Category: Mendacity O’ The Day

Another problem with Gun Violence Archive’s numbers

Supporters of gun control love to use Gun Violence Archive as an authoritative source on the number of shootings we have in this country. The number of mass shootings as compiled by the site–a number that doesn’t reflect what most people think of as a mass shooting, it should be remembered–is presented uncritically by the media.

It happens all the time, and in the wake of two shootings in California, it’s happening yet again. While we know plenty about those two shootings and will likely learn more as we go forward, proponents of gun control site Gun Violence Archive’s total number of mass shootings to show it’s more than those two incidents.

Take this editorial as just one example.

History is full of horrific events in which we shake our heads and ask, “How did that happen? What were they thinking?”

The Holocaust and slavery are two prime examples.

It begs the question of what is transpiring today that will be regarded by future generations as deplorable. That historians will record with the hope that they will never be repeated.

Climate change, yes. And then there is gun violence.

California has had three mass shootings in the last four days. Seven people were killed and one injured in Half Moon Bay on Monday. One person was killed and six injured at an East Oakland gas station later that evening. Eleven people were killed and nine injured in Monterey Park on Saturday.

We are not even at the end of the first month of 2023. Yet the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings bring the number of mass shootings (in which four or more people were killed or injured) to 39 this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That follows the 647 mass shootings recorded in 2022 and 690 mass shootings in 2021.

Of course, what follows is the true-to-form call for gun control we typically see from many editorial boards.

Now, in the wake of two deadly mass shootings, I sort of get it. However, they’re not just holding those two incidents up as why we somehow need gun control. They’re holding Gun Violence Archive’s numbers up as well.

And yet, what do we know about any of those shootings?

Well, we know three or more people were injured at those shootings–the low standard the site uses to categorize something as a mass shooting in the first place, which includes gang warfare, drivebys, and so on–but little else.

If we’re going to have a conversation about how we need gun control, about how certain guns shouldn’t be allowed in private hands, or how certain people should be legally barred from buying guns, shouldn’t we also need to know about any of those hundreds upon hundreds of so-called mass shootings?

I ask because I know statistically where most of those weapons came from, and it’s not from lawful gun sales.

How can you say that the gun laws are insufficient when so few of these hundreds of “mass shootings” were carried out with a lawfully-obtained firearm in the first place?

See, Gun Violence Archive is a favorite among the media and anti-gun set (but I repeat myself), yet it only shows part of the picture. To cite their numbers without important context on where those guns were obtained amounts to little more than trying to view a masterpiece by only looking at one single bit with a microscope.

It’s not a full picture by any stretch.

And it matters because while actual mass shootings make headlines, the real violence problem in our country happens in our inner cities. They get counted by Gun Violence Archive to try and push gun control when all the gun laws in the world aren’t going to help.

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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Ranking Redux

Everytown for Gun Safety is rank. And by that, we mean their state gun control law ranking system is rank(ed at the top of the silliness scale).

Takeaways

Everytown’s state law ranking system:

  • Is arbitrary, lacking any criminological basis.
  • Shows very little gun violence variability between states based on their gun laws.
  • Omits the most violent district, which has stringent gun laws.
  • Includes suicides, which are inappropriate in such an analysis.

Echoing the Brady Campaign

The moribund Brady Campaign (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) used to produce a state gun law scorecard every year. It was, in a word, a gun control wish list and nothing more. We keep their last scorecard criteria to reference their arbitrary scoring system for reference and a few laughs (whichever laws they were promoting that year tended get a higher score).

 

Brady Campaign State Scorecard vs Violent Crime Rates

click for larger, sharable version
 

Everytown Gun Law Ranking and Homicide Rates

click for larger, sharable version

We would dutifully produce a scatter diagram each year showing the utter lack of correlation between the Brady Campaign scorecard and any variety of crime.

The Brady Campaign quit producing their scorecard some time after we demonstrated that the states with “strongest” and most “lax” gun laws had identical rates of violent crime (in this last chart we made, blue California on the left and red Arizona on the right).

With the Brady Campaign largely forgotten, Everytown for Gun Safety picked up the slack and started producing their own “ranking” system

Same game, new player.

Blighted Everytown

The headline element of note is that Everytown’s ranking system doesn’t actually prove their point. Quite the opposite.

Here we took their ranking and graphed it against both gun homicides and all modes of homicides. Though the slope of the line does rise as Everytown’s arbitrary rankings drop (left-to-right, “strongest” to most “lax”) the rise is minuscule.

More importantly, the vertical scattering of points shows high volatility all the way from California to Mississippi. For the statistics junkies, that’s an R2 of 0.02 for gun homicides, which basically means no correlation between Everytown’s gun law rankings and actual gun violence.

Let’s list some of the “research” sins Everytown committed:

  • They omitted Washington, DC, which year in and year out is the murder capital as well as of the nation. The District also has stringent gun control laws, so this omission is blatant data rigging.
  • In their analysis, Everytown included suicides. We have shown, using a more appropriate international scale, that there is no correlation between gun availability and suicide rates. This is because the probability of someone wanting to commit suicide is based instead on external factors and cultural attitudes about suicide.

Let’s score their scorecard:

  • No criminology basis.
  • Excludes important datapoint.
  • Includes inappropriate data.
  • Composed via an arbitrary wish list.

In short, meaningless equine effluvium.

Everytown Dumbs Things Down

We expect advocacy groups (Everytown, NRA… doesn’t matter) to promote their causes. But to present the public with wantonly dubious and disastrously constructed “research” only helps to destroy their own brand and weaken their mission.

 

 

BLUF
So let’s be clear about what the Defensive Gun Use Database shows, and what Heritage’s position is: Civilians—just like the law enforcement officers who are exempt from these restrictions—sometimes need to defend themselves with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

And in those cases where more than 10 rounds are needed, the extra ammunition may mean the difference between life or death.

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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Biden’s Stolen Valor rant is no surprise to gun owners

Joe Biden walked onstage in front of a group of veterans Friday and then stole their valor.

Biden told the veterans his Uncle Frank was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, but somehow never received the Purple Heart. Biden claimed he first learned of the oversight when he was vice president, from his father.

“So, I got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house and I came out and my father said; ‘Present it to him, okay?’ We had the family there,” Biden said at the veterans’ townhall, according to media accounts.

Of course, there are massive factual errors in Biden’s latest tall tale. Biden’s uncle died in 1999. His father died in 2002, but Biden wasn’t elected vice president until 2008, so there is no way he could have presented his uncle the medal while serving as vice president. Also, there’s no documentation that Biden’s uncle ever received or was recommended for a Purple Heart — either before or after his nephew became vice president.

Biden’s latest lie comes as no surprise to gun owners. We’ve been hooting and hollering about his Second Amendment-related lies for years, but no one listened.

In August, during a rambling and often incoherent campaign speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Biden added yet another outlandish fib to his usual list of firearm falsehoods.

“Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun?” Biden asked the crowd.

To be clear, the AR round is quick, but it’s certainly not the fastest, and it’s definitely not five-times faster than all other calibers, which would be ballistically impossible.

In April, Biden created another fanciful tale, and like his Stolen Valor rant, he gave himself the starring role.

Biden was in southern Delaware, he claimed, trudging through the woods during hunting season, when he happened upon a hunter in a creek bed. The hunter asked him if he was going to confiscate his rifle, which Biden said he realized held 20 rounds. “You must be a terrible shot to need that many rounds,” Biden claimed he told the hunter in the creek bed. “Do you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?”

This tale was the latest version of one of Biden’s favorite quips, which states that anyone who uses a standard-capacity magazine must be a terrible shot, because deer don’t wear Kevlar vests.

Takeaways

Biden’s stolen valor claims are far worse than his previous false tall tales about Corn Pop, blonde leg hair or fictitious prohibitions regarding civilian cannon ownership.

He is the Commander-in-Chief, after all, the very top of the chain-of-command. By definition, every single member of the military is his subordinate. The CINC receives a lot of salutes, but the job also comes with tremendous responsibility, which Biden seems to ignore.

There’s no doubt that among Friday’s crowd were real Purple Heart recipients — men and women who sacrificed parts of their bodies for our freedom. They deserve an immediate apology, although they’ll likely never receive one.

Be it guns or stolen valor, Joe Biden will never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Remember This Whenever Moslems Demand More ‘Rights’ in the West.

Egypt’s Ministry of Endowments recently announced a new record: 1,200 new mosques were opened in the year 2022.

Moreover, in the two years between September 2020 and September 2022, a total of 3,116 mosques were opened (2,712 new; 404 renovated).

Since Abdel Fateh al-Sisi became president in 2014, the total number of mosques to be opened, repaired, or replaced — costing Egypt more than ten billion pounds [~$400 million]— is 9,600.

(One can almost hear the “Allahu akbars!”)

What about the religious places of worship that, for centuries before Egypt’s conquest by Muslim Arabs, dotted that nation’s landscape — namely, Christian churches? How fare they?

As is well known, when it comes to any question concerning the indigenous Christians of Egypt, the Copts, and their churches, accurate information — especially by way of numbers — is difficult to ascertain from the official channels.

As such, I contacted and spoke with one of the most astute analysts on the so-called Coptic question, the Egyptian-born Magdi Khalil, an author and public debater (appearing in approximately 1,500 televised debates, including on Al Jazeera) who specializes in citizenship rights, civil society, and the situation of minorities in the Middle East.

During our phone conversation, Khalil offered up the best-known figures he has been able to ascertain, after making clear that, “as you know, there are no absolutely accurate numbers from Egypt that aren’t politicized.”

He said there are a total of approximately 5,200 Christian institutions in Egypt, including all churches and monasteries from every denomination. As for Islamic institutions, there are 120,000 mosques and over one million prayer halls in the country.

This disparity alone underscores the extreme discrimination Christians face in Egypt. Considering that Copts of all denominations make up, at the very least, 10% of Egypt’s population of 104 million, there is one mosque or prayer hall for every 83 Muslims, but only one church for every 2,000 Christians.*

In 2016, a new Egyptian law was touted as “easing” restrictions on and helping many more churches to open.  Since its implementation, however, human rights groups have noted that it has only marginally helped. Khalil agreed, and said that at best, the 2016 law has made a “5-10 percent improvement.” But, by applying only to churches, as opposed to being a universal law for all religious places of worship, the new law has also formalized the Egyptian government’s divisive — or in Khalil’s words, “racist” — approach to its citizens. He is not alone in making this charge; even Human Rights Watch says that the new law ultimately “discriminates against the Christian minority in Egypt.”

Along with the ease Egypt grants to the building of mosques, often overlooked is the fact that the government also completely subsidizes a great many, if not most, of Egypt’s mosques. (Over 4 billion Egyptian pounds are paid annually by the state to subsidize the Ministry of Islamic Endowments, which is charged with affairs related to mosques and Islamic da‘wa [propaganda]. Moreover, 22 billion Egyptian pounds are annually paid to Al Azhar, which has a parallel educational system, or madrasa, from KG to university, with 2.8 million pupils and students.)

Conversely, not only does Egypt make it immensely hard for Christians to open or maintain churches, but the government does not contribute a “single penny” to their survival, said Khalil. Churches are even required to pay their utility bills, which no mosque in Egypt does, as the government happily picks up their bill.

Aside from the obvious discrimination and legal obstacles the government of Egypt has set up against churches, Khalil and I also spoke a bit about the Muslim mob violence that sporadically rises up against Christian places of worship. According to Khalil, “close to one thousand churches have been attacked or torched by mobs in the last five decades [since the 1970s] in Egypt.” This is a much larger number than is commonly assumed.

Khalil closed by saying, “The persecution of Egypt’s Christian Copts is the longest ongoing persecution in the history of mankind, from 642, to today, 2022. Through all this time, maybe 70 years under British occupation were peaceful and good — the “golden era” for Copts in all this duration. Then [during the colonial era] there was much more diversity in the government, including some Coptic ministers, etc. But the overwhelming majority of the time witnessed the Copts’ persecution.”

“I know of no group,” concluded Khalil, “that has been persecuted for nearly 1400 years — with still no light at the end of the tunnel.”

Another disingenuous Federal judge.

Federal Judge Denies Injunction Request Against Rhode Island Magazine Confiscation Law

Banning and confiscating commonly-owned ammunition magazines does not run afoul of the Second Amendment.

At least according to U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s reading of the amendment.

On Wednesday, McConnell denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Rhode Island’s recently passed law banning the sale and possession of ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. He said that so-called Large-Capacity Magazines (LCMs) did not count as “arms” protected by the U.S. Constitution.

“The plaintiffs have failed in their burden to demonstrate that LCMs are ‘Arms’ within the meaning of the Second Amendment’s text,” Judge McConnell, an Obama appointee, wrote in his order. “Moreover, even were they ‘arms,’ the plaintiffs have failed to prove that LCMs are weapons relating to self-defense. There is no Second Amendment violation from the LCM Ban because of those two shortfalls of persuasion.”

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Makes sense when “democracy”  means demoncraps are in charge

The Twitter files: leftism requires censorship.

One of the funny (although not ‘funny ha-ha’) things about all of this is that these same people bleat on about ‘democracy’ and its great value and worth. And yet they think of the public as unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as children in need of control from – yes – Big Brother Twitter. And they’re not the least bit ashamed about it. They had to do it to save democracy.

America’s Ruling Regime Doesn’t Fear Disinformation. It Fears Truth.

In Joe Biden’s America, attempting to cancel Joe Rogan is just counter-terror policy.

This is because our ruling class—in the name of “defending democracy”—classifies those who question the regime on any matter of consequence as a threat to the homeland, and pledges to pursue them accordingly.

Our ruling elites have engaged in an overt war on wrongthink masquerading as a domestic counter-terror mission since at least January 6, 2021.

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NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence. …

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

— New York Times Editorial Board in America’s Toxic Gun Culture

 

original:

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Reworked to fit the narrative:

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New study by frustrated anti-gun researcher doesn’t tell the whole story

by Lee Williams

More than 1 million Americans were killed by firearms from 1990 to 2021, and firearm deaths increased markedly during the pandemic, according to a study published Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association network titled: “Trends and Disparities in Firearm Fatalities in the United States, 1990-2021.”

Firearm deaths reached their lowest point in 2004, and then increased more than 45% by 2021 — a 28-year high — the study claims. Black males were most at risk for homicide, and white males over 70 had the highest suicide rates.

The authors analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and used “key statistics” from the anti-gun group Brady United.

Despite its flaws, such as a reliance on biased statistics and a lack of causal factors, the report has been embraced by the legacy media and has proliferated across the internet.

The authors’ conclusion was rather simple: “This study found marked disparities in firearm fatality rates by demographic group, which increased over the past decade. These findings suggest that public health approaches to reduce firearm violence should consider underlying demographic and geographic trends and differences by intent.”

The study’s lead author, Dr. Eric W. Fleegler of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics, has written numerous anti-gun studies and editorials. Gun-rights experts were quick to point out there was a lot missing from his most recent work.

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No. Next question

Will the Left Ever Learn to Wait Before Blaming the Right for a Mass Shooting?

It’s our thirst to understand “why” someone would carry out such a horrific act that drives our curiosity and animates our search for a political villain in these mass shootings.

Answers are always few and very unsatisfying. Trying to ascribe rational, logical thought processes to someone who is mentally ill is an exercise in futility. It doesn’t matter if he leaves a right-wing manifesto railing against blacks and Jews or swears allegiance to Antifa and claims to want to stamp out “fascism.” “Politics” — a shooter’s limited understanding of it — isn’t a catalyst as much as it is a touchstone to a reality of which he or she is only vaguely aware.

The most recent incident led to a familiar pattern. A man walked into a gay club where a drag queen show was underway. Before he was stopped, five people were killed and 18 were wounded. Given the gunman’s “target,” it was “naturally” assumed that the perpetrator was a right-wing fanatic who was driven to this mass slaughter by conservative politicians and online hate sites (like PJ Media).

A National Review editorial sums up the arguments on the left.

According to the burgeoning conventional wisdom, therefore, the true culprits for the Club Q shooting include Libs of Tik Tok, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk’s Twitter content-moderation policies, the “right wing moral panic” about drag queen story hours, and — of course — the entire Republican Party.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributed the shooting to the Right’s “anti-LGBT+ campaign,” writing: “Connect the dots, @GOP.” Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf told MSNBC that “right wing grifters, including politicians like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, they’ve been spewing this vile, hateful rhetoric about LGBTQ people . . . and we warned them that inevitably this would result in violence.”

In the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that the shooting “seems hard to separate” from the Right’s “nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.” “Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame ‘mental illness,’” Brian Broome wrote in the Washington Post. But “it’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center — always looking to fundraise off of a tragedy — weighed in.

The mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, which saw a 22-year-old man charged with hate crimes and murder on Monday, came after years of intensifying anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, acts of violence and intimidation, and discriminatory legislation from far-right individuals and groups, including powerful Republican politicians.

Anderson Lee Aldrich was not influenced by right-wing “hate speech.” He was not “anti-LGBTQ” because he was, in fact, a “non-binary” person who preferred being addressed with the pronouns “they/them.” He had been hospitalized several times for mental disorders. But, apparently, Aldrich was influenced and motivated to kill fellow LGBTQ people by right-wing loudmouths?

“Words matter,” Whoopi Goldberg said on The View. “Words matter and people like Lauren Boebert who, you know, has been in the forefront of dissing LGBTQ+ people, is now saying her prayers and thoughts go with the families. Well, they don’t really need your prayers and thoughts. They needed your votes. That’s what they needed.”

What did people need when a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer opened fire on a number of House Republicans at a practice for the Congressional baseball game, putting House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in the hospital for six weeks? This came just days after Sanders warned on the Senate floor that if the GOP’s healthcare bill passed, “thousands of Americans would die” — a phrase echoed by most of the Democratic congressional leadership.

In 2017, a Tennessee woman attempted to run a Republican congressman off the road for his support for the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill. Does violent rhetoric from the left ever matter? Or is it only violent rhetoric from the right?

There have been more than 100 pro-life churches attacked since the Dobbs decision last summer. A man was arrested outside of the private home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitting he was planning to kill him. Using the left’s rationale to explain the attacks, we have to assume that left-wing rhetoric is to blame.

But that will never happen. And what’s really, truly frightening is that the left pretends not to see the hypocrisy of its position.

Anti-gunner gets remarkably basic fact wrong

Op-ed writers aren’t usually experts in all the topics they write about. They’re people who are tapped to write about what they think, but they’re usually not experts in all the many topics. They tend to filter an issue through prior understanding to reach new opinions on new issues.

With guns, remarkably few who write op-eds are experts on firearms, gun politics, the Second Amendment, or much else relating to it. That’s fine, in and of itself, but such writers need to at least make sure they get the basics right.

This one makes a bizarre assertion that really has to raise an eyebrow or two.

In other developed countries, gun ownership is considered a privilege and not a right enshrined in their founding documents. Would that it were that way here! But we’re in thrall to those who revere and even fetishize guns. Hence their litany: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people! The only defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun! It’s a mental health problem, not a gun problem.”

Those are all half-truths. The fact remains that people kill people with guns because that’s the easiest and cheapest way for ordinary people to do it. And contrary to what some choose to believe, enacting tighter gun-control measures would not be a slippery slope. There is no conspiracy afoot to disarm law-abiding Americans. But far be it from those beholden to and/or afraid of the NRA to counter such paranoia, much less to advocate for the reasonable gun-control measures most Americans support.

Now, if he’d just said the easiest, I’d probably have let it go. I’d have instead focused on his claim that gun control isn’t really a slippery slope toward more regulation, despite the fact that I have never seen an anti-gunner stop being anti-gun because “we’ve done enough.”

But he didn’t.

He made an assertion that guns aren’t just the easiest way but the cheapest way to kill someone, and it betrays a fundamentally bad understanding of the issue of homicides in this country.

Yes, guns are used to kill more people than any other weapon. However, they’re far from the only weapon and they’re most definitely not the cheapest.

An inexpensive handgun is going to cost you, at a minimum, a little over $170 the last time I checked. That’s for a Hi-Point, which is one of the cheaper brands out there. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot, and for a gun, it’s not.

But I can buy a knife at Amazon for less than $20. Much less, if I’m not picky about it.

I can buy knives in the grocery store, for crying out loud. These are much, much cheaper and are used in more than enough homicides each and every year that they should be taken seriously. Especially since we know our knife murder rate is higher than Europe’s, even with guns supposedly so easily available.

If the author can’t manage to get such a simple, basic fact correct, why should we listen to literally anything else he has to say?

Especially since, in that same paragraph, he manages to pretend that a legitimate and documented issue–the slippery slope–isn’t happening.

Both of these illustrate just how little the author knows about the issue, and it’s less than most anti-Second Amendment types.

Observation O’ The Day

Hi 97 Percent Team,

Thank you for putting on yesterday’s conference. I am a gun owner and member of the firearm community based in Chicago. I share your desire to decrease gun deaths and find common ground. As a sign of my good faith intentions, I recently put on a Safe Storage presentation with a Moms Demand Action representative for our school community despite vehemently disagreeing with their public policy platform.

I feel that the strongest part of yesterday’s presentation was the Hot Button Topics discussion between Amy Swearer and Fred Guttenberg. I am still shocked that Fred wold be willing to sit down with Amy. More conversations like that need to happen where each side sits down with one another to try and have good faith conversations.

I am writing after watching the entirety of yesterday’s presentation. I watched because I was interested in what the panel, which included elected officials and other policy makers, would put forward as give and take compromises to get the gun community onboard. Unfortunately I feel as if it was a hugely blown opportunity on the whole as zero policy compromises were put forward by any of the speakers except Dr. Seigel.

Many members of the gun community showed up to watch in the hopes that we may have found a partner where we could work together. Instead we were shown a parade of speakers who have all publically asked for or voted recently for assault weapons bans. Governor Roy Cooper, Rep Moulton, Rep Dean, are all elected officials who have publicly pushed for bans and made clear yesterday that not only are they unwilling to remove these bans (despite the organization’s stated policy as presented by Michael Seigel) but rather they said explicitly that they are just waiting for the opportunity to have the votes to pass it in Congress. Congressman Moulton even threw in the usual talking point about shooting deer with AR-15s and needing better aim. Is insulting comments REALLY how you intend to find common ground with the majority of responsible gun owners who train to use their firearms not for hunting, but to defend themselves and family? Our supposed “voice at the table” Former Rep Walsh put forward no push back but rather spent most of the panel virtue signaling his hatred of the NRA (who we all hate too btw). There was not one word, not one proposal that was put forward as a give-and-take compromise with the gun community. That first panel lost many of us but I continued watching.

Former Schumer aid Emily Amick’s social media is full of video clips demonizing gun owners who own AR-15s, calling for an end to the filibuster to push gun ban proposals, and glowing videos of Congressman Cellini saying “spare me the constiutional right bull sh*t.” How was including her, who again has shown no sign of willing to compromise on any policy, intended on getting buy in from the gun community?

What was the point of allowing WH Assistant Stefanie Feldman to read a 5 minute speech about Biden’s domestic policy, including once again her emphasizing that he wants to ban assault weapons and if you don’t agree with the ban then you don’t actually care about crime? Again not one word about compromises that the administration is willing to make with the gun community.

The gun community has a huge amount of respect for Stephen Guttowski and I am glad you included him in the discussion. Stephen’s method and podcasts, calmly discussing the DETAILS of firearm policy and law should be how 97 Percent moves forward in discussions with the gun community.

Unfortunately I’m not sure your organization will get the chance after yesterday’s conference as much credibility was lost. You simply cannot parade out a bunch of speakers, many of whom are board members, who have publically been strong advocates of gun bans and then ask us to trust your organization because…… your official platform says you don’t want an assault weapons ban? We all remember Conor Lamb campaigning with video of him shooting an AR-15 and then voting to ban them this year.

Richard Aborn (instrumental proponent of 94 AWB), Rep Steve Israel (proponent of AWB and on recent 97% podcast spoke favorable of NY’s Bruen-response bill and explained his idea of compromise as “getting 60% rather than 100%” of gun control policies he wants), and Rep Moulton (who’s service I respect yet again just voted for an AWB), are all prominent members of your board. Why should the gun community trust you???

So when will the gun community trust you? When you come forward with REAL policy compromises as well as fight to overturn abusive laws. We want to stand shoulder to shoulder with you in calling out California’s Handgun Roster or New York’s post-Bruen concealed carry restrictions. We are willing to discuss federal Universal background checks in exchange for national concealed carry reciprocity. A federal license (with training perhaps!) in exchange for not needing FFL NICS checks for transfers. These were the types of discussions we were expecting when we showed up to watch yesterday. The ONLY person who in good faith touched on any of this was Dr. Siegel.

I will end with a humorous fictional story written about someone attending the conference in-person that is circulating among the gun community.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/ninety-seven-percent

I hope your organization will take this criticism to heart and revamp how you plan on engaging in good faith with the firearm community. Many of us are still willing to talk, but not just about how much we are willing to give up in exchange for nothing.

Best,
David Rice
Chicago

Well, the false front gun control group led by, among others,  Richard Aborn of Handgun Control Inc/the Brady Campaign (name subject to change without notice), has finally gotten off the dime to post their list of tired talking points we’ve seen before

97Percent’s New Research-Based Policy Roadmap Reveals New Path to Dramatically Reduce Gun Violence

97Percent Policy Roadmap
The Policy Roadmap is a research-backed package guided by a simple core principle – gun safety policies should ensure that people who are at high risk for violence cannot access guns while simultaneously respecting the rights of law-abiding citizens. The package includes:

  1. Closing the Violent Misdemeanor Loophole. New federal and state policies would set violent misdemeanor crimes as the threshold for excluding people from purchasing or possessing a gun. The current felony threshold does not capture many violent crimes, including assault, battery, and stalking; lowering this threshold is the single most-effective measure to reduce crime and may reduce overall gun-related homicide rates by as much as 19%. Only four states currently have violent misdemeanor laws.

  2. Implementing State-Level Gun Permit Laws. States would create a gun permitting system with two permits – a general one and one for concealed carry – both of which could be issued at the same time. Permits would be checked using a new background check system, as outlined below, and be valid for a period of years. Only 12 states currently require a permit to purchase a firearm.

  3. Simplifying Universal Background Checks. New, simplified background checks as part of the gun permitting process would utilize both federal and state databases to ensure a potential permit holder has not been convicted of a violent misdemeanor or felony. Currently, only 11 states search state and local records as part of the background check process, even though many violent crimes are only tracked in state databases.

  4. Implementing Red Flag Laws with Strong Due Process Protections. State-level laws would allow family members or law enforcement officials to petition a court to remove firearms from a person who is a threat while including strong provisions protecting gun owners’ due process. Only 19 states have red flag laws and only 12 allow family members to petition for a protective order.

Bloomberg’s propagandists now blame gas stations for Philadelphia murders

The anti-gun activists at The Trace — the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vast anti-gun empire — have created a new bogeyman for their ongoing war against our gun rights: Killer Gas Stations.

In a story published Monday titled “Gas Stations Become a Magnet for Violence in Philadelphia,” the author would have you hold your breath, suspend all disbelief and actually accept that mom-and-pop gas stations somehow play a role in the escalating gang violence sweeping the city, even though the author’s own data does not support such a claim.

According to the story, there were nine killings at Philadelphia gas stations during all of 2021 and 2022 — nine homicides in nearly two years. However, citywide over the same time period there were 1,021 murders — 562 during 2021 and 459 in 2022. To be clear, gas station murders made up less than one-percent of Philadelphia’s total homicides.

And who would a young anti-gun activist turn to in order to buttress his false claim that service stations are somehow culpable for murder? How about a local attorney who has filed lawsuits against nine gas stations because people were shot in their parking lots.

“I don’t think the public is aware of this because they may think of shootings usually happening at bars or nightclubs, certainly not at gas stations,” said attorney David P. Thiruselvam, who has filed nine lawsuits against gas stations. “But it’s becoming an epidemic, and the gas station industry is aware of it because it’s in the news all the time. But they are not doing anything about it.”

Not only is the gas station industry not doing anything about this “epidemic,” the City of Philadelphia didn’t leap into action either.

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The Dirty Secrets inside the Black Box Climate Models

The world has less than a decade to change course to avoid irreversible ecological catastrophe, the UN warned today.” The Guardian Nov 28 2007

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra

Introduction

Global extinction due to global warming has been predicted more times than climate activist, Leo DiCaprio, has traveled by private jet.  But where do these predictions come from? If you thought it was just calculated from the simple, well known relationship between CO2 and solar energy spectrum absorption, you would only expect to see about 0.5o C increase from pre-industrial temperatures as a result of CO2 doubling, due to the logarithmic nature of the relationship.

Figure 1: Incremental warming effect of CO2 alone [1]

The runaway 3-6o C and higher temperature increase model predictions depend on coupled feedbacks from many other factors, including water vapour (the most important greenhouse gas), albedo (the proportion of energy reflected from the surface – e.g. more/less ice or clouds, more/less reflection) and aerosols, just to mention a few, which theoretically may amplify the small incremental CO2 heating effect. Because of the complexity of these interrelationships, the only way to make predictions is with climate models because they can’t be directly calculated.

The purpose of this article is to explain to the non-expert, how climate models work, rather than a focus on the issues underlying the actual climate science, since the models are the primary ‘evidence’ used by those claiming a climate crisis. The first problem, of course, is no model forecast is evidence of anything. It’s just a forecast, so it’s important to understand how the forecasts are made, the assumptions behind them and their reliability.

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Op-Ed blows it on Second Amendment history

The Deep South is, for the most part, a safe haven for the Second Amendment. It’s not unique to here, mind you, but it’s definitely a big part of the culture down here and has been for ages.

And yet, for many, that’s indicative of…something. In particular, guns are about racism, and gun owners are, in essence, racist.

Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, but an op-ed in the LA Times is the latest to try and make that connection.

There are a lot of guns in America — this nation has collectively more civilian-owned guns than we have citizens. Unlike the rest of the developed world, firearms ownership in America is broadly held, with an estimated 40% of American households owning at least one gun; and unlike the rest of the world, gun-owning Americans tend to think of their weapons not as something dangerous, but as something that keeps them and their families safe.

Two-thirds of American gun owners say that they own their gun at least in part for protection — this despite data showing having a gun in the house doubles the likelihood that someone in the household will die by homicide, triples the likelihood that someone in the household will die by suicide, and provides little or no defense against assault or property loss.

Where does this unique set of beliefs about the protective power of a gun come from?

I don’t know. Facts, maybe?

Let’s remember that the data he links to has serious problems. For example, the study saying having a gun in the house doubles your chance of dying by homicide has been widely and repeatedly debunked. The other link uses information from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which also has problems that have been widely discussed.

But don’t worry. The author knows where our beliefs really come from.

Americans have not always felt this way: Historians suggest that for a large portion of this country’s existence, firearms were more often thought of as tools for hunting and pest control, with a purpose that was not primarily to keep a household safe. Guns, when advertised, were often displayed in the same pages as household goods such as farm implements, with similar language promoting both.

It is only relatively recently that Americans came to widely believe that guns keep a person safe and secure. My research with Jessica Mazen suggests that the crystallization and propagation of these beliefs happened largely in the former slave states in the aftermath of the Civil War.

There we go. The whole “racist” thing, right?

Well, not necessarily. I might be a bit worked up over this one.

Now, the author does go into the fact that those former states of the Confederacy were pretty lawless during Reconstruction and there was a widely held perception that the government in place had no interest in protecting former Rebel soldiers, thus precipitating people feeling the need to protect themselves.

However, even there, he’s missing a key aspect of gun ownership that predated the Civil War.

In particular, that guns had long been a part of self-defense measures, even if they weren’t necessarily marketed as such.

From the time of Jamestown and St. Augustine, the North American continent was a pretty rough place. Wild animals were an issue, but so were the Native American tribes that called this land home for eons prior. While many were friendly with the settlers and were willing to trade, others saw the Europeans as invaders.

This became even clearer after the settlements grew.

Indian attacks were a thing.

In fact, the earliest school shooting on American soil, if not in the world, took place in 1764, more than a century before Reconstruction. Four Lenape warriors slaughtered 11 people and wounded one other in the Enoch Brown school massacre, part of Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Such attacks were at least semi-common, particularly for those who lived outside of the protection of the town. Those who lived and farmed in these areas knew that their guns were key to their survival, not just for getting game during lean years, but also to fight back from these attacks.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of such attacks when they penned the Second Amendment.

“But advertisements…”

Honestly, I don’t want to hear a thing about advertisements. Advertisements are about what they think will sell a product but don’t represent the totality of how people view the product.

Even looking at the Founding Fathers’ words, it’s difficult to imagine that no one viewed guns as mere hunting tools rather than an item essential to self-defense and the defense of this nation.

Plus, if guns were for hunting, then why do we have flintlock pistols for private sale? Surely no one was using a pistol to hunt bears back in the day.

In fact, look at the wording of the Second Amendment itself for a moment. It begins with the controversial clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” before anything else. There’s no “hunting being important for putting food on the table” or anything of the sort. The militia clause clearly articulates that this is about defending our nation and, by extension, ourselves.

No amount of pretending otherwise is going to change it.