Category: Crap For Brains

2 Georgia men killed — one electrocuted, the other in explosion — during theft at power station

GAINESVILLE, Ga. — Two Georgia men are dead after attempting to steal copper wire from a power substation, Gainesville police told CBS News.

The men have been identified as Shane Joseph Long, 45, and Christopher Blair Wood, 44.

Police responded to the power station after getting a call from someone at a nearby business saying there was an explosion, CBS News reported. Both firefighters and police made their way to the explosion where they found the two men dead.

An investigation revealed the two men were thieves attempting to steal copper wire and other electrical components, police said.

Lieutenant Kevin Holbrook told CBS News that one of the men was killed by electrocution and the other man could have been killed by the transformer explosion.

Autopsies are still being conducted to determine the cause of death.

CBS News reports that nationwide, power stations have been reporting a rise in copper wire or metal theft. Holbrook the robbers sell the wire to scrap yards or third-party individuals.

Profits from these sales are generally low, Holbrook told CBS News.

CDC team got sick while investigating health risks from Ohio toxic train derailment.

A team of seven US government investigators fell ill while studying the health impacts of the February derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals through East Palestine, Ohio, according to the CDC.

The group, including members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, were going house-to-house surveying town residents near contaminated areas when they began feeling symptoms including sore throats, headaches, coughing and nausea. The group spent a day working from their hotel, before their symptoms quickly resolved, the agency told CNN.

“Symptoms resolved for most team members later the same afternoon, and everyone resumed work on survey data collection within 24 hours. Impacted team members have not reported ongoing health effects,” a CDC spokesperson told the network.

The public health agency did not initially disclose the team getting sick to the public.

Two contractors working on the derailment for the EPA also reported health symptoms after working in an area with strong odors, CNN reported. The agency said that none of the other more than 100 EPA employees on the scene reported any issues.

More than half of the people in a state survey reported headaches, anxiety, couching, fatigue, and irritated skin after the derailment, according to research released Friday from the Ohio Department of Health.

Officials have said the water and air in East Palestine is safe to consume, despite rampant conspiracies online that following the crash and subsequent decision to conduct a controlled burn of some of the chemicals that were spilled.

On Friday, governor Mike DeWine’s office confirmed 1,900 feet of railroad track at the crash site will be removed to allow for the excavation and removal of contaminated soil, and said testing at 157 private wells showed no contaminated water.

As The Independent reported, public health experts say long-term testing is needed in East Palestine to monitor the potential health effects of exposure to the toxic materials transported by the train that derailed.

“Byproducts from the burn could be very toxic and we don’t know yet know what they are,” Dr Erin Haynes, professor of preventive medicine and environmental health at the University of Kentucky told The Independent. “They have probably settled onto the soil. They’re in the homes on surfaces and they could be in the waterways in the sediments…We do not know the long-term consequences of that exposure.”

Actually, It Is ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’

One pernicious development of these parlous times has been the rise of various cults that ape the trappings of Christianity while being fundamentally and unalterably opposed to its moral tenets. Case in point, the Marxist Suicide Cult masquerading as heroic do-gooderism that goes by the name of “climate change,” by which these solipsistic lunatics mean “man-made climate change.”

The argument that the climate is changing is prima facie false, because there is no argument. The climate is always changing. An hour in any major art gallery immediately illustrates that. Start with the Dutch paintings from the Little Ice Age, such as Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow from 1565 if you doubt me. Note also that the old city of Alexandria, in Egypt, which was founded by the Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great c. 331 B.C., and once ruled over by Cleopatra, is now under water. Man had nothing to do with either.

All gone now.

In fact, to say that puny human beings can affect the climate is arrogance of the highest order when one considers the size of the Sun and the vastness of even our little solar system at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. “An ant in the afterbirth,” as Mr. Dolarhyde famously put it.

In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit…. This was also the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.

The effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by, among other things, erratic harvests. In Europe, rivers and lakes and harbors froze, leading to phenomena such as the “frost fairs” on the River Thames—fairgrounds that spread across the river’s London tideway, which went from being a freakish rarity to a semi-regular event. (Virginia Woolf set a scene in “Orlando” at one.) Birds iced up and fell from the sky; men and women died of hypothermia; the King of France’s beard froze solid while he slept… in 1588, the Spanish Armada was destroyed by an unprecedented Arctic hurricane, and a factor in the Great Fire of London, in 1666, was the ultra-dry summer that succeeded the previous, bitter winter.

And then a warming trend began, continuing into our day: high culture flourished, science advanced along with the arts, and a longer growing season helped fuel a rise in population. This, of course, is not good enough for the ninnies, hysterics and bed-wetters who are convinced We’re All Going to Die if we don’t immediately reverse these civilizational advances (which, remarkably, seemed to have passed the entire southern hemisphere by), tear down our offending infrastructure, cease having babies (but import other people’s babies), reduce our mobility, and ban everything that “pollutes” our precious air and water, even at the cost of a grotesque and unnecessary reduction in living standards: 1565, here we come again!

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Analysis: A Legal Template for Upholding AR-15 Bans is Emerging

A federal judge upheld Delaware’s “assault weapons” ban this week using reasoning likely to resonate with other courts inclined to reach the same outcome.

On Monday, Federal District Judge Richard G. Andrews, an Obama appointee, found the state’s ban on AR-15s, AK-47s, and similar firearms–along with its ban on magazines that hold more than 17 rounds–is constitutional. He did so despite finding the guns were “in common” use for lawful purposes.

“[I] conclude that the prohibited LCMs, like the prohibited assault long guns, are in common use for self-defense and therefore ‘presumptively protect[ed]’ by the Second Amendment,” Judge Andrews ruled in Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

That probably left a lot of people doing a double-take. But Judge Andrews came to his conclusion after arguing AR-15s and the like weren’t common during the founding era and represented a technological advancement that is responsible for a uniquely modern problem: mass shootings. Because of this, he argued Bruen allowed him to look for historical analogues that show a history of regulation instituted for the same purpose and using the same means.
He ruled there was such a tradition.

“I find that the LCM and assault long gun prohibitions of HB 450 and SS 1 for SB 6 are consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” he wrote. “Plaintiffs have therefore failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of their Second Amendment claim.”
He pointed to the proliferation of late 19th Century Bowie knife and Billy club bans, plus later machinegun bans, as evidence governments have previously banned the sale of weapons they believe are associated with especially dangerous criminal behavior. He further argued banning a subset of weapons was a relatively minor burden and one that was similar to his historical examples.

“[B]oth sets of regulations impose a ‘comparable burden,” he wrote. “Indeed, the burden that the challenged regulations impose is slight.”
Judge Andrews isn’t the only, or even the first, one to use this concept to save a ban. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, denied an attempt to block Oregon’s magazine limit under the same basic framework. While she went further and said she didn’t need to do a Bruen analysis at all because ammunition magazines aren’t protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment, she did the analysis anyway, and it came out along the same lines as Judge Andrews’ argument.

It’s likely other courts will adopt this framework as well.
Other courts, namely the Ninth and Fourth Circuits, have previously shown they don’t believe AR-15s or similar guns should be sold to civilians. The old two-step balancing test of the pre-Bruen era was explicitly about whether the argued public safety impact of banning the guns was enough to overcome the infringement on the right of Americans to have them. Any court that upheld an “assault weapons” ban before 2022 essentially said “yes.”

So, given the opportunity to review the law again, it’s fair to think they may want to find a way to reach the same conclusion. That’s especially true if the path to that answer appears to at least plausibly fit within the Supreme Court’s new test.

Of course, Judge Andrews’ reasoning has some serious flaws. For one, it seems to be making the same mistake in the eyes of the Court that the two-step test did: going one step too far.

Reading Heller, McDonald, and Bruen provides the impression that any class of firearms considered to be in “common use” for lawful purposes, such as self-defense, is inherently protected by the Second Amendment and can’t be banned by the government.

“The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms ‘in common use at the time’ for lawful purposes like self-defense,” The Court  wrote in Heller.

“Indeed, that is precisely the way in which the Second Amendment’s operative clause furthers the purpose announced in its preface. We therefore read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns. That accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right[…].”

That Judge Andrews finds AR-15s and the other banned guns in common use for the purpose of self-defense and then proceeds on to further analysis is unlikely to be what The Court had in mind. It seems relatively clear SCOTUS doesn’t believe it is possible to ban any gun that is in common use for lawful purposes. So, the detour into comparing modern “assault weapons” bans to 19th Century Bowie knife or Billy club bans will likely be unpersuasive should it ever make its way up to The High Court.

It also suffers from the lack of a limiting principle. Judge Andrews argues that the self-loading, semi-automatic technology found in AR-15s and the other banned guns didn’t become popular until after the Civil War. And their adoption led to the rise of mass shootings (never mind that semi-automatics were becoming common about 100 years before the onset of modern mass shootings).

But there’s nothing in Judge Andrews’ line of reasoning that wouldn’t prevent the same argument from being applied to all semi-automatic firearms or an ammunition magazine of essentially any size. That includes semi-automatic handguns, which the Supreme Court has already ruled can’t be banned.

Still, even if the prospects for success on appeal to the Supreme Court are dim for this argument upholding AR bans, it will likely proliferate in some of the most important circuits because it at least attempts to follow the Bruen steps while still maintaining the bans. And, even if the weaknesses are as serious as they appear, pointing them out will only matter if the Supreme Court actually takes up a case involving them. After all, the two-step test The Court excoriated in Bruen was the defacto review standard on gun cases for a decade because of SCOTUS inaction.

Whatever ends up happening, expect to see Judge Andrews’ legal reasoning pop up anytime a gun or magazine ban is upheld.

Blast from the past: Anti-gunners recycle talking points from the 80s in response to Florida permitless carry

In 1986, Florida passed “shall issue” concealed carry legislation, kicking off a decades-long trend across the country that has continued to this day. At the time, Florida’s adoption of shall-issue language was a very big deal and a huge change to the “may issue” status quo, and gun control advocates did their best to drum up the public’s fears; predicting “Wild West shootouts” over parking spaces and a descent into a dystopian hellscape. As the NYTimes breathlessly reported in 1987 as the “shall issue” law took effect:

Only Florida has a law ”in which a license to carry a concealed gun is given by the state,” said Sarah Brady, vice-chairman of Handgun Control Inc., a Washington-based lobbying group. ”We believe that this kind of decision should be made on a local level where people know one another rather than applying to a state office.”

Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth noted this month that the law, passed overwhelmingly by the Legislature in the spring, ”has left the area of unconcealed manual possession of a firearms totally unregulated.”

This gap has created ”the possibility of openly armed youth gangs hanging around street corners and gunmen parading through a shopping mall,” the Attorney General wrote in a letter urging that the law be amended in the current special legislative session.…

”It was about time for Florida to have such a law,” said Richard M. Manning, a National Rifle Association official who pushed for the legislation.

He is counting the days until the law goes into effect Thursday. So too is Mrs. Brady and other gun control supporters, and they are worried about what will happen in Florida. Widepread weapons possession ”is not the best way to handle the increase of violence,” said Mrs. Brady, whose husband, James S. Brady, the White House press secretary, was shot in an assassination attempt against President Reagan. ”We are the only civilized nation in the world without a good gun law and we are the most violent in the West.”

A funny thing happened after “shall issue” went into effect: crime dropped, and not just by a little bit. Between 1987 and 2019, Florida’s violent crime and homicide rates declined by more than 50%, and the state now has around 2.5-million active concealed carry licenses.

But in the wake of the Florida legislature sending a permitless carry bill to Gov. Ron DeSantis, anti-gunners are dusting off their old arguments and once again deploying them in a campaign of fearmongering. Here’s a portion of Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago’s hyperbolic response to the passage of HB 543 headlined “Permitless carry and gun sanctuary cities. Visit Florida at your own risk – it’s a blast!”

This is a state where people aren’t required to register guns like they do cars or house alarms. There’s no paperwork, no background check involved when gifting or privately selling guns. Only in gun shop and gun show sales do buyers undergo basic scrutiny.

And now, not even first-time gun users will be required to learn how to use a gun, online or in a gun range, to carry a concealed gun around the rest of us.

Their new right puts the rest of us at greater risk of dying as a result of their incompetence.

The permitless carry bill, CS/HB543, now heads to Gov. DeSantis, a fan of even worse, open-carry. He will be all too giddy to sign it into law. He was the bill’s chief proponent, although, hypocritically so — the governor doesn’t want guns at his events.

Remember, he got caught asking the city of Tampa to ban firearms at his election party — and to take the blame for it so he didn’t have to?

DeSantis had nothing to worry about.

“Historic NRA Win: Constitutional Carry Passes in Florida,” the organization boasted in a press release sent, in its own words, “moments” after the vote. They’ll shower DeSantis with funds for his likely presidential run.

But for the safety at major events — like spring break in South Beach — the new law foreshadows new trouble.

Although there’s talk that it could be possible to fence in an event, call it a private party and prohibit guns — like at DeSantis’ election event — “the gun law passed by the Legislature allowing concealed weapons with no permit or training will make 2024 in South Beach a nightmare,” said Stuart Blumberg, a 77-year resident of Miami Beach and founder of the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association.

Agreed, said Michael Grieco, a former Miami Beach commissioner and ex-state Rep. , a criminal defense attorney who carries a concealed weapon: “It’s just going to exacerbate the problem. I’m a Democrat and gun-owner, and this bill passed scares the crap out of me. As a father who drives his kid to school every week,” he said, pausing, “now anyone can just go buy a gun with only some nonsensical, lighthearted background check.”

Umm, that was the case before HB 543 was approved by lawmakers.
The bill doesn’t make any changes to the purchase or sale of firearms. It simply states that those Floridians who would be eligible to obtain a concealed carry license can carry a concealed firearm without the need for a government-issued permission slip. All those prohibited from possessing or carrying a firearm today will still be forbidden from doing so when the law takes effect on July 1st.

To opponents of Florida’s permitless carry bill, it’s the 1980s all over again. But while Florida was at the forefront of the “shall issue” movement almost 40 years ago, it’s far from an early adopter of permitless carry. When DeSantis signs HB 543 into law, Florida will join 25 other states in recognizing the right to bear arms without paying hundreds of dollars in fees and costs to do so. None of the doom-and-gloom predictions from anti-gunners have come to pass in those states, and not one has seen fit to repeal its permitless carry law after deciding it was a mistake.

In fact, I’ve got a story that should put Fabiola’s fears to rest. It comes from the constitutional carry state of Ohio; specifically the city of Toledo, which has not had a firearm-involved homicide since early February, when a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed inside his home. In fact, as of March 31st Toledo has only reported six homicides this year, well below where the city was at this point in 2021 and 2022, before constitutional carry took effect. The true number is likely even lower; one incident involved a man shot and killed by Toledo police, another fatal shooting is probably going to be ruled a justifiable homicide given that it was a burglar who was shot, while the family of the 15-year-old says he was the victim of an accidental shooting and not an intentional act of violence.

I’m not exclusively crediting constitutional carry for the plunge in homicides. Crime is complicated, and there are undoubtably a number of factors at work. But it’s clear that permitless carry, by itself, does not lead to an automatic rise in shootings or gun-involved murders any more than “shall-issue” concealed carry led to more crime in Florida in the decades after it was enshrined into law. Most violent criminals aren’t legally walking around with guns to begin with, so the new law will be of little note or use to them. What’s most important is that law enforcement sticks to the tactics and strategies that are most effective in reducing violent crime; focusing on the most violent and prolific offenders instead of casting a wide net of gun control laws over the general public.

The current doomcasting over Florida’s permitless carry law is nothing more than a rehash of decades-old arguments that have been proven false time and time again. The attempts to scare the pants off the public will only intensify between now and July 1st, but gun owners should keep calm and look forward to the day when they can carry on their person without having to get a permission slip from the state beforehand.

Fuhgeddaboudit it’s NOO YAWK

Manhattan garage worker charged with attempted murder after shooting thief

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief — then wrestled the gun away and opened fire on the suspect — has been charged with attempted murder, police said.

The overnight worker, identified by cops as Moussa Diarra, 57, was also hit with assault and criminal possession of a weapon charge in the Saturday incident, which unfolded around 5:30 a.m. as the attendant saw a man peering into cars on the second floor of the West 31st Street garage, the sources said.

Believing the man was stealing, the attendant brought him outside and asked what was inside his bag.

Instead of cooperating, the man pulled out a gun, the sources said.

Diarra tried to grab for the weapon, and it went off — leaving him shot in the stomach and grazed in the ear by a bullet before he turned the firearm on the would-be thief and shot him in the chest, sources said.

The suspected thief, identified as Charles Rhodie, 59, was also charged with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon, as well as burglary, police said late Saturday.

While police hit Diarra with attempted murder, it wasn’t immediately clear if prosecutors would follow through with the charge.

The initial charges against Diarra sparked outrage — and recalled the case of Manhattan bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was charged with murder after a fatal July 1 confrontation in his store with an angry customer who came behind his counter and accosted him.

Family friend Mariame Diarra, who is not related to the attendant, slammed the decision to hit the married dad of two with charges.

“That’s self-defense. The guy tried to rob his business,” she told The Post. “He’s there for security. That’s literally his job, to defend his business. … He takes his job seriously. … Attempted murder charge has no place there. He [robber] came to find him at his job with his gun, he [Diarra] has to defend himself.”

An individual who works nearby the garage, which is across from Moynihan Train Station, was also incredulous.

“You are kidding. That’s an April Fool Day joke, right?” the worker asked of the charges against Diarra, adding, “How can a hardworking man get arrested for defending himself?”

Alba spent six days in Rikers before Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped the controversial murder charge amid intense public pressure to do so.

One cop who heard of the attempted-murder charge against the parking garage worker snarled, “People like Alvin Bragg have made this city unsafe, and this worker is a victim defending himself.”

Moussa and Rhodie, who both live in Manhattan, were taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition after the incident, authorities said.

Yes, his opponent is a carpet bagging RINO, but still, Pennsylvanians knew exactly what they were voting for.

Fetterman Does First Post-Depression Interview and Raises a Multitude of Questions

John Fetterman has finally been released from the hospital after suffering from a reported bout of severe depression. The Pennsylvania senator has long been at the center of controversy surrounding his ailing health, largely centering on the massive stroke he had prior to the 2022 election.

Since then, Fetterman has deteriorated in ways that would have led to immediate calls for his resignation were he not a member of the Democratic Party. He can’t speak properly, he can’t understand others properly, and he relies on a closed captioning device to communicate.

It’s good to be a Democrat, though, and the press has been rushing to cover for him since day one. That continued on Friday with an interview with CBS News that did nothing but raise a multitude of questions.

For starters, is this guy a US senator or not? I’m not trying to downplay his condition. Quite the contrary, but the Senate is not a place to battle depression, much less serious health issues that leave one unable to communicate. The question at hand isn’t how brave Fetterman supposedly is. It’s whether he can do his job, and he obviously can’t. That should be the top issue for every single person who interviews him. Instead, they lavish him with praise while helping him hide his actual condition. It’s dystopian.

Past that, a lot of people noticed where Fetterman’s eyes were going during the interview. Not only is reading the questions on some kind of monitor just off-screen (which CBS News is careful to not show), but he’s pretty clearly also reading his answers. His eyes stay glued to the screen the entire time, with only passing glances at the interviewer herself.

There were also 11 different editing cuts in the 45-second clip that CBS News released. Let me say that again. There were 11 cuts in under a minute.

Those edits weren’t just made for promotional purposes. They were cuts all made during a single question. Why? Because Fetterman takes time to read his monitor and often loses his train of thought. CBS News, instead of being honest with its audience, is trying to hide that fact.

Does that sound like something an honest press would do? If this were a Republican, would they be bending over backward to cover up just how bad things are? We all know the answer to that. Fetterman is not fit to be a US senator. It was easy for anyone to see during the campaign, and he’s even worse off now. Truly, there is nothing the Democratic Party won’t do to hold onto power.

Ultra-ultra crap-for-brains o’ the day

Op-ed claims Founding Fathers would want gun control

I’m a big believer in the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. It’s why I’m a Second Amendment advocate. The way I see it, our Founding Fathers put together a document that did a pretty good job of limiting the government and securing our rights.

Too bad it’s ignored, such as the push for gun control.

But with frightening regularity, there comes someone who seems to act like they held a séance with the Founding Fathers and knows that their past words in support of the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms would go out the window.

People such as this:

The tragic shootings in Nashville, with children and staff at the Covenant School being killed, demands action from Congress. But so many times we have seen Congress do nothing after gun violence.

If America’s Founding Fathers could have traveled in time to today, they would be horrified to see these mass shootings in our schools and communities. They would also be shocked that the Congress has done so little to stop these tragedies.

The Founding Fathers, if they could have foreseen the terror of today, would surely have revised the Second Amendment. They would urge us to implement gun control today.

There must be some limitations on the right to bear arms of the Second Amendment. There must be gun control including banning assault weapons. As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”

First, while I respect the late Justice Scalia, he wasn’t a Founding Father. Injecting his comment, one often taken drastically out of context, isn’t making the case.

The author here, like so many others, claims the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have supported the right they literally fought and bled for if they could see the bad things happening today.

Yet they offer no evidence for such a claim. Nothing in their writings of the time suggested they were in favor of forfeiting the right to keep and bear arms simply because people could do bad things.

In fact, that claim flies directly in the face of something one of our Founding Fathers said explicitly. Thomas Jefferson said, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” That tells me that yes, he’d look at what we see today, and while he would mourn those lost lives, there’s little reason to believe he’d suddenly want to restrict people’s rights.

The Buckeye Firearms Association has a very handy list of other pro-gun quotes from our Founding Fathers, none of which suggest even a hint of support for the idea of gun control.

See, what the author has done is convince himself of a fiction, that the Founding Fathers are whatever he wants to believe them to be. Further, since so many of us look to them for guidance on matters of policy, he somehow hopes he’ll suddenly be the one to trick us into supporting gun control.

That’s really not how it works. You can’t just say, “They’d support me,” then just expect people to shrug and accept it.

Let’s also remember that in the time of the founding, private parties owned artillery and equipped their own private warships–letters of marque were a thing, after all–which could lay waste to people in numbers even the much vilified AR-15 couldn’t.

If they were willing to trust the American people with that, then just why would you assume they’d suddenly support gun control? The fact that you just really, really want them to isn’t enough.

Yet this is what passes for reasoning, apparently.

Missouri bill to ban federal “red flag” laws, funding killed by Republican senator

JEFFERSON CITY — A Missouri bill that would ban federal funds and programs from being used in the state to enforce “red flag” gunmeasures was killed by a committee Wednesday.

Republican Sen. Bill Eigel of Weldon Spring filed the legislation, Senate Bill 10, in response to a recent plan from the U.S. Department of Justice to distribute dollars to states to administer “red flag” laws and other crisis intervention programs related to gun violence.

But the legislation failed to pass out of committee after a Republican joined Democrats in voting it down, citing a school shooting in Nashville this week that killed three students and three adults.

Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Springfield Republican, joined the two Democrats on the committee to vote against the legislation. Three other Republicans — Sens. Rick Brattin, Rusty Black and Mike Bernskoetter — voted in favor of the bill, but did not reach the majority of votes required. The fourth Republican on the committee, Sen. Mike Cierpiot, did not vote.

“I think it’s a little disheartening, quite frankly, to even be having this sort of conversation given what happened two days in Nashville,” Hough said prior to the vote. “But I’m more than happy to go ahead and have a vote right now.”

Bernskoetter, the chairman of the committee, responded that “I told (Eigle) I would have a vote on it and I’m having a vote on it.”

Eigel has said the legislation “builds on” a 2021 law that nullified federal gun statutes in Missouri, which is currently facing litigation and has been decried by members of law enforcement.

“The federal government, the Biden administration, is trying very hard to try to use federal dollars to be sent into the state of Missouri to incentivize the creation of these red flag databases,” he said at a hearing in February.

In a Twitter post Wednesday after the vote, Eigel alleged that Hough and Cierpiot had “coordinated and vote to derail” the bill, calling it a “dark day for supporters of (the Second Amendment).”

Wednesday’s vote marks the second consecutive session Hough has joined with Democrats in committee to vote down legislation relating to guns. He and another Republican voted with Democrats last year to kill legislation that would have expanded legal immunity for those who shoot and kill someone in self-defense. That bill was dubbed the “Make Murder Legal Act” by an association of county prosecutors.

Karine Jean-Pierre Responds to Question About Gun Confiscation With an Alarming Answer

When faced with a relatively easy question about President Joe Biden’s position on gun confiscation policies, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Invoking repeatedly failed candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s 2019 presidential debate promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “Does the president support not just banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons but further than that, confiscation?”

It’s a straightforward question: Does President Biden think legally owned firearms should be confiscated by the federal government? But Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” in what should be an easy answer.

Instead, Jean-Pierre ignored the question and retreated to the usual Democrat talking points about “weapons of war” that “should not be on the streets across the country in our communities, they should not be in schools, they should not be in grocery stores, they should not be in churches — that’s what the president believes.”

Jean-Pierre went on to claim Biden “has done more than any other president the first two years” to address what Democrats say is a crisis of “weapons of war” in America. “Now it’s time for Congress to do the work,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s happy to sign, once that happens, he’s happy to sign that legislation that says, ‘ok we’re going to remove assault weapons, we’re going to have an assault weapons ban.'”

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say whether Biden supports gun confiscation for “assault weapons,” President Biden’s record on the subject is not a winning one, nor is Democrats’ obsession with eradicating “assault weapons” — a purposefully non-specific term usually paired with other buzzwords such as “military style” — a policy goal that’s been shown to limit instances of violence in which the perpetrator uses a firearm.

As we at Townhall have repeatedly noted, Biden’s frequent claim that the “assault weapons” ban he worked on as a U.S. senator was effective just doesn’t pass muster. Biden and his administration’s claim that it’s possible to get the specter of “assault weapons” off America’s streets is one this administration employs frequently while attempting to take advantage of tragedies. “But according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the ban cannot be credited with reducing violence or mass shootings,” Katie noted after Biden repeated the claim last May. Here’s what the DOJ found:

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

“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, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury,” the summary of the report on the study’s findings states. “The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban.”

If banning “assault weapons” didn’t reduce gun violence, nor reduce the lethality of gun violence, then passing a new ban or going as far as confiscating such firearms — something Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t rule out this week — won’t make a difference either and will only further infringe on the rights of Americans.

Federal District Judge Wimes Creates Novel Excuses to Rule 2A Protection Act Unconstitutional

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)-— On March 6, 2023, federal Judge Brian C. Wimes ruled the Missouri Second Amendment Protection Act was unconstitutional, claiming the Act violates the Supremacy clause of the US Constitution, invalidates federal law, and violates the doctrine of “intergovernmental immunity”.

The Federal court system has long held states cannot be compelled to use their resources to enforce federal laws. States are not required to explain why they do not wish to use those resources to enforce federal laws. They have the power to refuse to do so. To hold otherwise is to collapse the power-sharing between states and the federal government into a monolithic entity controlled by the federal government. This doctrine is known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.

Judge Wimes appears to be nullifying the anti-commandeering doctrine by claiming Missouri must use state resources to investigate and prosecute federal law. Refusing to do so, Judge Wimes claims, is “obstructing” federal law enforcement, which is somehow a violation of the supremacy clause and intergovernmental immunity.

From the opinion:

SAPA is an unconstitutional “interposit[ion]” against federal law and is designed to be just that. Id. Section 1.410(5) states the Missouri General Assembly’s declaration that the Supremacy Clause “does not extend to various federal statutes, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules, regulations, or other actions that collect data or restrict or prohibit the manufacture, ownership, or use of firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition exclusively within the borders of Missouri . . . .” Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.410(5). However, the Missouri General Assembly’s assertion that the Supremacy Clause does not extend to acts of Congress does not make it so. To the contrary, 15 “[t]he law of congress is paramount; it cannot be nullified by direct act of any state, nor the scope and effect of its provisions set at naught indirectly.” Anderson, 135 U.S. at 490.

SAPA does not prevent agents of the federal government from investigating, arresting, prosecuting or convicting residents of Missouri who violate federal law. It prevents agents of the state and local governments from assisting federal agents in doing so. Judge Wimes claims the anti-commandeering doctrine does not apply by quoting reasons in SAPA for the purpose of the law. But the purpose of state law has not generally been an issue in anti-commandeering doctrine.  The Constitutionality of laws is based on what the law does, not what the law claims the purposes of the law are.

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Thank God this hack never made it to a set on the Supreme Court. After he’s done being a bureaucrap, it’s likely he’ll slide off into some partnership deal at a D.C. or NYC law firm and disappear off the scene.

Attorney General Garland: Too early to call Nashville shooting a hate crime

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday that it’s too early for the Justice Department to say whether the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville should be considered a hate crime.

Mr. Garland said the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are looking at the incident in cooperation with local authorities.

“We are certainly working full-time with them to try to determine what the motive is, and motive determines whether it’s a hate crime,” the attorney general said in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

His answers came in response to Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican, who wanted to know if the Justice Department would open a hate crimes investigation even though the shooting suspect is dead.

Local authorities say Audrey Hale killed three adults and three children at The Covenant School, which is associated with the Presbyterian Church.

Authorities said the 28-year-old Hale was a former student and seemed to have targeted the school, though the children and adults killed were chosen randomly. Nashville’s police chief said the shooter was transgender.

Police shot and killed Hale roughly 14 minutes after the first 911 call about the incident.

Poor Huffpo.

Heller, McDonald and Bruen are Affecting How State Legislatures View Pending Gun Control Legislation.

[Heller and McDonald] allowed opponents to wage new battles against longstanding gun laws. When District Judge Roger Benitez overturned California’s 34-year-old assault weapons ban two years ago, he pointed to Heller, saying that under the decision, “it is obvious that the California assault weapon ban is unconstitutional.”

Because the Heller ruling applied to guns in common use, the sheer volume of semi-automatic rifles in America protects them under the Second Amendment, according to Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Federation.

“There are currently 24.4 million of these rifles in circulation today,” Oliva said. “To put that into context for you, there are more of these rifles in circulation today than there are F-150s on the road.” …

Eight more states have laws similar to California’s assault weapons ban that could be affected if the Supreme Court ultimately weighs in.

The expectation that these laws may be doomed is already complicating the politics of passing new ones like them.

In New Mexico, Democratic Gov. Michelle Luján Grisham has repeatedly urged the legislature to send her an assault weapons ban to sign this session, but lawmakers tabled the effort — partly over concerns that it wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in federal court.

“There’s absolutely no point to passing new laws which federal courts will strike down and which are clearly going to be deemed unconstitutional,” state Sen. Joseph Cervantes, a Democrat, tweeted last month.

With those lawsuits still playing out, the future of gun policy remains in flux. But that legal panorama makes it hard to imagine clear lanes for reform in the near future.

“We’re in a very difficult spot with that Bruen ruling,” said Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. “Even though it was only about concealed carry, it’s just made everybody afraid who wants to pass common sense gun violence prevention legislation.”

— Roque Planas and Paul Blumenthal in How the Courts Are Strangling Gun Reform

Nashville shooting: White House presses GOP on assault-style weapons ban

President Joe Biden is seeking to put pressure on congressional Republicans to pass an assault weapons ban after three children and three adults were killed during a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.

“He wants Congress to act because enough is enough,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday. “How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?”

Schools should be “safe spaces for our kids to grow and learn and for our educators to teach,” Jean-Pierre said, adding Biden had been briefed on the situation and that the White House is coordinating with the Justice Department and local officials. She defended Biden’s gun-related executive orders and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which incentivized states to introduce so-called red flag laws.

“I don’t have the data” on the effectiveness of Biden’s unilateral action, the press secretary said.

Biden will address the shooting at a small-business event Monday afternoon, she added.

Six people are dead, as well as the shooter, after a 28-year-old woman opened fire with two assault-type rifles and a handgun Monday morning at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville.

Quote O’ The Day
The military is not a therapy program – Sarah Hoyt

Military Officials: Diversity Training Makes Soldiers Feel ‘Included’.

Top military officials in the Biden Administration recently attempted to defend far-left “diversity” training in the military, claiming that such sessions make all soldiers feel more “included.”

As the Washington Free Beacon reports, Air Force Chief of Staff General C.Q. Brown gave an interview for Defense One defending the practice of diversity training, claiming that “when people join our military, they want to look around and see somebody who looks like them.”

“They want to be part of a team, and feel like they’re included,” Brown added.

Brown praised the practice for its alleged efforts to build “cohesive” teams for all service members, “no matter their background.”

Similarly, General David Berger, Commandant of the Marine Corps, claimed that he has seen “zero evidence” of any negative impact from such left-wing policies when it comes to the end result of making stronger Marines.

House Republicans are currently attempting to cut funding for such far-left practices in the military; other examples include a program in the Army for training soldiers on how to use “gender pronouns,” and a similar training video for the Navy discussing pronouns and “safe spaces.”

Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) declared that the Biden Administration’s efforts to force politics into the military are “shaping the Department of Defense into an institution that is spearheading toxic social policies instead of restoring military strength.”

“On the House Armed Services Committee, we are laser-focused on the threats we face and the capabilities we need to defeat them,” said Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

The fight over the politicization of the military comes as most branches struggle with reaching the appropriate levels of recruitment numbers in recent years. Last year, the U.S. Army missed its minimum recruitment goal by 15,000.

This is what happens when pronouns are a higher priority than logistics

U.S. Weapons Stockpile Disaster Limiting Our Ability To Deter China In Taiwan
It’s so bad now, even the New York Times is reporting about it.

In late January we reported that U.S. military weapons stockpiles were so low that various commentators were describing the shortages as “uncomfortably low,” “insufficient,” “precarious,” and “dangerous” due to the large quantities of these weapons we had given free of charge to Ukraine: U.S. Weapons Stockpiles “Uncomfortably Low” Due To Arms Shipments to Ukraine:

To date, the U.S. military has provided a “staggering” amount of military hardware and munitions to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, amounting to more than $27 billion. This U.S. support has included over 1 million rounds of 155 mm howitzer ammunition. It has also included 8,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 32,000 anti-tank missiles of other types, 5,200 Excalibur precision 155 mm howitzer rounds, and 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, among many other weapons systems and munitions.

[T]he Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense concludes that “[t]he fact that only a few months of fighting in Ukraine consumed such a large percentage of U.S. Stingers and Javelins suggests that the DOD’s plans, and the stockpiles that result from them, are insufficient.” Even the Washington Post has conceded the seriousness of the situation, noting that “[s]tocks of many key weapons and munitions are near exhaustion,” and citing a…CSIS report that concludes that “the U.S. defense industrial base is in pretty poor shape right now [and] we don’t make it past four or five days in a war game before we run out of precision missiles.” The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) describes the state of U.S. weapons stockpiles as “precarious.”

The U.S. Naval Institute describes them as “dangerous” due to their low inventory levels. Even a U.S. Department of Defense official quoted by the Wall Street Journal admitted that munitions stockpiles are “uncomfortably low” in that they are “not at the level we would like to go into combat.” This official explained that the only reason the issue isn’t “critical” is because “the U.S. isn’t engaged in any major military conflict” at the moment.

The key problem, of course, as we reported, is that the administration’s official position is that, in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley, “we will continue to support [Ukraine] all the way” and “[w]e will be there for as long as it takes to keep Ukraine free,” despite the obvious impact of such support on U.S. weapons’ stockpile levels.

And one of the side issues, although of critical seriousness, is that this arms largesse to Ukraine severely impacts our ability to come to Taiwan’s aid in case of an invasion by China, as we reported:

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You simply can’t make up this kind of crap-for-brains judicial double talk.

Comment O’ The Day:
This is exactly what happens when you allow the courts to go outside the original text as Scalia did in the Heller ruling.
Since when did the 2A say anything about dangerous and unusual weapons?
And no one in the decision asked; If it wasn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t be considered a weapon? Thus, not even under the purview of the court?
The problem is political bias. It’s time the courts started calling it plain.
Nothing about 2A is a difficult decision. Just an unpopular one in certain circles.
So much for even the thin veil of democracy they hide behind.
Bans aren’t unusual? That’s basically what started the revolution!

Second Amendment Roundup: An Opening Judicial Salvo in Defense of Illinois’ New Rifle Ban

The latest salvo in America’s “assault-weapon” wars is the decision of February 17 by Judge Virginia Kendall of the Norther District of Illinois in Bevis v. City of Naperville finding that plaintiffs are not likely to prevail on their challenge to the bans under the city’s ordinance or under Illinois’ just-passed Protect Illinois Communities Act.

Just last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court said that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,” and that the term “arms” “covers modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense” and “weapons that are unquestionably in common use today.” None of those three phrases found its way into the district court’s decision approving the prohibition of the AR-15, America’s most popular rifle, and many other semiautomatics.

The court started out on the right track recognizing that the plaintiffs had standing and that the harm they sought to alleviate was redressable. It made the interesting point that the Second Amendment “differs from many other amendments in that it protects access to a tangible item, as opposed to an intangible right,” and that makes it similar to the First Amendment, under which “individuals can sue when the government bans protected books or attempts to close a bookstore based on content censorship.”

While five appellate courts had upheld “assault weapon” bans, Bruen pulled the rug out from under them with its text-history approach and rejection of the two-part balancing test. The Seventh Circuit had gone its own way in Friedman v. City of Highland Park (2015), holding that the banned arms were not common at the time of ratification, had no militia nexus, and were not needed by citizens for self-defense. As Judge Kendall wrote, “Friedman cannot be reconciled with Bruen.” Per Bruen, protected arms are not limited to those that existed in 1791 or that are useful in warfare, and “the arguments that other weapons are available and that fewer assault weapons lower the risk of violence are tied to means-end scrutiny—now impermissible and unconnected to text, history, and tradition.”

So far so good, but that’s where the opinion goes awry. It states: “The text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms, and history and tradition demonstrate that particularly ’dangerous’ weapons are unprotected.” For that it cites Heller at 627, but on that page Heller said that the Amendment protects arms that are “in common use at the time,” which is a limitation “fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ’dangerous and unusual weapons.’”

For that proposition, Heller cited a dozen historical sources, only one of which substituted “or” for “and”—Blackstone referred to going armed with “with dangerous or unusual weapons.” But Bevis read too much into that conjunction. Bruen repeated the basic distinction between arms that are “in common use” and those that are “dangerous and unusual.” The Court in Staples v. US (1994) made a similar distinction between machine guns and commonly-possessed arms like the AR-15, noting that the latter are no different than cars in potentially being dangerous. And in Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), Justice Alito wrote that “this is a conjunctive test: A weapon may not be banned unless it is both dangerous and unusual.”

So Bevis begins with the fundamentally wrong criterion that being particularly “dangerous,” alone, justifies banning a type of firearm.

The court goes on to justify the ban under a historical test, arguing that, unlike today, gun restrictions weren’t needed at the founding: “In the 18th century, violent crime was at historic lows; the rate at which adult colonists were killed by violent crime was one per 100,000 in New England and, on the high end, five per 100,000 in Tidewater, Virginia.” For that the court cites Randolph Roth, American Homicide 61–63 (2009). But as that book says, those were the rates “between the mid-1670s and the mid-1690s,” the low rate ended in “the revolutionary crisis of the 1760s and 1770s,” and “the extremely high homicide rates persisted until the end of the War of 1812 ….”

In arguing that guns were not a problem at the founding, the court describes muskets as being slow and fairly useless, and that “only a small group of wealthy, elite men owned pistols, primarily a dueling weapon.” This history is starting to read like Michael Bellesiles discredited Arming America. As I’ve shown in The Founders’ Second Amendment, long guns and pistols alike were in common use. For instance, just after Lexington and Concord, British General Thomas Gage confiscated 1,778 long guns and 634 pistols from the citizens of Boston.

Since there were no gun bans at the founding, the Bevis court turns to Bowie knives, citing restrictions in a minority of states in the antebellum period that focused mostly on banning concealed carry. An 1837 Georgia law made it unlawful for a merchant to sell a Bowie knife or to carry such knife or a pistol about the person, and Bevis states that “State-court decisions uniformly upheld these laws.” Not so. In Nunn v. State (1846), the Georgia Supreme Court held that the law violated the right to bear arms to the extent it prohibited open carry.

Nunn called the law an “absurdity” because it banned the sale and keeping of Bowie knives, pistols, and spears (!), but then exempted those who “openly wear” such arms. It then stated: “The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree ….”

Bevis next cites Aymette v. State (1840), in which the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed a conviction for concealed carry, but upheld the right openly to carry swords, muskets, and rifles. Not exactly a precedent for banning such arms. And it cited the Texas Supreme Court decision in Cockrum v. State (1859), which upheld a law with enhanced punishment for murder using a Bowie knife, but added: “The right of a citizen to bear arms, in the lawful defense of himself or the state, is absolute.”

Bans on trap-guns set to discharge by tripping a cord are next cited by Bevis, but the guns themselves were not banned, just the dangerous practice. The next cited precedents were Prohibition-era bans on arms with certain firing capacities, but most referred to discharge “by a single pressure upon the trigger device,” i.e., machine guns, not semiautomatics.

The Illinois ban not having a basis in Bruen’s text-history approach, Bevis resorts to the disapproved means-ends scrutiny to show: “Assaults weapons pose an exceptional danger, more so than standard self-defense weapons such as handguns.” While “they fire quickly,” so can handguns.

The most puzzling statement of Bevis comes next: “The muzzle velocity of an assault weapon is four times higher than a high-powered semiautomatic firearm.” Moreover, the “injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury ….” But now the court is comparing, depending on the cartridge type, all rifles with all handguns. No difference exists between the muzzle velocity of an “assault weapon” and any other rifle with the same cartridge and barrel length. While most AR-15s fire the .223 caliber cartridge, deer hunting rifles generally fire far more powerful rounds.

The Bevis court does not articulate any of the defined features of an “assault weapon” that make it so dangerous that it must be banned. Other than quoting the statute, it doesn’t even mention them. “A pistol grip.” And that makes it too powerful? A telescoping stock that makes it adjustable to the user. That makes it fire faster? Go down the checklist of verboten features. None have anything to do with the alleged ability to obliterate a victim.

We are left with who-knows-who’s definition of “assault weapon” as the court claims: “While a high number of assault weapons are in circulation, only 5 percent of firearms are assault weapons, 24 million out of an estimated 462 million firearms.” Avoiding Heller’s test that arms in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes are protected, the court assets that “just under 45 percent of all gang members own an assault rifle (compared to, at most, 15 percent of non-gang members) ….” Ignoring that the test is common use by law-abiding citizens, the “experts” have seriously misinformed the court in representing that such a large number of “gang members” own rifles of any kind.

Instead of addressing whether the banned items are “dangerous and unusual,” Bevis changes the criterion to say that “Assault-weapons and high-capacity magazines regulations are not ‘unusual,’” because eight states ban them. Since 42 states don’t, that sounds kind of unusual. And the FBI agent who said that “shotguns and 9mm pistols” are best for self-defense means nothing in view of the right, as Heller recognized, that the American people make that choice.

In denying the motion for a preliminary injunction, Bevis adds: “No binding precedent, however, establishes that a deprivation of any constitutional right is presumed to cause irreparable harm.” That doesn’t sound too promising for future protection of constitutional rights in general.