying the Boston SAC countered, “No, we’re not going to open up cases based on credit card or debit card activity that took place.”

While Boston’s FBI office refused to open the requested cases, Hill stressed that “what I don’t know and could not give accurate testimony to,” was whether the D.C. field office “took it upon themselves to open cases.”

Hill’s deposition testimony raises another troubling possibility: that one or more of the other 54 local FBI field offices either complied with the D.C. field office’s initial request to open investigations into innocent Americans, or later capitulated when the D.C. office escalated the request up the chain of command to the ASAC and then the SAC.

The only reason the Boston FBI office did not launch investigations into the Bank of America customers flagged by the D.C. field office is that the Boston office’s leadership stood firm against the pressure. And the only reason we know about the D.C. field office’s attempt to target innocent Americans based on Bank of America’s data mining gun owners who happened to be in the greater D.C. area on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021, is that a whistleblower came forward.

What the FBI’s other 54 field offices did in response to the D.C. field office’s pressure is unknown. According to a person familiar with Hill’s testimony, Hill had no information on that question either. Also unknown is whether any other private businesses mined the financial information of their customers, as Bank of America had, and then handed that private information over to the feds.

Congressional investigations and more whistleblowers will be needed to uncover the extent of the FBI’s political targeting of innocent Americans.

Bank of America did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

The most ridiculous “I’m a gun owner, but” ever?

The gun prohibition lobby loves to claim that the vast majority of gun owners support their “reasonable” infringements on an inherent individual right, to the point that they even create their own astroturf groups like “Gun Owners for Safety” and the now-defunct American Hunters and Shooters Association.

The whole point of these outfits is to advance that narrative, and one of the most common tactics is the “I’m a gun owner, but” argument. You’ve seen it countless times. “I’m a gun owner, but I support ‘commonsense measures’ like”:

  • making it a criminal offense to possess commonly-owned firearms and magazines
  • prohibiting lawful concealed carry almost everywhere in public
  • making it more expensive to purchase, possess, and even train with a firearm
  • holding firearms manufacturers liable for the actions of violent criminals

I’m reasonably sure that attorney and columnist Mario Nicolais would be in favor of each and every one of those things, because his own “I’m a gun owner, but” narrative goes much further. Writing at the Colorado Sun, Nicolais says he’s a gun owner, but he wants the state to tell him to turn ’em in.

As I have written, the Colorado Republican Party is dead. While I am sure the ghosts of 2013 recall elections still haunt some Democrats, the fear of the next child dead from a gunshot wound should scare them more. They are not going to lose their majorities in the next decade, if ever. They may even solidify them if they take even more direct action.

That means getting assault-style guns off the streets. It means cracking down hard on handguns. It means going after ghost guns and criminals who resort to violence.

I happen to be a gun owner. But I have also run through a Las Vegas casino afraid of an active shooter, texted with my wife as she hid huddled inside a classroom as a gunman walked outside, and paid attention as an officer married to a high school friend has recovered after being shot in the neck by an assailant.

I would hand over my gun if the legislature took action.

Why wait for the legislature to do something? If Mario Nicolais doesn’t want to own a gun, no one is stopping him from selling it or even melting it down to turn into a garden trowel or something like that.

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The Hard “Nope”

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”

It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint.

Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

I’ve got another couple of hard “nopes” – but anthropogenic climate change is just the main one at present. What are some other personal hard “nopes” among you all? Discuss as you wish.

New York’s Message to Gun Owners: You Can Have a Carry Permit. Good Luck Using It.

“New York’s Gun Laws Sow Confusion As Nation Rethinks Regulation,” says the headline over this morning’s lead story in The New York Times. But after implicitly (and correctly) blaming state legislators for the “confusion,” the Times identifies a different culprit in the subhead: the Supreme Court’s June 23 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which “overturn[ed] century-old New York gun regulations” and “produced scores of new lawsuits,” leaving “jurists and citizens” to “sort out what’s legal.”

In Bruen, the Court held that the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment precludes states from requiring that residents “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community” before they are allowed to carry handguns outside their homes. The New York State Legislature responded with a law that eliminated the state’s “proper cause” requirement for carry permits but simultaneously imposed new restrictions on public possession of firearms.

“Anticipating more gun-toting,” Times reporter Jonah E. Bromwich says, the legislature “made certain areas off-limits to firearms.” That gloss makes the new restrictions sound prudent and modest. In reality, they are so sweeping that they create a risk of felony charges for anyone who tries to exercise the right recognized in Bruen while engaging in quotidian activities. The Times barely hints at the breadth of New York’s location-specific gun bans, which is crucial in understanding why federal judges have deemed many of them unconstitutional.

Next month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit will hear several of those cases. The plaintiffs argue that New York has defied Bruen by making it very difficult for permit holders to legally carry guns for self-protection. It is impossible to assess that claim without recognizing the vast territory covered by what the Times describes as “certain areas” that are “off-limits to firearms.”

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Debunking the gun-banners’ false constitutional-carry claims
Gov. DeSantis will likely sign the bill long before its July 1 effective date.

Nearly every anti-gun group in the country has descended upon Tallahassee to try to stop Florida from becoming the 26th state to allow residents and visitors to carry concealed firearms without a permission slip from the government.

It’s an important mission for the gun-ban industry, because once Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the bill — and he will — a majority of states will allow unlicensed or permitless carry. For pro-gun advocates, this would be a significant victory in the war to restore our Second Amendment rights, and the other team will do anything they can to prevent that from happening.

It’s important to point out that neither Florida’s HB 543 nor its companion bill, SB 150, are traditional constitutional-carry bills, since neither bill legalizes the open carry of arms. True constitutional carry allows gun owners to decide for themselves whether to carry arms openly or concealed. Despite Republican super-majorities in both the House and the Senate, and a governor who’s promised to sign “constitutional carry” legislation, open carry was not included in either bill. We still have not been told why, at least not officially.

In what has been called “smart bundling,” SB 150 also includes numerous school-safety provisions, such as expanding Florida’s School Guardian program, adding funds for hardening schools, providing additional money for gun-sniffing dogs, clarifying zero-tolerance policies and ensuring every law enforcement agency has an active-shooter policy. So, a vote against the bill can be seen as a vote against school safety.

Regardless of what the bill is called or its other offerings, the very thought of restoring more gun rights — especially in Florida — has brought the gun-banners out in droves. We’ve seen members of Everytown, Demanding Moms, Demanding Students, Giffords, Brady and Florida’s extremely anti-gun League of Women Voters all shuffle to the mic. Their testimony before House and Senate committees has been interesting, desperate and at times, comical. If the gun banners sent their A-team to Tallahassee and this is the best they can do, freedom will most certainly prevail.

It’s clear the gun-banners’ moves are well organized and orchestrated. Too many of their objections seemingly come from the same playbook. Keep in mind anti-gunners have phones, Skype and Zoom, too. They’re sharing information and ideas. Florida has become their latest battle template. They are throwing a lot of crap against the wall. That which sticks likely will be used in the next state they attempt to victimize.

Here are some of the lowlights of their testimony.

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NPR talks about “major takeaways” from ATF report

The ATF has always at least felt politicized to gun owners. After all, it’s a federal agency that perpetually seems dedicated to restricting our rights. At no point is there any illustration that the agency actually wants to help gun owners or benefit them in any way.

Lately, though, things were turned up to 11.

But data is, at least in theory, just data. While it can be manipulated in various ways, there’s often some degree of usefulness to it.

Leave it to NPR to not just look at it, but try to present it in the most heavily biased way possible.

Stolen guns, untraceable weapons and other deadly devices are becoming more prevalent in U.S. gun crimes, new federal data shows.

Last week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released an expansive federal report on guns used in crimes in two decades, providing the public with more detail about stolen firearms and gun trafficking.

The data stretches from 2017 and 2021. During that period, local police reported a shrinking turnaround time for a legally purchased gun to be used in a crime. It also provides insight into the spike in ghost guns and conversion devices.

ATF Director Steven M. Dettelbach wrote that the findings offer “strategic intelligence” for policy makers, law enforcement and researchers to reduce gun violence.

Gun policy experts have said that the release of this data is a big step in better understanding gun crime in the U.S., and can better educate policymakers on the need to regulate several areas of the gun industry.

Because it’s always about regulation, isn’t it.

It should be noted that while this is posted on NPR’s website there’s no actual link to the ATF’s report. Nor does there appear to be a press release on the ATF’s website.

Interesting.

So what about these takeaways in question? Well, it’s interesting in how little framing we’ve got.

Legally purchased firearms are being used in crimes sooner than ever

The ATF found that 54% of traced crime guns were recovered by law enforcement more than three years after their purchase. Those guns were legally purchased, but were later used in crimes, the report indicated.

“Crime guns may change hands a number of times after that first retail sale, and some of those transactions may be a theft or violate one or more regulations on firearm commerce,” the ATF’s report reflected.

“We’ve had record gun sales in the United States, particularly in and around the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021. And the vast majority of those guns are, of course, purchased by law abiding citizens and with no intent to commit crime,” James Densley, a sociologist with the Violence Project, said. In addition to tracking mass shootings with the Violence Project, Densley also studies everyday gun violence and homicide.

“But what we know is from the large numbers of gun sales, there are lots of ways that legal guns end up in the hands of prohibited persons.”

OK, but what’s not mentioned is how much the time has reduced. Are we talking years earlier or mere days? That’s some important information. After all, if the time dropped from 20 years to three, then something sure does seem wonky. If it goes from 3.2 years to 3.1 years, not so much.

That’s far from the only takeaway, though. For example, they note more than a million guns are stolen, which is unfortunate to say the least. Stolen guns are a huge problem and something lawful gun owners want to help mitigate as best they can.

After all, if my guns get stolen, not only am I deprived of my property but someone else might be hurt with one.

NPR also brings up the ATF’s great boogieman, “ghost guns.”

Privately made firearms, also called “ghost guns,” and their involvement in crime “is an emerging issue,” the ATF said in its analysis. Still, law enforcement agencies are just beginning to establish uniform training on how to recognize, identify, and report ghost guns.

The number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement agencies and sent to the ATF for tracing and tracking “increased by 1,083% from 2017 (1,629) to 2021 (19,273).” This indicates, for one thing, that these ghost guns are increasingly being used to commit crimes, the ATF concludes.

Now, let’s be clear, that is a significant increase over such a short stretch of time.

However, the better question is what percentage of total guns sent for tracing did unserialized firearms account for from year to year.

Let’s remember that 2020 and 2021 were particularly violent years. It’s entirely likely that at least some of that increase was really just because of the increase in violent crime as a whole.

I suspect that if we looked at those numbers, the difference wouldn’t seem so stark.

Yet despite that, it does look like a lot more so-called ghost guns are being sent to the ATF for tracing. I can’t help but note, however, that until the media started freaking out over homemade firearms, remarkably few people were using them for criminal activity.

That didn’t make it in this report, I’m sure.

Look, I could go through the whole thing, but all we have is biased reporting of what the ATF’s report said and we know how that goes. Absolutely none of it changes the fact that our rights are what they are and that gun control laws uniformly fail to prevent criminals from arming themselves.

As such, the report was mostly a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In that way, it’s much like the ATF itself.

Fauci: now he tells us.

What if I told you that Anthony Fauci knew all along that the COVID vaccine could not possibly prevent either infection with or transmission of COVID?

Not surprised? Neither am I.

Now that is a bit of a surprise and exactly the opposite of what he told everybody during the push to get everybody vaccinated.

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Here’s the abstract of the piece published in Cell, a highly prestigious journal.

Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns.

Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.

In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines, emphasizing that all of these viruses replicate extremely rapidly in the surface epithelium and are quickly transmitted to other hosts, within a narrow window of time before adaptive immune responses are fully marshaled.

We discuss possible approaches to developing next-generation vaccines against these viruses, in consideration of several variables such as vaccine antigen configuration, dose and adjuventation, route and timing of vaccination, vaccine boosting, adjunctive therapies, and options for public health vaccination polices.

We haven’t gotten to the (not so) good part yet, but the bolded sentences tell you why these vaccines don’t work as advertised: the vaccines are delivered intramuscularly (you get a shot), which is intended to stimulate a systemic immunological response. You develop antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream.

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Horrified That the Bruen Decision Protects Gun Rights, Academics Try Throwing Research Data and Statistics At It

A judge in Texas is using a recent Supreme Court ruling to allow domestic abusers to keep their guns

April M. Zeoli, University of Michigan and Shannon Frattaroli, Johns Hopkins University

For a large part of the history of the United States, domestic abuse was tolerated under the nation’s legal system. There were few laws criminalizing domestic violence, and enforcement of the existing laws was rare.

It was only in the past few decades that laws criminalizing domestic violence came to be widespread and enforced. But now, the U.S. is in danger of backtracking on that legal framework precisely because of the nation’s historical legacy of turning a blind eye to domestic violence.

On Nov. 10, 2022, a judge in the Western District of Texas struck down the federal law that prohibits access to guns for people subject to domestic violence protection orders. He did this based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, NYSRPA v. Bruen, which held that, to be constitutional, a firearm restriction must be analogous to laws that were in existence when the country was founded. In other words, disarming domestic abusers violates the Second Amendment because those types of laws didn’t exist at the founding of the country.

In a separate, but related, case, the 5th U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals on Feb 1. sided with the Texas judge, ruling that the federal ban was unconstitutional. The Justice Department has indicated that it will appeal.

We study the link between gun laws and domestic violence in the U.S. and know that backtracking on laws that prevent the perpetrators of domestic violence from getting their hands on guns will put lives at risk – the research has proved this time and time again.

Putting lives in danger

At present, federal law prohibits persons subject to final – rather than temporary – domestic violence protection orders from purchasing or possessing firearms. In addition, 39 states and the District of Columbia have similar prohibitions on their statutes, with many expanding the restrictions to include individuals under temporary, or ex parte, orders prior to a full hearing.

Ruling that these laws are unconstitutional will put mainly women and children in danger. More than 50% of women who are murdered are killed by intimate partners, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. A 2003 study found that when an abusive man has access to a gun, it increases the risk of intimate partner homicide by 400%.

Women constitute the majority of victims of intimate partner homicide, and almost one-third of children under the age of 13 who are murdered with a gun are killed in the context of domestic violence.

Moreover, 68% of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence or killed an intimate partner in the mass shooting.

Enforcement of gun restrictions is spotty, with further research needed as to how systematically they are ordered and whether restricted individuals relinquish firearms they already possess. Nonetheless, research shows that firearm restrictions on domestic violence protection orders save lives. Multiple studies conclude that these laws are associated with an 8%-10% reduction in intimate partner homicide.

Specifically, there are statistically significant reductions in intimate partner homicide when the firearm restriction covers both dating partners and those subjected to temporary orders. This decrease is seen in total intimate partner homicide, not just intimate partner homicide committed with guns, nullifying the argument that abusers will use other weapons to kill.

Moreover, these laws have broad support across the country – more than 80% of respondents to two national polls in 2017 and 2019 said they favor them.

Americans – whether male or female, gun owner or non-gun owner – tend to agree that domestic abusers should not be able to purchase or possess firearms while they are subject to a domestic violence protection order. Most seem to realize that such reasonable restrictions serve the greater good of keeping families and communities safe.

A disregard for data

The ruling in Texas was based on an originalist legal argument rather than the data. Under the judge’s interpretation of the Bruen decision, because colonial law – written before a time when women could vote, let alone be protected in law from violent spouses – didn’t restrict domestic abusers’ gun rights, then it simply isn’t constitutional to do so now. In effect, the ruling, should it stand, would mean the U.S. is unable to escape the nation’s historic legal disregard for domestic violence.

It also disregards the harm that allowing domestic abusers to keep hold of guns does. Multiple studies demonstrate that domestic violence firearm restriction laws are effective and save lives.

That research shows that, should the Texas ruling stand, people who suffer abuse at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk of that abuse being deadly.

Lisa Geller, director of state affairs at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, contributed to this article.The Conversation

April M. Zeoli, Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Michigan and Shannon Frattaroli, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

FACT CHECK: Biden Claims Mass Shootings Tripled After ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Ended

CLAIM: During the State of the Union Address President Joe Biden claimed mass shootings tripled after the “assault weapons” ban expired.

VERDICT: Misleading/Mostly False.

Biden said, “In the ten years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire, in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”

It should be noted that Biden has made this claim before, in one form or another, following a high-profile shooting.

He did so on May 24, 2022, following the Uvalde elementary school attack. The Washington Post quoted him saying, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

Ironically, the Post also called Biden’s claim into question:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

…The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.

Breitbart News reported that the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a report in 2004, as the “assault weapons” ban was coming to an end. The information in that study dovetails perfectly with the Post’s observation, inasmuch as the NIJ researchers could not credit the “assault weapons” ban with any of the reductions in crime or shootings which were sporadically reported elsewhere.

The Washington Times quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, author of the NIJ report, saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

The NIJ report continued, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

The NIJ report put matters into perspective by pointing out that “assault weapons” were “rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”

Biden’s claim about mass shootings tripling and the sunset of the ban being causal is misleading, because no reliable connection between the end of the ban and an increase in shootings has been made.

Biden’s claim is also mostly false because the information from sources like the NIJ explicitly indicates the “assault weapons” ban cannot be credited with a drop in gun violence to begin with.

Like how that State’s Attorney (More commonly called a Prosecutor for the rest of us) slyly moves the goalpost of self defense so he can slide in ‘hurt feelings’? I’ve found very few prosecutors that like the idea that they can have their hands tied, legally speaking, from exercising every bit of power they have just exactly how they want?

Shooting at Roanoke supermarket reveals “substantial evidence” showing self-defense

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) – WDBJ7 has learned new details about a shooting over the weekend at a Food Lion in Northwest Roanoke. Roanoke City’s commonwealth’s attorney told WDBJ7 the suspect was released because there is a substantial argument for self defense.

Saturday night, there was a disagreement at the store on Peters Creek Road. Investigators say one man threw a punch at another man, who then took out his gun and shot several times.

He hit the person who initiated the fight and a woman who was caught in the middle. The woman’s injuries were not life-threatening, but Roanoke Police said the man’s injuries were serious.

The commonwealth’s attorney explained the store’s surveillance video will help investigators determine if this was self defense.

”That’s where it becomes a fine line; does a person have to stand there and take a beating or get beat up, or if they are armed, can they use deadly force to repel the attack?” Donald Caldwell said. “That will be a decision that we’ll have to get the actual video from the Food Lion and watch and make those determinations.”

The man who fired the gun stayed on scene and cooperated with police. Caldwell explained cooperation is rare in situations like this.

“The predicate act for using a gun has just become so low is there’s almost no bar,” Caldwell said. “Hurt feelings now, among some members of our society, justify using a gun. It is just a sad state of affairs.”

The commonwealth’s attorney also stated the man who started the fight could face charges for assault and battery.

So, those who want to ban guns from the citizenry are liars.
Yes, we know that.

Fact-Check: Mass Shootings Actually Increased During Federal ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

A widely cited study used to push for more state ‘assault weapons’ bans is flawed and does not show that the 1994 federal ban saved lives.

“Assault weapons” ban proponents say that such bans will save lives. A recent opinion column published in the Chicago Sun-Times claims that the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower during the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban. The column was published while the Illinois state legislature was debating a state-wide assault weapons ban, which passed a few weeks ago.

The study on which that claim was based is flawed and its conclusions unreliable. Yet gun-control advocates such as the Giffords Law Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Sandy Hook Promise continue to use the study as they push for more assault weapons bans like the one in Illinois. Legislators, media reports, and opinion writers have cited the study, and the column published in the Chicago Sun-Times has appeared in several media outlets.

The study was produced by Charles DiMaggio, lead author; Michael Klein, the opinion column’s author; and seven other medical professionals. It examined data from three open-source mass shooting databases. The study identified 44 mass shootings from 1981 through 2017 in which four or more fatalities were reported (not including the shooter), resulting in 501 fatalities. It determined that 34 of these shootings were committed with so-called assault weapons, which accounted for 430 (86 percent) of the fatalities.

The study found that mass shooting deaths decreased during the years the federal ban was in effect. It claimed that had the federal ban been in effect for the entire period from 1981 through 2017, it might have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the non-ban years.

Defining ‘Assault Weapons’

Measuring the effect of the federal assault weapons ban requires distinguishing mass shootings with assault weapons from mass shootings with non-banned weapons, such as handguns. After all, the point of an assault weapons ban is to reduce mass shootings with the banned firearms.

There is no consistent legal definition of “assault weapon,” so one must look to how each law banning such firearms defines them. An “assault weapon” under the 1994 federal ban included both specific firearms by name and any semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting a detachable magazine and having two or more features such as a folding or telescoping stock, pistol grip, barrel shroud, flash hider, or threaded barrel. Subsequently enacted state and local bans typically require only one such additional feature.

To identify whether a mass shooting occurred with an assault weapon, the DiMaggio study’s authors made no attempt to determine whether the weapons used actually met the 1994 ban’s definition of “assault weapon.” Instead, they simply searched the databases’ text for “AK,” “AR,” “MCX,” “assault,” and “semiautomatic.” (Klein claimed in his column that the authors “chose to use the strict federal definition of an assault weapon,” but this methodology belies that statement.)

Although all assault weapons are semiautomatic, not all semiautomatics are assault weapons. A semiautomatic firearm fires only one round with each pull of the trigger and automatically loads the next round after firing. The federal ban did not apply to all semiautomatic firearms, as the study’s authors assumed, but only to those with detachable magazines and two or more of the specified features. The vast majority of semiautomatic handguns do not have the additional features required by the federal ban.

Study Includes Non-Banned, Common Handguns in Statistics

Using “semiautomatic” as a search identifier vastly overstated the number of mass shootings committed with so-called assault weapons. The study’s weapon data set for the 34 incidents shows that in at least 20 (almost 60 percent) of the shootings, non-banned semiautomatic handguns — in 9mm, .45, and other popular calibers — were wrongly identified as assault weapons. This obviously skewed the study’s results.

Common semiautomatic handguns should never be confused with “assault weapons.” No federal or state assault weapons ban has ever included such handguns.

Perhaps the study’s authors were confused about what constituted an “assault weapon.” This is unsurprising. The term “assault weapon” was popularized in the late 1980s not to address a particular problem, but to enliven a waning gun-control movement by confusing and scaring the public about firearms. A report from gun-control advocacy group The Violence Policy Center explains:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

The study’s misidentification error was pointed out in a public letter to column writer Klein and his study co-authors by University of Massachusetts Professor Louis Klarevas, a well-known academic expert on mass shootings and author of “Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings.” After reviewing the study’s data set, Klarevas challenged the study’s conclusions based on this “large number of misclassifications.”

The authors responded: “We make no claim to have retroactively determined whether these guns would have been illegal under the original statutory language.” But both their study and Klein’s column are about the effectiveness of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban.

Ignoring the need for fidelity to what the statute actually banned in determining whether that statute was effective, they claimed that assault weapon definitions don’t really matter, but only the “main message” of the study, which is that “fewer people died in mass shooting incidents during the ban period.”

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