Category: Crap For Brains

Biden is living in a little fantasy world where he believes his wish is law.

Biden takes fire after vowing to ‘ban assault weapons’

President Joe Biden pledged in a speech late Wednesday to ban “assault weapons,” but critics were quick to push back.

Biden made the statement during his remarks at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference.

“I know I make some of you uncomfortable, but that little state above me, in Delaware, is one of the — has the highest rate — one of the highest rates of gun ownership,” Biden said. “But guess what? We’re going to ban assault weapons again come hell or high water.”

Biden also called out “high-capacity magazines.” Those comments sparked pushback from critics who pointed to their Second Amendment protections.

“The loss of life is a tragedy whenever it occurs,” U.SS. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., told The Center Square in response to Biden’s comments. “At the same time, the Second Amendment is not subject to interpretation by bureaucrats in Washington and cannot be taken away by Congress. Rather than confiscating firearms from law-abiding Americans, our priorities should be to protect and equip our police and crack down on violent crime.”

Biden has taken a series of executive actions pushing the boundaries of his Constitutional authority, such as the eviction moratorium and COVID mandates, leading to legal challenges and rulings pushing back on Biden’s agenda.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently bolstered gun rights. Last summer, the high court struck down a New York gun law that required residents to prove they had “proper cause” to receive a permit to carry a firearm outside the home.

As The Center Square previously reported, the court ruled 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the opinion. Roberts wrote that the court “recognized that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of an ordinary, law-abiding citizen to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense.”

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in January introduced the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which would “ban the sale, transfer, manufacture and importation of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and other high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.”

“It’s time we stand up to the gun lobby and remove these weapons of war from our streets, or at the very least keep them out of the hands of young people,” Feinstein said in a statement.

A companion bill has support from more than 200 Democrats but has not passed either Chamber this Congress.

“President Biden didn’t have the votes in Congress to get this ineffective and patently unconstitutional measure passed even when Democrats controlled the House,” Amy Swearer, Heritage senior legal fellow, told The Center Square. “He certainly doesn’t have the votes now, when the most recent polls show support for this type of law is lower now than it was in previous years. Unless the president plans on stripping Americans’ Second Amendment rights via executive fiat (a real ‘come hell, high water, or constitutional crisis’ scenario), then it’s difficult to see this as anything more than the President once again blowing smoke on behalf of Gun Control, Inc.”

Texas lawmaker tries emotional blackmail to push gun control

The state of Texas has been rocked to its core by the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. There’s no mystery why a lot of people are upset.

However, most lawmakers in the state aren’t suddenly shifting with the currents like a windsock at the airport. They’re holding firm to what they think is the right way forward.

That’s a problem for anti-gun lawmakers in the state, though, and some will say anything they can to try and force their colleagues to change their minds.

With the Lone Star State suffering mass shootings with what some call “numbing regularity”, Democratic lawmakers are proposing what they see as “common sense” measures to reduce the number of gun deaths.

“This has to stop. We have to stop the bleeding,” said Houston State Senator Carol Alvarado.…

Among the control measures – increasing the age from 18 to 21 for the purchase of semi-automatic rifles, a “Red-Flag” law to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable, a 72-hour “cooling off” period after buying a firearm, and a mandatory background check for all gun sales.

“The fact that we are sitting here and have the ability to do something to help their grieving and to help stop the mass shooting and we don’t do anything, that’s on us,” said Alvarado.

That is absolutely disgusting.

First, let’s understand that this whole line of “reasoning,” if we can even call it that, is predicated in part on the assumption that everyone actually thinks gun control works, particularly these bills, they’re just not going along with it for whatever reason.

I assure Mrs. Alvarado, we do not.

Yet what bothers me most is this whole guilt trip he engaged in to try and pressure his colleagues. The parents are grieving and they can somehow help simply by forfeiting people’s rights?

Holy crap, that is both the worst argument I’ve ever seen and the most vile.

It’s an attempt at emotional blackmail. “How dare you! You could have eased their suffering if you weren’t such a cold, heartless bastard!”

Again, it’s disgusting.

Imagine the outrage if a lawmaker pushing an anti-abortion bill used a similar talking point. “These parents here lost their daughter when she died after having an abortion. The fact that we are sitting here and have the ability to do something to help their grieving and we won’t do anything, that’s on us.”

There would probably be rioting in the streets over the comment, yet for those who want to see gun control and would lose their minds at my hypothetical example, how is it any different? How?

No, Alvarado made her comment and no one will hold her accountable for it. Even if there was no counterpoint to provide, it wouldn’t somehow make his comments accurate or forgivable.

We do not give up our rights to appease someone’s grieving. We may sympathize with their loss, as we should, but that doesn’t give anyone license to run rampant over our right to keep and bear arms.

And emotional blackmail won’t change that.

Get woke, go broke.

Christian school that embraced the LGBTQ community is forced to close its doors

A conflict over what it means to be Christian is forcing a school in Kansas City, Missouri, to close.

Urban Christian Academy is a private, K-8 school with an enrollment of 100 that describes itself as providing “a tuition-free, high-quality, Christ-centered education for low-income students.”

The school’s mission statement has always stressed inclusivity in general terms, noting that following Jesus “opens up doors and makes room at the table.” But last year it added a paragraph to its website, which read in part, “We are an affirming school. We stand with the LGBTQIA+ community and believe in their holiness. We celebrate the diversity of God’s creation in all its varied and beautiful forms.”

According to the school, that update prompted donors to stop contributing, many of them citing their interpretation of Christianity as the reason. Now, UCA has announced it will close at the end of the school year due to the loss of financial support.

Kalie Callaway-George, UCA’s executive director and co-founder, said this new language “is kind of what started the backlash from our donor base, which we anticipated. It was just that we anticipated a 50% loss in funding and made adjustments for that. We had an 80% loss in funding and that was too much to overcome.”

The dramatic drop-off in donations came quickly. Soon after the new language appeared on the school’s website, eight churches withdrew their support. Although those institutions were responsible for just 2% of the school’s funding, church members were a donor base that gave much more.

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California City to Charge More Than $1,000 for Gun Carry Permits

Residents of one Los Angeles County suburb will have to shell out big bucks to exercise their right to carry a firearm.

On Thursday, the La Verne Police Department announced it was opening an application process for city residents who wish to obtain a Carry Concealed Weapon (CCW) license. The department’s website spells out a lengthy application process, including a department-approved psychological screening and a series of fees totaling nearly $1,100 for all first-time applicants. Renewing applicants will also be forced to pay almost $650 every two years after that.

The unveiling of the application process and exorbitant fee structure arrives nearly nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to carry a firearm in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That ruling struck down subjective “may-issue” permitting standards, including California’s previous carry regime. It ensured that lawful adults must, at the very least, have an avenue to obtain a license to carry so long as they meet objective criteria.

At the time, some gun-rights advocates worried that some former may-issue jurisdictions would simply replace their old systems with an objective but onerous process meant to discourage new applicants. La Verne’s new application process and high costs schedule validate some of those fears and will likely thrust the city into a legal battle with those advocates.

La Verne’s high fees have already caught the attention of at least one gun-rights group in the state. The California Rifle & Pistol Association sent a letter to the city on Monday through its law firm, Michel & Associates, warning the city to reduce its fees or face the group in court.

“We were happy to hear that the La Verne Police Department has finally created a process for residents to apply to receive a concealed handgun license,” the letter reads. “Unfortunately, our happiness quickly turned sour when we saw the outlandish fee schedule included with the permit application process. Further, we’ve heard from members that La Verne is requiring applicants to submit letters of recommendation alongside their applications. That is unconstitutional, illegal under California law, and violates the privacy of applicants who may not want to tell anyone they are exercising their right to carry.”

The letter noted that La Verne’s fees were roughly twice as expensive as neighboring jurisdictions, including Los Angeles, San Diego County, and Orange County, which it said averaged around $400-$500 in costs to obtain a license.

If the group does file a lawsuit, the city could have a tough time defending its permitting system in court. The Supreme Court has cast doubt on the legality of permitting processes that attempt to discourage applicants with delays and high costs. In the same majority opinion striking down may-issue laws, Justice Clarence Thomas warned against putting objective licensing regimes “toward abusive ends.”

“To be clear, nothing in our analysis should be interpreted to suggest the unconstitutionality of the 43 States’ ‘shall-issue’ licensing regimes, under which ‘a general desire for self-defense is sufficient to obtain a [permit],’” Justice Thomas wrote. “That said, because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

The breakdown of fees for first-time applicants is listed on the police department’s website as $398 for “processing,” a $150 administrative fee, a $93 licensing fee, $20 for fingerprint scanning, $150 for a department-approved psychological review, $250 for an approved safety and training course, and a $20 fee for the physical CCW card—$1,081 in total.

Renewals must occur every two years and are subject to slightly reduced processing, administrative, licensing, and training fees. Renewals would also be exempt from subsequent fingerprinting and psychological evaluation but would still be required to pay the same card fee for a total renewal cost of $647.

These fees are far above what most other jurisdictions charge for permitting. For instance, Pennsylvania caps its permitting fees at $20.

The La Verne Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

I’ll take “Because They’re Stupid” for $500, Alex

Why Gun-Control Activists Can’t Have Intelligent Discussions

David Hogg, co-founder of the March for Our Lives gun-control group, recently tweeted what he thinks the Second Amendment means.

“After reading about the history of the second amend and talking with a lot of hist & law professors- I believe the second amendment has been intentionally misinterpreted. It was never meant as an individual right it was created to protect state militias like the national guard,” read Hogg’s tweet.

That legal theory he is parroting has been debunked by historians, by many legal scholars and by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) clearly said, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

What Hogg tweeted next further demonstrated his ignorance.

“It says well regulated militia for a reason. The ‘shall not be infringed’ part means the federal government is not allowed to forcibly disarm state militias. I’m not alone in this interpretation. Over 100 years of jurisprudence back me up on this,” read Hogg’s follow-up tweet.

“Hogg mentions ‘jurisprudence,’ but it seems he does not really understand the term. When contemplating the philosophy of law in the United States as it relates to the Second Amendment, the longest held view of what it protects is an individual right; a view that goes back more than 230 years. There are countless quotes from our Founders—many of whom were deeply involved in the process of writing, debating, and ratifying the Second Amendment—referring to the right of individuals to possess firearms. Even those quotes that mention a ‘militia’ do so in the context of it being comprised of individual citizens who are expected to supply their own arms,” reported the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA).

NRA-ILA also cited several other cases in their analysis, before summing up Hogg by saying, “Ultimately, David Hogg is simply another anti-gun activist, and like most others, he is prone to making false claims about a subject for which he has little understanding.”

This militia argument has been so thoroughly debunked that it is disappointing, brain-numbing and counterproductive to have to again refute it, but such is the anti-intellectualism of today’s gun-control movement; unfortunately, this includes, in this case, David Hogg, a student who Time says is now “studying the history of conservative political movements” at Harvard. Given these tweets, he isn’t getting much of an education.

Upholding her reputation as the dumbest SCOTUS judge.
That’s why she’s the worst justice. She decides who “should” win, who is most “deserving”, instead of what the law says.

There Is No ‘Expert’ Clause in the U.S. Constitution

CNN’s Joan Biskupic writes up yesterday’s oral arguments from the two student loan cases that are currently before the Supreme Court:

Prelogar’s arguments were bolstered by the three liberals among the nine. Sonia Sotomayor, the senior justice on the left, warned that judges would seize greater power if agency authority to carry out acts of Congress were diminished.

Addressing Nebraska state Solicitor General James Campbell, who argued against the Biden administration, Sotomayor said, “What you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them. Instead of the person with the expertise and the experience, the secretary of education, who’s been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans, we’re going to take it upon ourselves, instead of leaving that decision in the hands of the person who has experience with these questions.”

This is a nonsense argument from Sotomayor. First off, the question before the Court is not “how much aid” to give to students. The question before the Court is whether the statute it is examining — the 2003 HEROES Act — confers upon the executive branch the power to do what it’s trying to do. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The amount of aid doesn’t enter into that calculation. Neither does the level of “expertise and experience” exhibited by the incumbent Secretary of Education. That Secretary could have the most sparkling mind in American history, or he could be a total moron, and, in both cases, the issue before the Court would be same: “Does he have the power to do it?” There is no provision within the United States Constitution that accords unlimited power to bureaucrats simply because some people consider them to be well-credentialed.

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MARINES DITCH FAMOUS SCOUT SNIPER PROGRAM

The Marine Corps is dismantling its iconic Scout Sniper platoons – a facet of each infantry battalion for generations – and is doing away with the coveted 0317 Military Occupational Specialty.

The product of a grueling training pipeline that yields field-ready precision marksmen qualified on the M40, M110, and M107 series rifles, the Marine Scout Sniper program is facing permanent disbandment as a result of a shifting focus in the country’s amphibious warfare service.

A leaked Feb. 21 unclassified message from Lt. Gen. D. J. Furness, the deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, detailed that the current 18-member Scout Sniper Platoons assigned to the Corps’ infantry battalions will quickly transition to 26-member Scout platoons – in other words, cutting the snipers in favor of a unit that would provide more “continuous all-weather information gathering.”

Spots in the Scout Sniper Basic Course will be zeroed out in the coming fiscal year while a nascent sniper capability will be continued in the Corps’ Reconnaissance and Marine Special Operations units under a new Military Occupational Specialty – 0322 MOS (Reconnaissance Sniper) – via a revamped, shorter training program.

The problem with that is, as these groups typically operate detached from standard infantry units, the highly specialized skill will in effect vanish at the battalion level, which will be left to get by with the current designated marksmen already at the company level. Under current doctrine, DMs typically only have a three-week course under their belt and train to engage targets out to 500 meters, rather than the much longer ranges that Scout Snipers train to achieve.

The USMC Scout Sniper Association is urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to reconsider what the group terms an “ill-advised” policy decision that will gut the program that has been tweaked and perfected over the past 80 years.

“This announcement by the Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policy, and Operations on Tuesday is the result of misguided assumptions and decades of neglect of the community of men who are Scout Snipers,” said the Association.

“It’s unlikely that any officer who commanded and employed Scout Snipers in combat agrees that removing a sniper capability from the infantry battalion makes sense. Replacing an 18-man Scout Sniper Platoon with a 26-man Scout Platoon will not solve the ‘all weather information gathering’ problem. Retaining the skill set and the combat capability of Scout Snipers by offering a viable career path to Scout Snipers and providing them with more engaged leadership might.”

The shift away from having dedicated sniper platoons in each infantry battalion comes as the number of battalions themselves is dwindling.

The Corps’ three active-duty divisions would field a total of 27 infantry battalions between them if they were at full strength, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Long reduced to just 24 battalions all told, in 2020 the current commandant unveiled a plan to case the colors of three additional infantry battalions and the 8th Marine Regiment to make room to form a new Marine Littoral Regiment, the latter optimized to leapfrog rapidly across islands and coastal spaces with a smaller footprint when compared to the current force.

The result is a Corps with just 21 active-duty infantry battalions, shortly, in addition to cuts in tiltrotor, attack, and heavy-lift aviation squadrons and disbanding of all of the branch’s tank battalions.

That Warren Burger Quote Gun Grabbers Love Is Ahistorical — Not To Mention Sort Of Fake

Idon’t know how many times people have dropped this alleged quote from the late “conservative” Justice Warren Burger into my social media feeds:

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

If you find yourself in a debate over the Second Amendment, sooner or later someone is going to let you know that Burger believed an individual right to gun ownership was one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” perpetrated on the American people. Burger’s line is ubiquitous—it can be found in The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, NPR, every major newspaper, and in every anti-gun columnist’s pieces.

The first problem with the popular online iteration of the quote is that it’s actually cobbled together from three separate sources to give it more impact. Don’t get me wrong: Burger is mistaken in all instances, but he is mistaken in different contexts.

The second problem is that the quote often reads as if Burger—the “conservative” who voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade—offered this argument as a member of the Supreme Court. No high-court decision has ever defined the Second Amendment as anything but an individual right. And Burger never uttered a word about the Second Amendment while sitting on the court. For that matter, he never rendered a gun decision on any court, nor ever wrote a legal paper on the issue. And it shows.

Then again, the “collective right” theory was only a recent invention of revisionist historians and anti-gun activists when Burger adopted it. It’s also a tough one to sell to anyone who cares about history. Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to George Mason to Samuel Adams to George Washington to Patrick Henry to James Madison and so on, is on the record defending the individual’s right to bear arms. There is not a single record of anyone in that era challenging the notion.

Anyway, the part of the quote about the gun lobby is taken from a 1991 PBS interview in which Burger erroneously argues that the 18th-century conception of “well regulated” was the same as the contemporary one. The notion that the state, much less the federal government, would be empowered to “regulate” what kind of weapons you owned would have been alien to a person in 1789. “Well regulated” simply means a well-pulled-together militia, rather than a rabble.

Burger maintains that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies would defend state populations. This is an ungrammatical and ahistorical reading of the amendment. Sure, there was a debate over standing armies and control of the militias. But, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in Heller, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is the operative clause in the Second Amendment. The “well regulated Militia” part is the prefatory clause.

It makes zero sense to read the prefatory clause as a nullification or even limitation of the operative clause. It is tantamount to arguing that because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, it’s not an individual right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people” — people who generally used their own weapons as militiamen — just as it does elsewhere in the Bill of Rights when protecting individual rights. Many colonies enshrined the individual right to bear arms in their constitutions before the Bill of Rights was even written, most of them in much more explicit terms. No state defined it as a collective right. Some Federalists argued that special protections in the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the public.

The other two parts of the quote are lifted from different passages in a column Burger wrote for the Associated Press. Here the former justice expands on his idea that guns should be regulated like cars.

“[A]lthough there is not a word or hint in the Constitution about automobiles or motorcycles,” Burger says, “no one would seriously argue that a state cannot regulate the use of motor vehicles by imposing licensing restrictions and speed limits based on factors of driver’s age, health condition, and driving record, and by recording every purchase and change of ownership.”

It is because automobiles and motorcycles — or transportation as an ideal — are not explicitly protected by the Constitution that you can heavily regulate those things. The better analogy would be due process or speech rights. (Although Burger wasn’t a great fan of the First Amendment, either.)

Besides all that, Burger should have known that Americans, even in 1991, did not have “unfettered” access to “machine guns.” In 1986, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act law made ownership of fully automatic weapons pretty rare.

Burger also should have known that the Gun Control Act of 1968 established the first federal age limits for buying guns. Today there are tens of thousands of laws regulating gun ownership in the United States. That is not “unfettered” by any definition.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like Burger knew very much about the topic at all.

Electric vehicle drivers get candid about charging: ‘Logistical nightmare.’

YouTube personality Steve Hammes leased a Hyundai Kona Electric sport utility vehicle for his 17-year-old daughter Maddie for three reasons: it was affordable, practical and allowed Maddie to put her cash toward college, not fuel. Now, the upstate New York resident has a dilemma many EV owners can relate to: finding available charging stations far away from home.

“We’re going through the planning process of how easily Maddie can get from Albany to Gettysburg [College] and where she can charge the car,” Hammes told ABC News. “It makes me a little nervous. We want fast chargers that take 30 to 40 minutes — it would not make sense to sit at a Level 2 charger for hours. There isn’t a good software tool that helps EV owners plan their trips.”

Last week the Biden administration said Tesla would open its Supercharger network to non-Tesla owners by the end of 2024. The plan includes 3,500 Tesla fast chargers and 4,000 of its slower, Level 2 chargers — a small number in Tesla’s sprawling network. Setting up an account on Tesla’s app is also required for access.

PHOTO: Tesla cars recharge at a Tesla charger station on Feb. 15, 2023 in Corte Madera, Calif. Tesla is partnering with the U.S. federal government to expand electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the U.S.
Tesla cars recharge at a Tesla charger station on Feb. 15, 2023 in Corte Madera, Calif. Tesla is partnering with the U.S. federal government to expand electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the U.S.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

John Voelcker, an industry expert on EVs and the former editor of Green Car Reports, said this arrangement will allow Tesla to learn a lot about U.S. drivers — “how you charge, where you drive and what car you have.” He does not expect Tesla to commit to additional charging stations.

“Tesla does not want its highly reliable and tightly integrated charging network to be clogged with people whose cars can’t charge as fast as Teslas,” he told ABC News.

President Joe Biden prioritized emissions-free vehicles in the 2021 infrastructure law, vowing to increase the number of green vehicles on America’s highways and local roads. The president’s goals include installing 500,000 new chargers across the U.S. and dramatically boosting EV sales by 2030.

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Seems? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’.

Op-ed writer seems to misunderstand data on guns

One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.

But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.

They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.

However, a writer with the Philadelphia Tribune took the discussion of gun control in a bizarre direction.

While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.

That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.

More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.

The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.

By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?

Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?

Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”

Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.

Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.

Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.

Marshall University Prof: Cops and Vets Earn Their Second Amendment Rights Through Months of Training

So nice when they provide such clear photography for future positive ID 

The presidents of West Virginia University and Marshall University penned a joint letter to legislators opposing the bill in late January.

“We believe that our boards of governors are best suited to decide whether guns should be permitted on campus,” the letter reads. “We therefore do not support statewide campus carry.”

The presidents of West Virginia State University, Concord University and Shepherd University wrote a separate letter saying they strongly support the Second Amendment but “have serious reservations about the significant public safety challenges” that the bill would present.

“Introducing firearms into this already challenging environment could have unintended consequences,” the letter says, referencing increased suicide rates and concern that the presence of firearms could stifle the free exchange of ideas.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported that at a public hearing last week, 40 people spoke and nearly everyone opposed the bill.

Marshall University professor Chris White said the bill doesn’t have enough safety measures in place. Formerly a Marine Corps infantryman, he referenced months of training that military and police officers go through “to earn that Second Amendment right and carry those weapons in public.”

“None of those safety controls will be imposed on our students or anybody else who comes on to campus,” White said, according to WVPB.

I was lucky this phobia wasn’t around when I was in school, because I spent a lot of my time in high school art class sketching guns.

Banning My Son From Doodling A Gun Is Not A Solution To School Shootings

The only thing more predictable than boys being fascinated with weapons is them eventually sketching one in class. But that’s not allowed anymore.

What is it that makes a little boy — practically straight out of the womb — take an interest in weapons and emulate gun-toting, swash-buckling heroes? Even doctors aren’t sure. As one pediatrician told me about my then 16-month-old son who turned every stick into a sword, “We don’t know why. They just do it.”

If you’ve raised a little boy, you know what I’m talking about. And the only thing more predictable than them being fascinated with weapons is them eventually doodling one in class. An alien with a laser gun. An elf with a sword. Rambo with a machine gun.

When they do, they’ll encounter a host of school polices banning images of weapons, ostensibly to prevent school shootings and other violence. Some make exceptions for historical context (such as a Revolutionary War soldier with a bayonet).

Others don’t. Who can forget the infamous Pop-Tart gun of 2016? The 7-year-old was suspended.

If your child is lucky, he’ll be told to put the drawing away. If he’s unlucky, he’ll be sent to the principal’s office and then to the school counselor, where he may even be given a suicide assessment.

No Drawings with Guns Allowed

My first encounter with this type of policy was when my youngest boy came home from a Fairfax County, Virginia, elementary school with his shirt inside out. On the front was an image of a Lego Ewok holding — eek! — a tiny axe.

I recently encountered this policy again with my 10-year-old son. He had gotten in trouble for drawing a police officer holding a gun. A police officer.

Author's son's drawing.
Author’s son’s drawing.

In an email, my son’s teacher said she explained to him that drawing weapons in class is not allowed and encouraged him to “stick to dragons and landscapes.”

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Observation O’ The Day
There’s a species of cruelty in putting people in jobs they’re mentally unable to handle, but there’s a worse species of cruelty in subjecting an entire nation to being governed by such people — or by whoever is pulling their strings from behind the scenes. Enough.

Delusional Democrats think Fetterman and Feinstein still fit to serve

Once upon a time we mocked the Soviet Union for its gerontocracy. Aged party leaders, bundled up in overcoats and fur hats to the point of near-unrecognizability, would be wheeled out to sit, immobile, as parades passed or party congresses opened. Their withered, stale leadership was emblematic of the decaying USSR’s withered, stale ideology — and industrial base.

But now the joke’s on us. A leading United States senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), can’t seem to remember important things, like her just-taken vote on a judicial nominee and her just-announced retirement. “Did I vote for that?” she asked an aide Wednesday, moments after leaving the chamber.

The day before, the oldest sitting senator announced she wouldn’t seek another term — or her staff did, anyway. Asked about her coming retirement an hour after the statement posted, Feinstein said, “Well, I haven’t made that decision. I haven’t released anything.” A staffer told her she had. As The Post reported, “an incredulous-sounding Feinstein” said, “You put out the statement?” before telling reporters, “I didn’t know they put it out.”

Well, Feinstein is 89. She shouldn’t be expected to remember things too well at that age. But maybe she shouldn’t be expected to serve two more years in the Senate, either.

Of course, another senator, John Fetterman (D-Pa.), isn’t nearly as old as Feinstein but not exactly compos mentis either. Fetterman ran for election despite a severe stroke that left him unable to campaign much and unable to perform basic senatorial tasks like speaking to reporters.

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What AP calls ‘turmoil,’ we call ‘about time’

The Associated Press, or AP, is supposed to be unbiased, though we’ve all seen countless examples of them being anything but.

That’s especially true regarding matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.

These days, the right to keep and bear arms may have a firmer foundation on which to rest following the Bruen decision. It’s rather clear that there can be no total gun ban and that any restriction has to conform to a particular framework that won’t be easy for any law.

It seems this has led to what the AP calls “turmoil” in the courts.

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books.

The high court’s ruling that set new standards for evaluating gun laws left open many questions, experts say, resulting in an increasing number of conflicting decisions as lower court judges struggle to figure out how to apply it.

The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said.

Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers,felony defendants and people who use marijuana. Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade “ghost guns.”

In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling. The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.

“There’s confusion and disarray in the lower courts because not only are they not reaching the same conclusions, they’re just applying different methods or applying Bruen’s method differently,” said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school who focuses on firearms law.

Sure, there’s a bit of confusion. The Bruen decision has set a stage most courts have never seen before. They now have to consider whether the Founders would have approved of such a law by looking at whether or not they approved of something similar during their own time.

But is it really a bad thing?

The only downside is that it’s taken us this long to get to this point. While the AP is apparently concerned that the status quo has been upturned, I’m more upset that the status quo was allowed to become the status quo in the first place.

It’s just insane that it came to this.

Yet here we are. We now have an opportunity to right the ship and put the onus on things back where they were. No longer can courts just claim it’s in the government’s interest to restrict our rights – something they’d never say about the First or Fourth Amendments, it should be remembered – but must instead look at the matter objectively and compare it to historical precedent.

The AP may lament this “turmoil,” but I only lament that we didn’t have this upheaval a long time ago.

Pennsylvania Social Workers Must Now Ask if Babies ‘Identify’ as ‘Nonbinary’

A new rule in Pennsylvania means that the state’s social workers are now required to ask whether children, including newborn babies, “identify” as “nonbinary.”

When social workers are assigned to a new case, the new requirement states that they must first establish whether the child or infant “identifies” as male, female, or “nonbinary.”

A government form, that social workers in Pennsylvania are now required to complete, was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“The state’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning, which funds health and social programs for young children, requires providers to report demographic information on their cases – including, since 2022, the gender identity of infants,” the outlet reported.

“Data collection forms for the agency now ask for newborns’ ‘gender’ rather than their sex and allow providers to select male, female, or ‘Gender Non-Binary.’”

The forms are used for home-visit programs, including cases that exclusively involve infants.

The Free Beacon noted one social worker explained, “I have to ask clients, ‘Is your 10-day-old male, female, or nonbinary?’”

Responding to the report, the state’s Department of Human Services “downplayed the requirements.”

The department’s spokesperson Ali Fogarty said in an email it’s just a data collation point and there’s no “expectation” that parents be asked the question.

The Free Beacon noted, “The questions, which were updated in August according to the forms, come amid mounting concerns that the rise in childhood gender dysphoria has been driven by social forces – including the push to teach young people about gender identity and the practice of ‘affirming’ children who identify as transgender.

“That practice is ‘not a neutral act,’ a review by England’s National Health Service concluded last year, but an ‘active intervention’ that can lock in trans identity, promoting the distress it’s meant to alleviate.”

Most studies show that most cases of children with gender dysphoria resolve themselves as they grow older if they are left alone.

“These questions plant the seed in parents,” the Pennsylvania social worker told the Free Beacon.

Climate Protester Rushes Stage, Josh Hawley Turns the Tables

Is there any more of an obnoxious protest movement than the one propagated by the climate cult? They glue themselves to roads and pour soup on famous works of art, all the while never having to reckon with the fact that their predictions of doom have been continually disproven by the passage of time.

Remember Al Gore’s now-defunct doomsday clock? Or the claim that the Arctic would be ice-free by now? And did polar bears ever go extinct? There’s also another cataclysmic event on the way, as prophesied by the church of climate.

Sen. Josh Hawley got a taste of that on Thursday when a climate protester rushed the stage he was speaking from. Watch until the end because he does a good job turning the tables.

The whole rushing-the-stage thing is bad enough. It shows a profound disrespect for basic boundaries while highlighting the clinical narcissism these climate protesters possess. Everything must revolve around their obsession, and conveniently, that obsession seems to involve defending China a lot. That’s exactly what this woman did as she screamed “China is not our enemy,” while being dragged out of the room to the laughter of the audience.

Isn’t it strange that Greta Thunberg never goes to Beijing and that so many in the climate movement want to let China off the hook for leading the world in carbon emissions?

Ask yourself, who benefits the most from the world shifting to “renewable” energy? That would be China, which provides or controls much of the rare earth materials needed to produce things like batteries and solar panels (neither of which are renewable, by the way). Someone should really look into how much of the climate cult is being funded by Chinese interests, wouldn’t you say?

Returning to the clip, Hawley makes a really good point at the end of it.

HAWLEY: It’s interesting. This administration wants to use the climate crisis as a justification for its agenda in Ukraine and elsewhere. Maybe they ought to visit with that gal.

That’s exactly what’s going on. John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, has already made it clear that the administration is going to ignore human rights abuses, if it means getting a “climate” deal done with China. Never mind that such deals are worthless and amount to absolutely nothing.

Then there are the connections between the Biden family and the Chinese to consider. It just so happens that the president’s climate agenda plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping. What a coincidence, right? Thankfully, Republicans are finally pushing back, and there seems to be an anti-China consensus forming. That’s going to put Chicom-simping Democrats in an awkward position going forward.

Do what?

Oregon Judge Egan Calls 2nd Amendment Protection Laws Racist & Anti-Semitic

Oregon – The Oregon Court of Appeals [lead by Judge James Egan, Chief Judge at Oregon Court of Appeal] has struck down the Second Amendment Sanctuary Ordinance in Columbia County, an ordinance Oregon Firearms Federation has been defending with Gun Owners of America.

And while that is not a particular surprise, what is a surprise is the scathing, incendiary, and frightening “concurring opinion” from Judge Egan.

In the opening page of his opinion, Egan attacks the ordinance and the people who argued for it saying :

“In other words, Intervenors came before this court and referenced UN mandates, which as explained below is a well documented trope meant to invoke white supremacist, antisemitic fear of a takeover of our country by outsiders and minorities who are manipulated by an elite class of supervillians.

On occasion, however, individual members of the court must call out illegitimate quasi-legal arguments and theories for what they are-viz., antisemitic and racist tropes.”

On page 6 of his screed, he titles one section: “The Antisemitic and Racist Origins of the Ordinance.”

He claims that constitutional sheriffs “embrace racist and white nationalist ideologies.”

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