Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers.
This political judgement, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self preservation a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to God and Nature. – John Locke

A Hard Heart Kills: Why Liberal Values Breed School Shootings

Traditionally, the school shooting phenomenon was perpetrated by young, disaffected males. But, a disturbing new trend seems to be forming. The tragic shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School this week was committed by a young girl. A fifteen-year-old with a digital history indicative of the deep angst experienced by many young teenagers left adrift in existential darkness.

It is a very disturbing trend indeed when our young girls, typically characterized by feminine compassion, who should be anticipating the joys of family, motherhood, or career, instead are driven to find meaning in mass homicide. Surely, this is a sign of cultural apocalypse.

Reportedly, Natalie Rupnow had an online obsession with mass shootings and death. Can it really be surprising that our culture of death (the death of God, death of the unborn, the death of personhood) produces mass-murdering kids?

We treat the unborn like bio-waste and devalue life to the point of absurd irrelevance, discarding it at will. The message to anyone paying attention is that life is disposable and subject to whim or convenience. Making a statement with the lives of innocent people is a simple metaphysical extension of the secular culture of grievance and lack of eternal accountability.

Perhaps some old-fashioned hell-fire preaching might go a long way toward saving lives, both temporal and spiritual.

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Federal Appeals Court Upholds Non-Violent Felon Gun Ban

The government can permanently disarm somebody convicted of non-violent felonies if their broader criminal history contains violent conduct, a federal appeals court has ruled.

On Monday, a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected a Kentucky defendant’s as-applied challenge to his recent conviction for possessing a firearm as a felon. The panel ruled that even if a person is convicted of non-violent felonies, the totality of their criminal record can indicate “dangerousness” that permits disarmament under the Second Amendment.

“Morton’s criminal record demonstrates dangerousness, specifically that he has committed ‘violent’ crimes ‘against the person,’” Judge Rachel Bloomekatz wrote in US v. Morton. “So, his conviction is consistent with the Second Amendment as interpreted in Williams. Accordingly, § 922(g)(1) is constitutional as applied to him.”

The ruling stands out as the first time the Sixth Circuit has applied its unique standard for adjudicating challenges to the federal felony gun ban—by far the most common Second Amendment claim arising in the courts since the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision. Other circuits have either issued blanket rulings upholding the federal ban as constitutional or struck it down in narrow applications without setting a generalized standard for evaluating other cases. But the Sixth Circuit crafted a standard that only convicted felons who are shown to be “dangerous” can be disarmed in an August ruling upholding the ban.

Monday’s panel was tasked with applying that new “dangerousness” test to Jaylin Morton.

Morton was arrested in 2022 on several outstanding warrants and was found to be in possession of multiple handguns. At the time of his arrest, he already had “at least six prior felony convictions.” Those included multiple convictions for possessing a firearm as a felon, evading the police, one for burglary, and one for intimidating a participant in a legal process. He also had multiple non-felony assault convictions, including one for a domestic-violence incident in which he “punched his then-girlfriend in the head.”

He was subsequently indicted for possessing a firearm as a felon, which he moved to challenge on the grounds that the Second Amendment does not permit disarming him because his prior felony convictions were for non-violent crimes.

Drawing on the Sixth Circuit’s earlier ruling from August, US v. Williams, Judge Bloomekatz said that the court’s controlling precedent recognizes constitutional applications of the lifetime felony gun ban for offenses that “strongly suggest dangerousness,” particularly “crimes against the person,” like murder and assault. Bloomekatz said Morton’s criminal conduct “undoubtedly” demonstrates he is violent.

“Among other offenses, Morton was previously convicted for wanton endangerment and possessing a firearm as a felon after he shot at his ex-girlfriend and her family, and then showed up at her house a few weeks later and verbally harassed her with a gun on his person,” she wrote. “On another occasion, Morton was convicted of assault resulting from a domestic-violence incident after he punched his then-girlfriend in the head during an argument.”

And though the domestic violence incident was not a felony that currently underlies his lifetime firearms ban, she said the court “may look at Morton’s whole criminal history in assessing dangerousness.”

“Moreover, we are not confined to the fact of conviction alone, but may consider how an offense was committed,” she wrote. “Accordingly, Morton’s convictions demonstrate his dangerousness, making § 922(g)(1) constitutional as applied to him.”

The decision adds to the growing divergence in how lower courts are handling the federal lifetime gun ban for felons. Even courts that have reached similar conclusions to one another have done so under a variety of approaches, which has resulted in a variety of enforcement standards for the most commonly charged federal gun statute.

In June, Department of Justice expressed concern over the growing divide and asked the Supreme Court to resolve the matter.

“The substantial costs of prolonging uncertainty about the statute’s constitutionality outweigh any benefits of further percolation,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said at the time.

However, the Court opted to sidestep the matter. Instead, it remanded half a dozen requested cases back down to the appellate system to be reconsidered in light of its most recent case law.

Even as many of those cases have returned with unchanged outcomes, the Court has not yet taken up one that would resolve the question.

Why, yes. Yes it is. And the ‘dilemma’ is goobermint’s

3D-printed guns: Is gun control in America really dead?

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shocking killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, made his first appearance in court on Tuesday. He was arrested after a McDonald’s employee recognised him and called the authorities, while he sat at a corner table wearing a blue face mask and stared into a laptop for hours. Amongst his belongings was found the 3D printed gun that he used to assassinate Brian Thompson. A ghost gun that was seen on the surveillance footage of the crime, that looked so unfamiliar that even police veterans were puzzled by it.

The “ghost gun” found on Mangione was capable of firing a 9mm round and had a suppressor, also known as a silencer, that muffles the sound of the gunshot.

Ghost guns are untraceable, most often self-assembled and can be put together with the help of a 3D printing machine and metal parts bought online in a matter of a few hours. They don’t have serial numbers which can make them almost impossible to track and regulate.

The United States of America, where gun laws have been a hotly contentious and angrily debated issue for decades now, is now faced with a new dilemma.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen
And the Establishment gets washed away by a preference cascade. But it was a damn close-run thing.

What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?

There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.

In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.

But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.

This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.

In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.

This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.

In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.

But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.

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It means;
1 ‘You can’t stop the signal’
2 Gun control has been dead for years, but the moron wanna-be gun grabbers haven’t yet gotten to the ‘acceptance’ stage of grief.

What Would It Mean if CEO Killer’s Suppressor Was 3D Printed?

In the early days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder, there was a lot of speculation as to what exactly the killer used. With the arrest of Luigi Magione, though, many of them have been answered. We know that Magione was in possession of a 3D-printed handgun and he had a suppressor.

However, what we’re not seeing in most of these reports is just where the suppressor came from.

I’ve reached out to the NYPD for answers, though they haven’t responded by the time this particular piece has gone live. In fairness to them, I sent that email early this morning before most decent people were awake.

What’s interesting, though, are a lot of reports that this was like a 3D-printed suppressor.

‘I can confirm it is a 3D-printed gun,’ Print Shoot Repeat, who runs the YouTube channel PSR, said. ‘What are the odds it was a 3D-printed suppressor? Well, I think kind of high honestly.’

He explained that a 3D printer suppressor is ‘super light,’ but does not allow the slide the cycle properly.

The shooter of Thompson experienced a similar issue during the murder when he shot and had to recycle the slide to take another shot.

However, another gun expert with more than 30 years of training told Dailymail.com that most guns with a suppressor will behave that way.

‘There are different causes for jamming,’ the expert, who spoke on anonymity, said.

‘Sometimes the ammunition is poor sometimes the firearm is dirty, it’s not maintained. The ammunition is a poor grade. It doesn’t matter what kind of gun it is.

So yeah, there’s debate.

What we don’t have are answers.

3D-printing a suppressor fits what we know about the killer. We know he printed the receiver for his gun–my speculation has been that he knew all the media reporting on “gun tracing” but didn’t understand what that meant, so he wanted to avoid being identified quickly or easily–and that suppressors are more tightly controlled than firearms are. It’s very likely he did print his suppressor.

That brings up all kinds of possibilities and probabilities that a lot of gun control activists aren’t going to like.

First, again, suppressors are tightly controlled. There aren’t “suppressor kits” marketed throughout the internet where you guy buy a kit, print some key parts, and you legally have a suppressor. It doesn’t work like that. One could argue that there are kits available, but they’re not marketed as such and I have yet to find one that requires a 3D-printed part to work.

So that brings us to the idea that the whole thing was 3D printed.

No laws on the books allow just anyone to print themselves a suppressor.

“Yeah, but the files are all over the internet, most likely.”

Sure. However, there’s a problem with that argument. See, while possession of those files might not be illegal, having them on the internet likely is.

The gun files you can find on the internet are generally only there because the State Department has decided that they don’t violate the International Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITAR. That basically says that weapons and weapons technology can’t be exported without federal approval. That includes technical data.

On Monday, a State Department spokesperson confirmed to Bearing Arms that the U.S. Munitions List in Category I does, in fact, include suppressors and the technical data required to make them.

In other words, those files shouldn’t lawfully be on the internet in the first place.

While the State Department wouldn’t comment on any potential investigation, this still blows all the “we should ban ‘ghost guns'” rhetoric out of the water.

In no way are suppressors lawfully produced, and yet Magione allegedly produced one. If such a tightly controlled item can be produced from tightly controlled information, then just how does anyone really think they can stop guns from being made?

Yes, Magione reportedly used a kit, but we’ve covered the FGC-9, which doesn’t require any kits, just parts from the hardware store.

The truth of the matter is that just the possibility that Thompson’s killer used a 3D-printed suppressor illustrates that gun control isn’t a winning strategy. You’re never going to keep things out of the hands of people who want them badly enough. They’ll find a way.

While everyone is going nuts about the gun itself, the suppressor is the bigger issue, which is why no one wants to talk about it.

“If I’m gonna be lost in space for that long, I need a talking robot. And maybe June Lockhart or Marta Kristen.”

Stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts face new delay in return to Earth from ISS.

Dec. 17 (UPI) — Two Boeing Starliner astronauts, stranded at the International Space Station in June after what was supposed to be a weeklong test flight, are facing a new delay in their return trip to Earth, NASA revealed Tuesday.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore had been scheduled to return on a SpaceX Dragon flight in February, after they were forced to abandon Starliner due to helium leaks and thruster issues. The pair will now return to Earth no earlier than late March, 10 months after they originally launched, as they wait for their replacements to arrive at the ISS.

“NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 now is targeting no earlier than late March 2025 to launch four crew members to the space station,” NASA wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

“The change gives NASA and SpaceX time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission, set to arrive in early January.”

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