Category: Goobermint

‘Ghost Gun’ Bans Are Doomed from the Start
The DIY firearms movement specifically evolved to put personal armaments beyond the reach of the government.

The problem with imposing legal restrictions intended to stop a practice that is designed to evade legal restrictions is that you were outflanked before you even started. That’s the challenge for President Joe Biden and lawmakers around the country as they consider limits on “ghost guns”—homemade guns that are created, owned, and used off the government’s radar. Do-it-yourself manufacturing has always hobbled authorities’ ability to control things they don’t like, and the modern ghost gun movement specifically evolved to put personal armaments beyond the reach of the state.

“The White House is weighing a number of gun safety proposals as it looks to deliver on President Joe Biden’s campaign promises,” Politico reported this week. “Among the executive actions under consideration by the administration is one that would require buyers of so-called ghost guns — homemade or makeshift firearms that lack serial numbers — to undergo background checks, according to three people who have spoken to the White House about their plans.”

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Millions of American Jobs Under Biden Regime Won’t Come Back…democrat Officials Warn of Consequences as Biden Prepares to Give Unearned Amnesty to Millions

The far-left, Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published an article today warning that millions of jobs will not be coming back once the Chinese virus pandemic is no longer a threat.

Conservative Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) mocked the Democrats and their plan to offer unearned amnesty to millions of non-citizens living in the United States, “Millions of working-class jobs lost. Nothing that a giant amnesty can’t solve!” he tweeted.

From the WaPo article- Millions of jobs that have been shortchanged or wiped out entirely by the coronavirus pandemic are unlikely to come back, economists warn, setting up a massive need for career changes and retraining in the United States.

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered permanent shifts in how and where people work. Businesses are planning for a future where more people are working from home, traveling less for business, or replacing workers with robots. All of these modifications mean many workers will not be able to do the same job they did before the pandemic, even after much of the U.S. population gets vaccinated against the deadly virus.

Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates raised eyebrows in November when he predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would go away forever. That forecast no longer seems far-fetched. In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely. These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs.

“We’re recovering, but to a different economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said in November.

It’s curious that the Biden regime would be laser-focused on stopping construction on our border wall and giving unearned amnesty to millions of non-Americans, as economists warn of the loss of millions of jobs, post-COVID pandemic.

As of 2020, FAIR estimates that approximately 14.5 million illegal aliens are residing within the United States. This number is marginally higher than FAIR’s previous estimate of 14.3 million in 2019.

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The President is the Commander in Chief of the military and since Truman has the sole power to authorize National Command Authority. Now we see that they know this authority is in the hands of a person who should be under fulltime skilled nursing care and they’re scared. Their hatred for Trump overpowered their duty to provide for the common defense.

Gun Ownership It’s Not Insurrection, It’s Patriotism, Try Telling That to Gun Banners

The Democrats fake narratives of their political reality changed daily, as they needed.

After years of carefully crafted, and bought political and judicial positions, the Democratic Party created, from the get-go, bizarre lies about Donald J. Trump which have been proven false, we are now we’re expected to believe that former President Trump committed insurrection against our country while making a speech which only referenced PEACE and PATRIOTISM.

The Democrats forced a Second Trump Impeachment, even though he was OUT OF OFFICE, as the left does not want another Trump term. But that fiasco yielded a NOT GUILTY, and rightly so.

What is it that the Democrats want? They want power! They need to keep their own criminal acts covered up. Many of these crimes may rise to the level of sedition, which could merit jail time.

Former President Trump must be proven guilty of something, anything, and prevented from ever running again for high office because he might just win.

Democrats Are Terrified Of The Possible Outcome.

Now that Joe Biden is the Resident of the White House, the Socialist Democrats must mitigate the strength and resolve of Trump’s core constituents. So to this end, the Democrats employ many historical methods, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the NAZI agenda, to ‘evilize*’ us Trump supporters.

* Yes, we made up the word ‘evilize.’ We use it as ‘To be made evil’.

That my friends, is us, America’s conservatives and civilian gun owners. Not only must Americans accept that Trump is an insurrectionist, but they must also believe gun owners are insurrectionists, too.

Until U.S. gun owners are neutralized, the left cannot take total power. We must now be transformed from racists into violent, dangerous revolutionaries; Media and Big Tech have the dominating power to make that real in the eyes of ignorant Americans.

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Favoring renewable energy over natural gas investment has led to the mess.

I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out.

As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm down here and, in spite of the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup truck, Texas has come to a standstill. When a little bit of ice settled on the freeway, a half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135-car pileup.

Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy troubles, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts — and a whole lot of blackouts that refuse to roll on but instead sit obstinately in place — because our power grid cannot keep up with the spike in demand.

As in California, Texas’s energy scarcity is largely artificial: The state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure ranging from pipelines to winterizing equipment at utilities. You may as well not have the fuel at all if you can’t get it to where it’s needed or use it once it’s there.

What Texas has invested in is renewables, especially wind. These have performed especially poorly: The state’s electric-grid regulator reports that though wind and solar still make up a relatively small share of the state’s overall energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity shut down by the storm: Out of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts were from wind and solar.

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Did Wind Power Fall Hard During the Great Texas Storm? Yep. Twice.

Texas is that rare state that has everything: oil, natural gas, coal, space for wind and solar, rare-earth minerals, great food, good-looking people, and abundant humility.

Maybe not that last one. And we haven’t had a Super Bowl champion in much too long a time.

Anyway, Friday morning I pulled electric power generation data by source from the United States Energy Information Administration. EIA is reputable and authoritative, to the extent that any government agency is. Insert shrug emoji if you wish. I mostly trust their data. It’s EIA’s data everyone cites when they, accurately, say the United States reduced carbon emissions faster than other developed nations and ahead of the Paris Accords targets over the past few years. EIA’s data attributes that to the rise of natural gas as a cheap, reliable, and clean power source. So you’ve probably trusted their data too, whether you were aware of it or not.

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Leaked: Congressional Research Service Report on Firearms Stabilizing Braces

WASHINGTON, D.C. –-(Ammoland.com)- AmmoLand News has obtained a report dated February 12th, 2021 sent by the Congressional Research Service to Congress members about pistol braces. (embedded below)

Congressional Research Service Issues Report on Stabilizing Braces for Congress

Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a non-partisan government think tank that works with Congressional members on reports about different issues. The service consists of 600 government employees, including lawyers, economists, reference librarians, and social, natural, and physical scientists. It is the policy counterpart to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

William J. Krouse, Specialist in Domestic Security and Crime Policy, #ad wrote the report for members of Congress detailing the ATF’s long saga with stabilizing braces. This report can be a sign that Congress is once again looking into the brace issue. The CRS confidentially works with members of Congress, so AmmoLand News hasn’t been able to determine what member requested the document.

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BLUF:
We can laugh at the antics, but the terrible reality is that this crap is going to get a bunch of our young people killed. Let’s be very clear – when your priority is social justice nonsense instead of preparing to fight and win, you are opening up a lane for the enemy and the enemy is going to drive right through it.

But look on the bright side. When something horrible happens – maybe the Chinese will send a carrier to the bottom, for example – we can all take comfort in the fact that our sons and daughters, because it’s us patriots’ sons and daughters who usually fight and die in America’s wars, perished because our leadership failed to prepare, but at least they died fully aware of trans intersectionality.

Our Military’s SJW-Driven Abandonment of Warfighting Is Going to Get Troops Killed

It gives me no pleasure to say that I no longer recommend that young people join the military, and I’m not alone. The non-Blue Falcon veteran community is in full revolt against the conscious decision to decline embraced by our current military leadership. After failing to win a war in the last 20 years – and don’t say Syria, because the second President * woke up in the Oval Office wondering how he got there, more of our troops were heading back into the hellscape for reasons no one has bothered to articulate – the military has decided to target an easier enemy, i.e., other Americans.

See, the problem with me and the other vets who are disgusted by the brass’s choice to focus on SJW priorities instead of, you know, successfully deterring or defeating America’s enemies, is that we actually listened to what we were taught when we were coming up. Most of us were trained by the heroes who put the shattered American military together after the Democrat war in Vietnam broke it. We learned about leadership, about putting mission first but taking care of people always, and about objectives and how to attain them.

None of that’s a thing anymore.

So, count us out from complicity with the degeneration of our proud institution into a giant gender studies struggle session. And that’s a big deal. Do you know where the military gets a huge chunk on its recruits? Legacies. These are young troops who want to be like their father or grandfather or big brother or neighbor or other role model. I was the third-generation commissioned officer in my family, on both sides. Guess what? Right now, if one of my kids goes in, it’s against my advice. And again, I am not alone. I hear this over and over and over from other vets. And it makes me furious.

Congratulations, Pentagon. This is all on you.

You put two divisions behind wire in D.C. to protect against phantom insurrections by guys who dress like Vikings. And then you can’t even feed the troops, or house them. Gosh, if only there was a great big five-sided building full of generals just a couple miles away to square that idiocy away.

Oh, wait, there is.

And now, though we have not won a war in two decades, our military has plenty of time to stop training and focus on purging the ranks of people who like the politicians the current administration opposes. I eagerly await the introduction to the new 69D MOS – political officer. A zampolit for every battalion – hell, why not every company?

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Biden pushing Congress to pass bill giving millions of illegal immigrants’ path to citizenship

Congress introduced sweeping an immigration bill on Thursday modeled from President Joe Biden’s plan and designed to give millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. an eight-year path to citizenship, in addition to providing those who illegally entered the country as children a quicker route to citizenship.

In their respective Congressional chambers, Democrats Sen. Bob Menendez and Rep. Linda Sanchez introduced a bill identical to Biden’s US Citizenship Act of 2021 unveiled by the White House on Jan. 20, NBC News reported.

The bill cuts the time to secure citizenship from 13 years to just eight. To be eligible, illegal immigrants would be required to have entered the country prior to January 1, 2021.

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U.S. attorney, FBI investigating Cuomo’s handling of nursing home deaths 

The U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and the FBI have begun a preliminary investigation into the way New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration handled data about Covid-19 nursing home deaths.

After early praise for his leadership when his state became the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, the governor is now dealing with accusations of underreporting nursing home deaths.

In recent weeks, the administration revealed that 15,000 long-term care residents have died, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.

Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and the FBI declined to comment Wednesday night.

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Texas power outages: How the largest energy-producing state in the US failed in freezing temperatures.

DALLAS — Many Texans are rightfully asking why the largest energy producing state in the country cannot produce enough energy to get through a week of below-freezing temperatures.

So, what happened? Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.

“Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.

What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.

Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.

Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

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February 1st, 2013

Biden concedes new laws won’t end gun massacres

Vice President Joe Biden, who spearheaded the White House’s effort to find ways of reducing gun violence, admitted to reporters Thursday that any measures passed by Congress would fail in totally eliminating gun deaths.

Biden was speaking on Capitol Hill after meeting with Democratic lawmakers to build support for gun control legislation currently making its way through Congress. While he said no law could ever eliminate gun deaths, the vice president stressed that attempts must be made to prevent gun violence, particularly as Americans are demanding an answer from the government on how to end tragedies like the December massacre in Connecticut.

“Nothing we are going to do is fundamentally going to alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting or guarantee that we will bring gun deaths down,” Biden said, echoing remarks President Barack Obama made in January when he said “there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely.”

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These Are the Three American Cities the Biden Admin Is Planning to Start Releasing Migrant In

The Department of Homeland Security will begin phase one of the Biden administration’s new approach to immigration and asylum seekers on Friday by releasing thousands of migrants in three American cities over a two-week period.

The new plan, in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s “Remain In Mexico” policy, will have DHS start releasing illegal aliens in San Diego, California; El Paso, Texas; and Brownsville, Texas, according to Breitbart and the Associated Press. Around 25,000 migrants will be let into the country through the first phase.

DHS plans to process and release about 300 migrants a day in both San Diego and El Paso, with plans to release about 100 migrants a day in Brownsville.

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A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology.

*****

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.

Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile.

Highways require infrastructure but not this level of precision. While a four-lane freeway costs about $10 million to $20 million a mile, California ended up spending $100 million a mile building its abortive high-speed rail line on flat ground, and it predicted building in hilly territory would cost at least $170 million per mile.

The Year of No Science.

Remember “The Year of Living Dangerously”? That was a 1982 film based on a 1978 novel about a love affair during the year Sukarno was overthrown in Indonesia, 1967.

2020 and now 2021 might be called the Year or Years of No Science… or maybe Phony Science… or Pretentious Science… or, perhaps most accurately, Political Science (but not with the usage commonly employed).

Yes, I know we have seen the extremely rapid appearance of COVID-19 vaccines from several companies, but we have no way of knowing if they work long term or, more importantly, if they were necessary.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I have taken both Pfizers myself, largely because it will undoubtedly soon be required by our government to able to travel.)

It’s quite possible this pandemic would have run its course the way all others have without intervention—or that it was highly exaggerated in the first place.

No one has fully explained that not that many more Americans died in 2020 than in previous years, when the pandemic was supposed to have killed hundreds of thousands, nor has anyone a satisfactory theory for why countries and states without lockdowns often do as well as those with the most stringent regulations.

And this is not even to mention the amount of extraordinary and endless contradictions (mask/no mask… hydroxychlorquine yes/no… ivermectin yes/no and so on) we have had from medical experts, sometimes apologizing to us for their mistakes but other times changing their minds in full view as if we never noticed.

Add to that the mystery surrounding the Wuhan laboratory with all the various explanations cum communist Chinese propaganda augmented by the duplicitous World Health Organization about how this came about, including the odd involvement of Dr. Anthony Fauci with that lab over the years.

And all this is adjudicated by politicians many, if not most, of whom could not now easily pass a high school chemistry test. Does anyone think our president could?

They speak of “settled science,” but they don’t even know what science is.

But none of this should be a surprise.

I am writing this locked in my Nashville house, not by COVID, but by snow and ice that do not allow me to drive my car down my driveway without landing in a ditch.

In about an hour, another six to eight hours of non-stop snow and ice are predicted. Neither my wife nor I are likely to able to leave home to shop for food for several days. (We have emergency supplies.)

I gather things are worse in Texas, to the South of us, where millions are without power in freezing weather.

Fifteen years ago, Al Gore, in his Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” predicted “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

We all know how ridiculous that sounds now (well, everyone but John Kerry and Joe Biden and an endless stream of miseducated social justice warriors who have never read, nor heard of, Bjorn Lomborg).

Of course, those were the days of “global warming,” before it morphed conveniently into the factually meaningless “climate change.”

After all, you can’t get the lusted-after political power and financial gain if you say the sun is vastly more important to our weather and climate (a distinction, we are told, is important, so I put them together) than human endeavors.

So maybe we have been living in the Year of No Science for a long time, since the days people thought the world was flat, which was most of history by far.

It could be that people today are equally ignorant about the truth—or nearly. The idea of “settled science” is an oxymoron and those who speak of it are only making fools of themselves.

Climate and COVID are much the same. We should be humble before making definitive statements. And we should always be skeptical of politicians who say they are “trusting the scientists.” Which scientists and why?

Meanwhile, since I wrote the paragraph nine above this one, the snow and ice storm has returned, about a half hour earlier than predicted. The temperature is 25 Fahrenheit, about another 25 to 30 degrees below normal for February in Nashville.

People on my NEXT DOOR app are warning our neighbors not to go out jogging or even to walk their dogs on the streets for fear the cars will not be able stop and run them over. They are sharing pictures of many autos in ditches.

But not to worry. We are reentering the Paris Climate Accords. All will be saved.

What’s worse?
That the Chinese Commies were making spychips and putting them in computers?
Or that Uncle has known about this for over a decade, but still let who knows how many computers made for the commercial/home market with these spychips be imported into the country and sold to the public?
(maybe because they figured out a way to tap into the chip’s transmissions so as to have another channel to spy on the U.S. public themselves?)

China Used Secret Microchip to Spy on US Computers

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense found thousands of its computer servers sending military network data to China — the result of code hidden in chips that handled the machines’ startup process.

In 2014, Intel Corp. discovered that an elite Chinese hacking group breached its network through a single server that downloaded malware from a supplier’s update site.

And in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed an extra chip loaded with backdoor code in one manufacturer’s servers.

Each of these distinct attacks had two things in common: China and Super Micro Computer Inc., a computer hardware maker in San Jose, California. They shared one other trait; U.S. spymasters discovered the manipulations but kept them largely secret as they tried to counter each one and learn more about China’s capabilities.

China’s exploitation of products made by Supermicro, as the U.S. company is known, has been under federal scrutiny for much of the past decade, according to 14 former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the matter. That included an FBI counterintelligence investigation that began around 2012, when agents started monitoring the communications of a small group of Supermicro workers, using warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, according to five of the officials.

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Sound more and more like a pack of petty tyrants scared to death someone is going to get fed up with them and TCOB.

Biden White House Plan to Keep Occupying Troops in DC Through End of Year

The Biden National Security Council is planning on having National Guard troops continue to occupy the nation’s capital through the end of the year, according to a report by WTTG-TV Fox 5 in Washington, D.C. Additionally, active duty and reserve troops are being considered for deployment.

WTTG excerpt:

The National Security Council is asking the Department of Defense to engage Capitol Police on planning for post-March 12th support, according to the e-mail.

…Robert Salesses who began Performing the Duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security on January 20, 202, wrote in the e-mail:

“If it’s not possible to sustain at the current level with NG personnel, we need to establish the number of NG personnel (DCNG and out-of-state) we can sustain for an extended period – at least through Fall 2021 – and understand additional options for providing DoD support, to include use of reserve personnel, as well as active component.”

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My question is: Why didn’t the Goobernor fire him the day after this wanna-be tyrant opened his yap?

EMBATTLED MASSACHUSETTS CLIMATE OFFICIAL DAVID ISMAY RESIGNS ‘IMMEDIATELY:’

David Ismay, the Baker administration $130,000-a-year climate change undersecretary, has resigned “immediately” citing his incendiary comments.

In a resignation letter he shared with the Herald today, Ismay writes: “It is with great regret that I submit my resignation, effectively immediately, from the  position of Undersecretary for Climate Change in the Executive Office of Energy and  Environmental Affairs.”

The resignation letter is addressed to his boss, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Kathleen Theoharides, and is dated Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Ismay heads out the door after a series of questionable comments about forcing homeowners, motorists and fishermen to prepare for hard times as the state pushes for so-called Net Zero emissions in the years to come.

Even Gov. Charlie Baker bristled at Ismay’s rhetoric, saying the undersecretary does not speak for him.

Ismay laded on the hot seat after MassFiscal posted a video of the undersecretary saying the state needs to “break their will” and “turn the screws on” ordinary people to force changes in their consumption of heating fuels and gasoline. Ismay described the ordinary people as the “person across the street” and the “senior on fixed income.”

That didn’t sit well with the governor.

“First of all, no one who works in our administration should ever say or think anything like that — ever,” Baker said late last week. “Secondly, Secretary Theoharides is going to have a conversation with him about that.”

Biden and Yellen brush aside inflation warnings in pursuing $1.9 trillion plan for full employment.

The Biden administration is fighting hard for a historically ambitious fiscal package in the name of lowering unemployment, disregarding warnings from Democratic-aligned economists that their plans would risk runaway inflation.

President Biden is seeking a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to add to the $900 billion measure enacted in December.

If Biden’s full proposal were passed, the aid would double the shortfall in economic output due to the pandemic, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, for the next three years.

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Such a tactic could easily backfire on demoncraps. The old line about ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ was thought up for instructional purposes.

Senate Democrats Eyeing Reconciliation For Gun Control Bills

With the U.S. Senate split 50-50, the chances of gun control legislation passing through the normal legislative process are slim at best. Unfortunately, there are a couple of legislative tricks that anti-gun Senators could use to get around the fact that 60 senators are needed to close off debate and approve bills.

In a newly released interview conducted by the Las Vegas Sun in January of 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden said he planned on using “must pass” legislation as a vehicle for his gun ban; attaching it as an amendment to a budget authorization bill, for instance.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, on the other hand, tells the Michael Bloomberg-funded anti-gun news outlet The Trace that he believes another parliamentary procedure could help shepherd gun control legislation through the Senate.

Senate Democrats could advance gun reform legislation via the budget reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to pass tax and spending bills with a simple majority vote. Blumenthal says Ethan’s Law has a good chance of passing that way.

Budget reconciliation has never been used to pass a gun measure before, so it would set a precedent if Democrats go this route. As [Pro. Stephen] Smith put it: “Democrats are thinking far more creatively about this process than they have in the past.”

The “Ethan’s Law” that Blumenthal referenced would require all firearms be kept under lock and key when they’re not in use or “under the control” of the gun owner. It’s one of several gun storage bills that have already been filed in Congress this session, but I think it would actually be questionable as to whether reconciliation could be used for that particular piece of legislation. As The Trace‘s Jennifer Mascia noted, reconciliation is generally used for budgetary measures, and Blumenthal’s bill doesn’t require any new government taxes or spending.

Honestly, Biden’s gun ban would be a better fit for an attempt to use reconciliation as a way to get the bill to his desk, but even then I think the vote would be close. Would Joe Manchin sign on to Biden’s gun ban? In 2012 Machin sounded supportive of the idea, telling MSNBC that he didn’t know “anyone in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle.”

In a 2018 appearance on the same network, however, Manchin was singing a slightly different tune.

“They’re sold now legally, I’m not going to weigh in on that at this point in time,” he said. “I don’t have a desire to buy one, I don’t own one. I have a lot of friends that have sports cars, 200 mph on the speedometer, do you think they’re going to go 200? But they think they can or it will if they wanted to. That is a difficult one, there is not enough votes to repeal that.”

Asked once again how he would vote on a proposal to ban AR-15s, Manchin said: “I don’t have any friends that own the gun right now, I don’t know anyone who’s committed a crime with it so I wouldn’t take their gun away.”

Manchin is no Second Amendment stalwart, but he’s a pretty decent politician who’s managed to get re-elected as a Democrat even as West Virginia has become one of the reddest states in the nation. If Manchin were the deciding vote for Biden’s gun ban, it would spell not only the end of his political career in the state but would devastate the Democrat party in West Virginia for a decade or more.

By the way, I do need to correct The Trace‘s Mascia on one part of her story:

A more formidable obstacle to gun reform is the filibuster, which allows lawmakers to delay a vote on a bill. If the filibuster were abolished, Democrats could pass gun reform with a simple majority. But not every Democrat is on board — including West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, a longtime proponent of expanding background checks. As long as the filibuster stands, Democrats need 60 votes for most legislation — 59 senators and the vice president.

That’s simply not true. The vice-president only casts a vote in her role as the President of the Senate when there’s a tie. If the vote is 59-41, Kamala Harris doesn’t get to vote on the bill. Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution is clear that “the Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

Even with the filibuster in place, however, reconciliation and Biden’s threat to pack “must pass” legislation with his anti-gun agenda are genuine concerns for those of us opposed to sweeping infringements on our right to keep and bear arms. Second Amendment activists are going to have to be vigilant in watching Congress over the next two years, even as we work to replace the narrow anti-gun majorities in the House and Senate with politicians who recognize and respect our right to keep and bear arms.