From Editor: This Is Not A Culture War

It is tempting to think of the struggle to keep—or, in too many cases, to win back—our Second Amendment freedoms as a culture war. But an analysis of the numbers disintegrates that claim.

Before tackling the telling statistics, it is worth noting the gun-control groups like the culture-war claim. They need to frame this as a culture war, because a cultural struggle implies that gun control, like other social movements, will slowly win over time. This is why they so often speak of this issue in “evolutionary” terms.

The thing is, the numbers show this to be a war of a comparatively small number of “elites” against the people as a whole; whereas a real culture war needs two distinct sides.

This isn’t how gun-control groups and their supporters in the mainstream media, Hollywood and the political class want this issue to be thought of by the American public; as an elite-against-the-people reality implies the elite will lose this freedom issue over time in a democratic republic—which is what has been happening thanks in no small part to this civil-liberties association.

A we-the-people-versus-a-few-elites situation also isn’t helpful to their efforts to gain control of the American people. Imagine a gun-control-preaching college professor raised in the 1960s, an academic clinging to a tenured position in an ivory tower today, and you can see and feel why these elites would writhe and squirm if forced to confront this reality.

This is also why, as we trek closer to this midterm election on Nov. 8, the gun-control groups want this freedom issue framed as a “safety issue,” with gun control as the solution; as in, if the elites just had the power to ban, confiscate or deeply restrict the use of firearms, they could save the people. That’s nonsense, of course, as history shows again and again that disarmed peoples are not and do not remain free; “safe” is not an adjective the people of Venezuela, to give one example, would now use to describe their situation.

Now, to get to the numbers. As I said, a culture war, to be a culture war, needs two distinct sides, whereas Americans in every demographic own guns today.

We, thankfully, don’t have concrete numbers on the number of citizens who choose to own guns. But gun-sales numbers over decades, along with other data, makes it a safe estimate that over 100 million Americans now own more than 400 million guns. There are about 332 million Americans, but there are only about 258 million American adults, so perhaps half, or nearly that many, of the American citizenry has chosen to own a gun.

Indeed, an estimated 18.5 million citizens bought guns in 2021 alone, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). This was the second-highest annual figure ever, behind the 21 million who bought guns in 2020; in fact, at least 5.4 million Americans became first-time gun owners in 2021 alone, according to data from the NSSF.

The NSSF also now says that American citizens own about 24.4 million AR-type rifles. It is safe to say that about half of Americans’ guns are likely semi-automatic designs.

The popularity of this right is related to the need for safety, as most new gun owners say they decided to buy a firearm for self-defense.

So, if gun-control advocates were honest, they’d look at these facts—and all the data behind what actually makes Americans safer—and demand that armed criminals be prosecuted. They would, in sum, get on the law-and-order bandwagon in what must be a law-and-order election.

But they can’t, as control is what they’re really after.

Lawrence Solomon: Finally it’s safe for the whistleblowers of corrupted climate science to speak out
The greatest scientific fraud of the century will be laid bare, along with its corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media

Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.
Can the whistleblowers be believed in this claim, originally made in 2015? And in the further claim that NOAA then rushed this doctored data into print in time for the UN’s Paris global warming summit of world leaders, to dupe any doubters that the planet was in fact overheated?

Of course the whistleblowers can be believed, and not just because NOAA repeatedly stonewalled inquiries, even failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. No one paying attention can have any doubt that the governmental global warming enterprise has been a fraud. It’s been lies from the start, starting with the very mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which astonishingly ruled out factors like the sun as being worthy of investigation.

Among those astonished was the Danish delegation to the IPCC. It discovered at one of the IPCC’s early meetings a quarter-century ago that its scientists could not present their study, newly published in the prestigious journal Science, showing a remarkable correlation between global warming and solar activity. To their further astonishment, to squelch dissent the IPCC cabal set out to destroy the reputation of its chief author, falsely accusing him of fabricating data.

Whistleblowers now know they will no longer be silenced.

Dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy soon learned that, if they refused to recant, they stood to lose their jobs, their funding, and their reputations. They also learned the corollary: to get hired, to get funded, to get promoted, they needed to produce the science the authorities wanted. Governments annually spent billions of dollars on climate change research, virtually all of it commissioned to prove that the science was settled — that man-made climate change represented an existential threat to the planet.

None of the billions spent on research amounted to anything — none of the models proved reliable, none of the predictions were borne out, none of the expected effects materialized. The Arctic ice cap hasn’t disappeared, polar bear populations haven’t declined, hurricanes haven’t become more common, malaria hasn’t spread, temperatures haven’t continued to climb. What did materialize was fraud after fraud.

Climategate — the 2009 revelations of hacked emails showing scientists labouring to manipulate data and cover their tracks — was followed by Climategate 2.0 (a second damning batch of hacked emails), by Amazongate (the revelation that the IPCC’s claim of coming devastation in the Amazon was based on non-peer-reviewed research by WWF eco-activists), Glaciergate (here the IPCC relied on speculation in a popular magazine) and other scandals.

The mega-fraud was the assertion that the science was settled, which the IPCC trumpeted with claims that 2,500 scientists from around the world endorsed its findings. Except those 2,500 — a number that was soon inflated to 3,000 and then 4,000 — didn’t endorse anything. They merely reviewed some of the studies heaved into the IPCC’s maw, many of them giving the research the thumbs down.

Likewise, a much heralded claim that 97 per cent of scientists believed the planet was overheating came from a 2008 master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois who obtained her results by conducting a survey of 10,257 earth scientists, then discarding the views of all but 77 of them. Of those 77 scientists, 75 thought humans contributed to climate change.  The ratio 75/77 produced the 97-per-cent figure that global warming activists then touted.

In fact, major surveys show that scientists in the tens of thousands do not believe that global warming represents a threat. With the departure of president Obama and his administration, which had blocked independent investigations from being pursued, whistleblowers in greater numbers will now dare to come forward, knowing they will no longer be silenced.

One of them is Dr. John Bates, a recently retired principal scientist at NOAA, who described how his agency manipulated data to manufacture a non-existent increase in global temperatures.  In a press release last week, U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith thanked “Dr. John Bates for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.” This week a second press release from the same committee indicated that NOAA will be brought to account.

The blizzard of lies from NOAA and other corrupted agencies will soon be outed in excruciating detail. The greatest scientific fraud of the century will thus be laid bare, along with its craven and corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group.

 

The Pandemic Is NOT Over, Says the White House
If Biden doesn’t represent the Biden administration, who does?

By now, the pattern is familiar: President Biden says something stupid and/or insane and/or contradictory to his administration’s stated policies, and his beleaguered staffers need to run around denying that he meant what he very clearly said. This might be the first time they’ve had to do so twice in one day, though.

First they had to walk back Grandpa Joe’s comments on Taiwan. And now, inevitably:

Did you get that? The president of the United States doesn’t speak for the White House. Biden is not in charge of the Biden administration.

So… who is?

Who’s running the show? It sure isn’t Kamala. And Jill — excuse me, Doctor Jill — is just barely more lucid than her husband. Who’s the boss of that house? Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Ex-PFC Wintergreen? What the hell is going on?

Whistleblower Alleges FBI Schemed to Distort January 6 Cases Into Nationwide ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Epidemic

A whistleblower has accused the FBI’s Washington Field Office of using cases related to the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot to “overstate” the threat of “domestic violent extremism” in America, according to Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

The whistleblower alleged the FBI office did not follow standard investigative practices for the January 6 cases when it moved the cases to various local Field Offices around the country based on where the case subjects were from, Jordan revealed in a letter addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday.

January 6 cases “should all be officially led by the WFO [Washington Field Office] and categorized as WFO cases,” according to the letter, but instead, a “task force” dispatched instructions to open January 6 investigations to local field offices nationwide.

Those local offices received the cases, making it look as if they were conducting the investigations on the cases, when, in reality, the Washington Field Office continued to conduct the bulk of the work, according to the letter.

The whistleblower told Jordan:

The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics. Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.

Jordan noted in the letter, “Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” which supports a narrative being perpetuated by the Biden administration.

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Trump/Russia investigator hid ties to Russian billionaire.

If there is one thing you can count on with The Swamp it’s that every time they accuse a Republican of doing something, they themselves are likely to be guilty of that very thing themselves.

That may be the case with Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. In an exclusive report by Military and Defense Insider it was revealed that McGonigal appears to be under grand jury investigation for–get ready–improper ties to Russia.

 

McGonigal was no bit player in the Russia Russia Russia drama: he was one of the key instigators who got the ball rolling back in 2016. When he was at the FBI he was quite the bigwig, playing major roles in a number of high profile cases.

Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, busted Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York.

He has apparently been swept up into a grand jury investigation that is looking into his ties to a Russian billionaire and work he appears to have done with his representatives. It isn’t totally clear what exactly is being investigated and how central McGonigal is to the inquiry, but it looks pretty bad.

Late last year, according to internal court documents obtained by Insider, US attorneys secretly convened a grand jury that examined the conduct of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. The Justice Department declined to comment on what the grand jury was investigating or whether it remained ongoing. But a witness subpoena obtained by Insider seems to indicate that the government, in part, was looking into McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.

The subpoena, issued in November, requests records relating to McGonigal and a shadowy consulting firm called Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week after the subpoena was issued, a Soviet-born immigrant named Sergey Shestakov said in a separate filing that McGonigal had helped him “facilitate” an introduction between Spectrum and Deripaska’s aide. The filing also states that McGonigal helped introduce the aide to Kobre & Kim, a New York law firm that specializes in representing clients who are being investigated on suspicion of “fraud and misconduct.” Shestakov, who has been identified on TV panels as a former Soviet foreign ministry official and former chief of staff to the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, reported receiving $33,000 for the referrals.

It’s not clear that anything McGonigal did for the sketchy Russians was illegal, but he failed to report doing any work for them. That in itself may be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Depending upon the exact scope of what the former FBI agent did he may or may not have violated the law.

While it wouldn’t necessarily have been illegal for McGonigal to work on behalf of Deripaska, failing to disclose activities covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such as lobbying and public relations, is punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Deripaska was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for acting as an agent for the Kremlin, and has been accused of ordering the murder of a businessman. “If McGonigal is mixed up in any way shape or form with Deripaska, that strikes me as unseemly, to put it politely,” says Tim Weiner, the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”

There is little doubt that McGonigal’s ties to a sketchy Russian oligarch are clear evidence that he isn’t as squeaky clean as a top FBI official would like to appear. After all, one of the great perks of having had such a position is peddling the prestige of having had such a job. He certainly has been capitalizing off his status, and getting tied up with sanctioned Russian agents of the Kremlin might hit him in the pocketbook. Perhaps that is why he decided to hide his relationship.

It’s impossible to know at this stage whether McGonigal’s super-friendly ties to Russians played a role in his zeal to get Donald Trump, but these revelations certainly raise questions. Despite the constant repetition that Trump was Russia’s puppet, he was actually far more antagonistic in policy to Russia than Obama ever was. And we know that Hillary Clinton used her ties in Russia to stir up suspicion that Trump was colluding with Russia (she colluded with Russians to fake a narrative that Trump colluded with Russia; how ironic), faking the whole Steele Dossier narrative with Russian help.

Was McGonigal somehow involved? Did he have any contemporaneous or future financial interests? At the moment nobody but the grand jury knows.

These days McGonigal presents himself as a pious and wise man who is using his expertise to defend truth, justice and the American way. He compares the FBI to the FSB favorably.

Since he left the FBI, McGonigal has continued to trade on his expertise in counterintelligence. In 2020, months after his reported assistance to Deripaska’s aide, he appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council, where he condemned the corruption of Russia’s security services. “You are seeing an erosion in any rule of law as it relates to the FSB,” he said. “It would be akin to having in the United States the FBI as a rogue element, operating at the behest of the highest bidder.”

Unfortunately too many Americans have come to suspect that the FBI actually is a rogue element, operating at the behest of, if not the highest bidder, then the most powerful one.

As Donald Trump would say: sad.

Once again, the political acumen of Mitch McConnell deserves praise for stopping such a political hack as Merrick Garland from being seated on the Supreme Court

FBI Agents Accuse Biden of Pressuring FBI to Fabricate ‘Extremist’ and ‘White Supremacist’ Cases.

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

The FBI denies that they are targeting people based on politics, but sadly, these revelations are the latest in a longstanding pattern of the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department under Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Last year, the administration previously came under fire for using the resources of the Department of Justice to target angry parents at school board meetings and treat them like domestic terrorists. Merrick Garland authorized the FBI to investigate parents who protested school board meetings alleging a “disturbing trend” of teachers being threatened or harassed. However, PJ Media’s Megan Fox looked into those allegations and concluded that they’re mostly bunk.

In addition, the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had prompted Garland to write the memo with a letter likening parents to domestic terrorists, eventually apologized for doing so. Despite this, Garland has not rescinded the memo. Late last year, a whistleblower revealed an internal email showing that the FBI was using counterterrorism tools to monitor parents despite Garland denying before Congress that the FBI was doing so. This summer, whistleblowers revealed that the FBI “pressured and incentivized” agents to classify cases as domestic violent extremism.

Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Today, Special Counsel John Durham moved to unseal this motion in limine in the false statements case against Igor Danchenko.

This motion provides new information on the details of Danchenko’s lies to the FBI, further information on how Special Counsel Mueller ignored Danchenko’s false statements, expected testimony from Clinton-connected executive Charles Dolan, and one crazy development.

But we’ll start with the the most damning development: Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) from March 2017 through October 2020.

The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

That developed into the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump.

Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness.

(Read again Inspector General Horowitz’s report concerning the Carter Page FISA warrants. Did Horowitz know that Danchenko was a CHS?)

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DOJ Admits Only 692 ‘Ghost Gun’-Related Homicide Cases in Last 6 Years

Buried in President Biden’s Department of Justice’s (DOJ) explanation of the new “ghost gun” rule is an admission that only 692 “ghost guns” were involved in homicide cases during the past six years.

The DOJ noted:

As the final rule explains, from January 2016 to December 2021, ATF received approximately 45,240 reports of suspected privately made firearms recovered by law enforcement, including in 692 homicide or attempted homicide investigations. The chart below demonstrates the total annual numbers of suspected PMFs recovered by law enforcement over the past six years.

When one considers that there are on average 12,000 to 14,000 homicides in the United States annually–sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower–692 “ghost gun”-related homicide cases are a mere fraction of all firearm-related homicides.

Take, for instance, the higher number–14,000 firearm homicides annually for six years. That is 84,000 firearm-related homicides during that time frame, while during that same time frame there were fewer than 700 “ghost gun”-related homicide cases.

Breitbart News pointed out that the DOJ’s “ghost gun” rule change was announced August 24, 2022. The rule classifies parts in a gun parts kit as firearms that require a background check to purchase, like the one required for “traditional firearms.”

FAKE WOKENESS: Two New Junk Science ‘Studies’ Suggest Racism, Fears of Blacks Drive Opposition To Gun Control.

Remember the RAND study that found only 123 of 27,900 gun control studies actually used the scientific method to come to their conclusions? Well, gun control advocates have trotted out two fresh, steaming new “studies” and the flies are already swarming. The University of Wisconsin has promoted a new finding that whites own guns and oppose gun control because of racism and a fear of blacks.

And within days of squeezing out that specimen of woke clownishness, the American Psychological Association published their own “study” that — you guessed it — whites who support gun rights are racist.

Interestingly the same study showed that when whites support gun control they’re racist too! So you’re racist. I’m racist. We’re all racists! To the uber-woke racists at the APA, if you’re white, you must be a racist.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, gun owners and gun rights supporters — whatever their color — are some of the most open-minded, tolerant and welcoming people in our communities. Contrary to what the racial hucksters, the Grievance Industry and critical race theory practitioners are selling, most Americans aren’t racist. And frankly, most Americans oppose racist gun control laws, too.

Most normal people rightfully reject claims of inherent racism in whites (or anyone else), or any of the other woke, social justice nonsense peddled by the gun-hating left in America.

In fact, plenty of black gun owners would dismiss this Wisconsin Badger junk science (or the APA’s trash “science”) as nothing but poppycock.

The folks over at The Federalist have the deets on these new “studies” . . .

White people own guns — and oppose gun-control legislation — because they are racist and fear black people. Two new studies advance this dangerous narrative building among our academic elites. While such rhetoric is perhaps unsurprising among political pundits or celebrities, otherwise serious academics are now ascribing racist motives to gun ownership and opposition to gun control. These studies are not only based on a slew of bigoted assumptions, but also bad science.

The University of Wisconsin recently promoted a new study contending that in U.S. counties where black people were enslaved in 1860, gun ownership is higher today. In fact, gun ownership, they say, is correlated to the number of slaves formerly in each county. To support this more-slaves-means-more-guns theory, the authors construct a historical narrative that whites feared newly freed slaves, bought guns for self-defense, and then this fear somehow trickled down over 160 years.

But interestingly enough, just last month, National Public Radio ran a story on how black people are the fastest growing group of gun owners. If gun ownership is a product of white people being racist, then this is quite curious.

The University of Wisconsin study suffers from a series of flaws, even apart from its poisonous premise that white people believe or feel certain things because they are white. You’d never say the same about other races, and we shouldn’t give a pass to academics who traffic in the same type of racism…  

A few days after the release of the slavery-predicts-gun-ownership study, the American Psychological Association (APA) released another study contending that whites support gun rights because they are racist, and when whites oppose gun rights, that’s also racist.

Rest assured, gun control advocates will try to use these junk studies — like thousands that came before them — to paint patriotic, gun-loving Americans of all colors and persuasions as racists no matter their race, sex or religion.

And why not? Using pseudo-scientific hokum to support claims that gun control laws prevent criminal misuse of guns is actually less scientifically accurate than claiming drinking milk causes car accidents. But they have no fear of anyone in the media debunking the junk science on which they base their calls for civilian disarmament.

Plus most politicians and low-information types will probably believe it…so they keep pushing the politicized garbage to further their disarmament narrative. And so it goes.

Report on Possible Trump Charges Leaves the Resistance Reeling

As RedState reported, the DOJ dropped a filing on Tuesday evening in an attempt to deny the appointment of a special master regarding the documents seized during the now infamous Trump raid. In that filing was a photograph that set leftwing hearts a flutter, purporting to show “top secret” documents scattered on the floor of a Mar-a-Lago storage room.

In reality, the documents were found in boxes per the DOJ’s own documentation.

The DOJ knew what it was doing putting that photo out, though. They wanted to gin up more “the walls are closing in” outrage from the left, and sure enough, they got it. Social media was swamped with hysterical declarations that charges were incoming. That picture was “criminal evidence,” they screeched while racking up the likes and shares along the way.

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Well, SloJoe has always been known as a liar, so…

Fact Check: Biden Claims Mass Shootings ‘Tripled’ After ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Ended

CLAIM: During his speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden said mass shootings “tripled” after the 1994-2004 “assault weapons” ban expired.

VERDICT: Mostly False.

Biden said, “Back in 1994, I took on the NRA and passed the ‘assault weapons’ ban. For ten years, mass shootings were down.”

He added, “But in 2004, Republicans let that ban expire, and what happened? Mass shootings tripled.”

There are two things to unpack here: First, his claim that the ban itself was successful while in effect and, second, his claim that mass shootings “tripled” once the ban expired.

On February 19, 2018, Breitbart News looked at a report by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ), which found that the “assault weapons” ban could not be credited with any reduction in crime.

The NIJ report was written in 2004 as the ban was about to expire.

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

So much for the claims of all the great things the ban accomplished. Now consider the claim that mass shootings tripled after the ban expired.

Breitbart News noted that the Washington Post fact-checked the claim about mass shootings tripling when Biden first made it in early June 2022.

The Post reported:

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 Post added, “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.”

The claim that mass shootings “tripled” after the “assault weapons” ban expired is mostly false. There was a modest increase in such shootings, but the expiration of the ban does not seem to be causal in that rise.

What the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Tell Us About Guns

It’s hard to fool an honest man or woman who wants to know the truth. Unfortunately, many of us depend on the media to bring us much of our news, and lying to us — or withholding key parts of the story — today makes it easier to fool us tomorrow.

Most of us feel horrible when we see news stories about violent crime. Beyond the emotional shock of the story, though, we are seldom told what the story means. Is that newsworthy event a common problem or is it rare? Are there good solutions that make us safer most of the time?

Besides the violence shown in movies and TV dramas, it’s almost as if the news deliberately keeps us in the dark about real violence and its causes. We can’t make good choices unless we have perspective. For a minute, let’s shed some light on the reality of armed citizens and guns

We’re told that guns cause crime. That’s odd because a lot of criminals didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Only one out of twelve violent crimes are committed with a firearm. If someone says they need to disarm honest people in order to stop violent crime, they are going to leave about 92 percent of those violent crimes untouched. No wonder gun control laws don’t make us any safer.

If guns cause crime, then honest gun owners haven’t gotten the message either. Ordinary citizens like us own a lot of guns. About 40 percent of Americans live with a gun in our homes and we own hundreds of millions of firearms that are never used in crimes.

These are the guns you never seem to hear about. The news media don’t want to admit that firearms are ordinary tools that a huge portion of Americans lawfully own and use on a daily basis.

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Goobermint bureaucraps knew there were serious problems with mRNA ‘vaccines’ and still pushed them. It’s almost like it was a feature, not a bug. And nowhere near an ‘unintended consequence’

Report: 44 Percent of Pregnant Women in Pfizer Trial Lost Their Babies; FDA and CDC Recommended Jabs For Expectant Mothers Anyway.

More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents.

In a January court ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas, ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release around 12,000 documents immediately, and then 55,000 pages a month until all documents were released, totaling more than 300,000 pages.

The nonprofit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, sued the FDA last September, after the agency denied its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to expedite the release of mRNA vaccine review documents. In a November 2021 joint status report, the FDA proposed releasing only 500 pages of the documents a month, which would have taken up to 75 years.

Trial documents released in April revealed that Pfizer had to hire 1,800 additional full-time employees in the first half of 2021 to deal with “the large increase” of adverse reactions to its COVID vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine was made available under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on Dec. 11, 2020. By February of 2021, the company was seeing so many safety signals, including in pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, it had to immediately hire 600 employees to process the data.

A batch of documents released in late July showed that 44 percent of women who were pregnant during the trial suffered miscarriages, feminist author and journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf revealed on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Wolf has been spearheading research and analysis of the Pfizer documents through her website Daily Clout.

In the past, only 10 to 15 percent of known pregnancies ended in miscarriage.

“Pfizer took those deaths of babies—those spontaneous abortions and miscarriages—and recategorized them as recovered/resolved adverse effects,” Wolf told Bannon. “In other words, if you lost your baby, it was categorized by Pfizer as resolved adverse event, like a headache that got better,” she added.

Wolf said adverse event cutoff report showing the miscarriages was March 13, 2021, and the FDA received the report on April 1, 2021.

Therefore, the FDA had this data nearly a year and a half ago, and instead raising an alarm, they, along with the CDC, went ahead and recommended the experimental injections for expectant mothers anyway.

“Over a year ago, the FDA received this report that out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, and they did not say anything,” Wolf said, choking back tears. “Thus the FDA was aware of the horrifying rate of fetal death by the start of April 2021 and were silent.”

The CDC, as recently as last month, still recommended the experimental mRNA vaccines for pregnant and breastfeeding “people.”

“COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people 6 months and older. This includes people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future,” the CDC claims in a July 2022 post on its website. “CDC also recommends COVID-19 vaccines for infants 6 months and older who’s mother was vaccinated or had a COVID infection before or while pregnant.”

The FDA and CDC could conceivably claim they were unaware of high rate of miscarriages in the trial because Pfizer attempted to obscure the data.

“Pfizer notes the miscarriages as serious adverse events with moderate or severe toxicity ratings,” Wolf explained. “However, all of them were recategorized, by Pfizer, in the internal documents under the category of adverse events that were ‘recovered’ or ‘resolved.’”

Wolf noted that the Pfizer trial data correlates with the massive increase in miscarriages seen worldwide since the vaccine rollouts.

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Gun research needs no rebuilding

Research into things like “gun violence” or violent crime, in general, have always been a hot topic. That’s especially true when tax dollars are given over to fund it.

Supposedly.

The truth was that no one really cared if unbiased research took place. The problem was that what we were seeing from organizations like the CDC looked less like research and more like advocacy, so laws changed. Federal taxpayer money wasn’t to be used for advocacy at all.

And the CDC responded by ending all firearm-related research, thus tipping its hand that its intention was to push gun control, not look for answers.

Those days are, unfortunately over. Now, we’re back to tax dollars being used for “research.”

That’s annoying because the CDC hasn’t changed its biases, apparently, but what’s worse is how they’re pretending no research happened.

SUMMERS: To start, can you just give us a sense of how much of a roadblock the Dickey Amendment has been to your field of research?

CARTER: It fundamentally limited the type of progress we could make. When you think about the field of motor vehicle crash injury prevention, we saw the highest number of motor vehicle crash deaths in this country in the mid-1950s. In the subsequent 50 years, we’ve been able to reduce the number of people who die and or injured in car crashes every year by 70%. And we did that through the application of rigorous research methods and funding by the federal government. And we can do the same thing with firearms. We just haven’t been able to until most recently.

SUMMERS: OK. So as I hear you compare this to the way we think about and the way the government studies car accidents, it strikes me that when government agencies study that, they’re not weighing in and saying that cars are good or cars are bad. And so I guess my question is the research that you’re talking about, research into gun violence, it doesn’t take a pro-gun or anti-gun stance, right?

CARTER: That’s correct. So we don’t tell people they shouldn’t own pools. We talk to them about how to own pools safely and keep their children from drowning in pools. And it’s the same situation with firearms. We don’t take a stance on whether or not people should own firearms. It’s really about how do we decrease the number of people who are dying? And some of that is around, you know, how do people own and operate firearms safely?

And there are – there is probably a population of people who shouldn’t own firearms because they’re at high risk, and that population should be identified. And we’ve seen most recently with the federal government this move to move red flag laws or ERPO laws forward. And that’s one mechanism for identifying people who are at risk to harm themselves or to harm somebody else. And I think when we approach it in this way, where we don’t say it’s good or it’s bad, we talk about how to reduce injury and death, most people can get around the idea that we want less people across the country dying from firearms.

Except, if that were true, then there shouldn’t have been a problem. The Dickey Amendment forbid advocacy, not research. It was the CDC that couldn’t determine the difference between the two.

Further, let’s not pretend that firearm research wasn’t happening. We covered plenty of studies looking at the impact of gun control laws or the lack thereof prior to the federal pipeline opening back up for such research.

It was happening in plenty of places and it created significant debate. Look at a few examples from before the laws changed.

There was plenty of research going on.

So the implication that somehow all research halted is misleading at best, but again, the CDC is taxpayer-funded advocacy. They’re no longer seeking the truth, but are interested in manipulating data to advance an agenda.

Yet they won’t admit that, so they lie to the public and their media allies cover for them.

BLUF
None of this is to say what might happen, however, when you take into account all of the oddities we’ve observed over the past few months with nothing fitting, now a more specific picture is becoming clear. You don’t get specific unless you have prior knowledge, and prior knowledge is exactly what they’ve got. But of what…that’s the question.

Problems with the ‘Dirty Bomb’ Narrative

Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, has now pointed out in a piece done by the Washington Examiner that there’s not just been angry calls against the DOJ and FBI specifically but that those threats are becoming more specific, mentioning the term ‘dirty bomb’. That in and of itself is quite interesting.

A dirty bomb is a low-grade weapon of mass destruction designed to spread radioactive material rather than the all out drama of of a full scale nuclear detonation. They’ve been in the public parlance since at least 2001 and was even the major plot device in George Clooney’s terrible late 90s action movie, The Peacemaker. Like that dumpster fire, everything in DC is also fantasy land, with a cursory preview to the coming attractions playing out before your very eyes.

The term dirty bomb is quite a specific one, requiring much on part of a group to pull such a thing off. First you’d need to acquire some sort of radiological material, and unlike the first 30 minutes of Back to the Future, its not exactly an easy task. Having knowledge of such things is tightly controlled here in the US, whether people realize it or not, and nuclear engineering and access programs are fairly selective on exactly who they let in, replete with a DOE pre-screening. So one would be justified in assuming that they’d have a list of potential dissidents with such a working knowledge necessary. Right?

 

Let’s re-examine the media-spun narrative regarding the politicized raid on Mar-a-Lago. Their justification? Nuclear secrets. Of course the public cannot know specifically what those may be, leaving an open-ended interpretation to have the blanks filled in later. Dirty bombs certainly fit into the nuclear category.

 

Then of course we have the curious case of the NYC nuclear attack public service announcements, hastily greenscreened and coming off looking like a lower-rent version of Sesame Street. Why would they, and only they, launch such a PSA without some much as a public justification? If there’s a genuine threat, tell us. You have the burden of proof to ensure the public trust. Like a turtle on a post someone put it there and for a reason – not unprompted. And an already stretched thin emergency response force would not seek to exacerbate an already fragile system. Right?

Not unless there was some tangible thing to be gained. We cannot let a good crisis go to waste, or so we’re told.

So, we have a case of a specific threat being termed, which would require a specific skillset and level of access in order to pull off. And unlike the DC fall action movie blockbuster they’re trying to sell the American people, the antagonists ain’t exactly angry eastern Euros with bad accents. Its the guys in suits who know they’ve exhausted any credibility they have with any American with a brain. That no matter how many diversions they try to pull its not winning them any favor, and that the gravy train may very well be up when they realize they can’t cheat in enough elections to keep populist candidates from winning. So what’s the next move?

They’ve created a narrative that the former President ‘may have kept nuclear secrets’ and somehow exchanged them with Russia, keeping with their previously debunked lies while also seizing his active passport and two expired ones – a crime unto itself and one that requires its own warrant to be lawfully executed. Of course lawful is a vague term to this crowd. But also keep in mind the MSM has spun this tale and are running with it in an attempt to lie enough times it becomes truth. And now the embattled FBI Director uses a specific term. It doesn’t take much brain power to put together ‘nuclear secrets’ and ‘dirty bomb’ when you’re desperately trying to turn the table on losing the public. How could it be pulled off? The question becomes who’d have unique access to create such a thing?

One person who would have such access is Sam Brinton. You know him, the dog guy who wears leashed dresses and could not pass an SF 86 audit to save his life. One look at the guy tells you he never, under any circumstances, should have been granted access to any special access programs let alone be in charge of the very things you’d need to build a dirty bomb. Unless of course you needed an easily compromised, easily manipulable stooge who genuinely hates half this country as he’s said in his commentary on ‘gay conversion therapy’. And he’s the one in charge of exactly what would be needed for a dirty bomb and would have zero moral objection to such a thing. That’s why he’s where he is. Quite convenient.

With the narrative laid, such an attack would be a last resort as a shock tactic against the American people. The introduction of a superordinate goal, replete with a convenient public enemy for the people to rally behind in their newly awakened national vigor against. Orange man really was bad, who knew? they’ll say. All his followers are evil too. Now pay your higher taxes and forget the crimes of the Bidens. Wave your Ukraine flag while you’re at it.

None of this is to say what might happen, however, when you take into account all of the oddities we’ve observed over the past few months with nothing fitting, now a more specific picture is becoming clear. You don’t get specific unless you have prior knowledge, and prior knowledge is exactly what they’ve got. But of what…that’s the question.

Observation O’ The Day

There is a new trend, and it is battlespace prep. In both the US and Canada there is now a coordinated effort by the political/MSM class to portray every kind of dissent from secular progressive authoritarianism as nothing less than violent insurrection and terrorism. In the Canadian media, people who object to vaccine mandates have been promoted from Nazis to a vast network of violent insurrectionists. In the US, we are told that people angry about the Mar-A-Lago raid are about to commence terrorist actions against civilians, even using dirty bombs.


How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary
Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

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