Category: Rights

NRA Statement on the Nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to US Supreme Court

Fairfax, Va. – The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action released the following statement regarding the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court of the United States;

“Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has never affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the individual, fundamental right of all Americans to keep and bear arms for the defense of themselves or others. Consequently, the NRA is concerned with President Biden’s decision to nominate her to the Supreme Court of the United States at a crucial time when there are vital cases that will determine the scope and future of the Second Amendment and self-defense rights in our country.​ As we always do, the NRA will monitor her statements during the confirmation process and advise our members accordingly.”

 

Mere calls to end violence little more than theater

In most towns across the nation, you’ll find a community theater. There, locals will perform various shows that might have originated on Broadway but now find themselves on Main Street.

My wife spend an awful lot of her time volunteering and performing at one such theater here. I’ve taken a few trips across the boards myself over the years. I’m not going to insult theater folks in the least. Some of my favorite people are theater people.

But there’s a type of performative theater I keep seeing, and that’s those who basically use their performance to look like activism. I’m talking about people who do things like this.

Survivors, anti-gun violence groups and community leaders gathered Wednesday to tell Indianapolis to put the guns down.

Many of them live with the trauma of gun violence daily.

“Enough is enough,” said Deandra Dycus. “When are we going to get tired of seeing the daily news reports? A good doctor or a bad shooter is why my son survived when a stray bullet flew through the window and pierced him in the back of the head.”

They’re telling people to put their guns down.

Honestly, can anyone point me to a single person who heard such a call and thought, “Oh, crap! I didn’t realize me shooting up the city was a problem. My bad!” anywhere? Anywhere at all.

Now, I get that Dycus lost his son to such violence. He’s probably just looking for some way to prevent anyone else from going through what he did. But not everyone who gets involved in such “calls” has that excuse.

Then there are those who take their theater a few steps further, such as this gentleman from Michigan.

A 76-year-old community activist is crawling from Battle Creek to Kalamazoo to call for an end to gun violence.

Bobby Holley set out on the 23-mile trek Monday morning. Inching along the wet and icy road with pads strapped to his hands and knees, he said he’s crawling for a cause.

“To get attention to the issues,” he said. “If I walked, that wouldn’t get no attention… (Instead) I’m a person crawling, begging on his hands and knees to stop the violence.”

He wants to “get attention to the issues?”

I’m sorry, but is anyone unaware of the problem of so-called gun violence? Anyone? Seriously, no one is sitting there watching the news and thinking, “Holy crap! You mean people kill other people? And they use guns a lot of the time? I had no idea!”

It’s not happening.

Holley likely means well, and at least part of his crawling is to get attention on unsolved murders–something everyone knows exists but rarely thinks about–but he’s still just performing.

Something I’ve noticed through the years is that the people who make a big thing of their activism are rarely the people actually on the ground doing work. That’s because being on the ground, in the streets, trying to change things is hard work and you don’t have time for virtue-signaling nonsense.

But who gets the headlines? Who gets calls for media interviews? It’s self-aggrandizement in more cases than not, and the media eats it up.

Yes, I also think such could happen (anything’s possible), but 1, We’re not Canada and 2, I think that if SloJoe, or anyone else for that matter, tried to enact the sort of ’emergency measures’ martial law as Trudeau did in Canada, for anything short of global thermonuclear war, what would result is exactly what TPTB are scared to death of.

BARR: A Canadian-Style ‘Emergency’ Could Easily Happen Here

On Feb. 14, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave Canadians a Valentine’s Day present, invoking the draconian “Emergencies Act” and suspending a wide range of civil liberties otherwise enjoyed by his countrymen.
Lest Americans conclude that our constitutional republic is safe from such facially dictatorial actions, they should know that under existing federal laws and the laws of every state, the president or a governor could take similar “emergency” action at any time they decide an “emergency” presents itself. COVID has demonstrated this is spades.
Regardless of whether a real emergency exists prior to a president or governor invoking such powers, and regardless of whether such declaration is for a statutorily limited time, consequential damage to the fabric of a free society results. At a minimum, declaring an “emergency” and suspending individual liberties serves as a “warning” to citizens that they had best be careful what they say and do in the future.
Trudeau’s actions in declaring a “national emergency” because of an irksome, but peaceful, trucker’s strike should cause Americans to pay far closer attention to “emergency powers” laws here at home. Doing so might force some of our countrymen to question the abject fear that has undergirded much of public policy in the United States since the terror attacks of 9/11 — made far worse by the manner in which governments at all levels have responded to the COVID pandemic in the past biennium.
From a practical standpoint, as we see in Canada, it matters little whether the declaration of the “emergency” fits clearly within the four corners of the emergency law that is invoked. What matters is the presence of circumstances in which an elected leader is able to stoke the flames of fear and anger in a sufficiently large segment of the electorate, so that the invocation of the law seems to constitute a reasonable response.
Once an “emergency” law is on the books of the sovereign entity, whether of a state or the federal government, all it takes is a “stroke of the pen, law of the land” (to quote former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala) to unleash the awesome powers at that sovereign’s disposal. Just watch the videos emerging from Ottawa to see how quickly the nightmare unfolds once the document is signed.
The actual form of the government declaring the emergency is of little consequence. Abuse of emergency powers can happen in a representative democracy such as ours just as easily as in a Canadian parliamentary system. Moreover, Republicans often are just as likely to play the “emergency powers” card as are their Democrat counterparts. It was, after all, Republican President Donald Trump who, in March 2020, invoked the powers of at least three federal “national emergency” laws to meet a perceived COVID emergency threat.
Granted, many emergency declarations by state and federal officials are focused toward and limited to natural disasters, such as hurricanes or floods, and used primarily to free up government assistance. However,  the actual powers nestled within those laws are frighteningly expansive. For example, a U.S. president arguably could, among other actions upon declaring a “national emergency “ (not expressly defined in federal laws), seize control of the internet pursuant to a 1930s era communications law or freeze individuals’ financial accounts in reliance on 1970s era laws.
At the state level, Second Amendment supporters will recall law enforcement officers in New Orleans seizing, at times forcibly, over 1,000 lawfully owned private firearms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Even though subsequent legal action undertaken by the NRA and other gun-rights groups successfully challenged the seizures, many firearms never were returned to their owners.
Even today, with medical and scientific evidence clearly demonstrating that lingering COVID hazards are not dire and are manageable, many government agencies, including public schools in jurisdictions across the country, are refusing to hand back all the “emergency” powers they grabbed in early 2020.
Founding Father James Madison had it right when he wrote in Federalist 57 that placing the powers of all three branches of government in the hands of one entity (whether a prime minister, a governor or a president) is “the very definition of tyranny.”
Today, 234 years later, tyranny is still tyranny, even if it is only “temporary.”
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West
Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.

As potent as this mythological framework is, reinforced by large media corporations over so many decades, it cannot withstand the increasingly glaring use of precisely these despotic tactics in the West. Watching Justin Trudeau — the sweet, well-mannered, well-raised good-boy prince of one of the West’s nicest countries featuring such a pretty visage (even on the numerous occasions when marred by blackface) — invoke and then harshly impose dubious emergency, civil-liberties-denying powers is just the latest swing of the hammer causing this Western sculpture to crumble. In sum, you are required by Western propaganda to treat the two images below as fundamentally different; indeed, huge numbers of people in the West vehemently denounce the one on the left while enthusiastically applauding the one on the right. Such brittle mythology can be sustained only for so long:

Reuters, Aug. 8, 2019 (left); BBC, Feb. 15, 2022 (right)

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The Constitution may impede them, to an extent, but they still are trying.
It takes what Patrick Henry advised:
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”

WaPo Writer Actually Declares Individual Freedom ‘a Key Component of White Supremacy’

George Orwell’s “1984” or “Animal Farm”? Nope. Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”? Uh-huh. Some other dystopian novel about life in a future totalitarian America? No way. Straight from the pages of the Washington Post. You know, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” guys?

More like “Individual Freedom and Liberty Dies in the Darkness of the Radical Left.”

In a WaPo “Made by History” op-ed titled The Ottawa Trucker Convoy Is Rooted in Canada’s Settler Colonial History, Taylor Dysart, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, awkwardly argues that “one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy.” After carefully dissecting the garble, I was able to get to the root cause.

Before we begin, unlike the 187,594,632 (and counting) articles about the Freedom Convoy, totalitarian Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or anything else to do with Ottawa, my focus will be on “none of above.” Instead, it will be about the crux of the lunacy of Ms. Dysart and other lunatics who believe as she does, and the unfortunate publishing of said lunacy by a once-proud American institution.

You’re welcome. Now, on with the show.

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U.S. president Gerald Ford told Congress in 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” That goes for rights too.

Canada Shows Why It’s Called ‘American Exceptionalism’

It’s shocking to me that some people are surprised by how the situation with the Freedom Convoy went down. It was never going to end well, the odds of them winning were as long as a summer day for a very simple reason: Canada is not the United States.

That may seem obvious, and in the easiest way, it is. But in the way that matters most, it’s probably not that clear.

We have a tendency to think things that simply are not true, like the Iraqi people yearned to be free and democratic when in reality they simply wanted Saddam dead so they could return to settling ancient tribal scores. They had no idea what “freedom” meant, and the concept of individual liberty never occurred to them. It went over like introducing Sharia Law to San Francisco would.

One thing to notice about the coverage of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is how the American media, particularly from conservative outlets, didn’t reflect the will of Canadians. You’d think Justin Trudeau going full totalitarian, turning into a little Fidel Castro (like father, like son – look it up), would bring about a collapse in his popularity, but it hasn’t. Most Canadians were upset he didn’t act sooner.

Canada is not like the United States. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants Canadians various rights that, if you don’t think about it, are similar in a lot of ways to the rights we enjoy here. But there’s a major difference.

Our Constitution grants exactly zero rights to anyone, it acknowledges the rights with which we were born and denies the federal government the ability to infringe upon them. The Canadian Charter gives citizens certain rights, explicitly. If a government can grant rights, there is no justification for them not being able to take them away, temporarily or permanently.

When Trudeau invoked emergency powers, US conservatives recoiled in horror. Canadians did not.

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Seven Great Truths [to emerge from the truckers’ protest]

Robert Gore:

The truckers’ rallying cry—Freedom!—inspires the many and thrusts greatness on a few.

Justin Trudeau and his globalist ilk are an unimpressive lot. Trudeau’s interminable Wikipedia profile is over 8000 words and has 324 references. Never has so much been said about so little except, perhaps, in other globalist profiles. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was, like Trudeau, one of Klaus Schwab’s Young Global Leaders, a finishing school for the Davos set.

Trudeau’s resumé lists bachelors’ degrees in literature and education, and studies but no degrees in engineering and environmental geography. He was a substitute and then a permanent teacher in secondary schools. Wikipedia says he gave his father, Pierre, prime minister from 1980 to 1984, a nice eulogy. He started a winter sports safety fund after his brother was killed in an avalanche, portrayed a distant relative in a CBC miniseries, started the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, fought a zinc mine in the Northwest Territories, and was master of ceremonies at an award show and a political rally. (That comprehensive summation took three sentences and 105 words.)

His featherweight resumé screams politics and government as an ultimate career. He’s a Canadian Barack Obama. See the fawning Wikipedia entry for thousands of words on his ascent up the political ladder. In 2015 he was elected Prime Minister, a position he holds to this day, but perhaps not much longer.

Ottawa, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels are filled with globalist politicians, functionaries, and toadies who differ from Trudeau only superficially. Power, their “right” to tell and force others how to live, is really a self-bestowed entitlement. They are the insiders, and outsiders are ignored or deplored. Whatever differences they have among themselves, they close ranks when fellow insiders are under attack. The Wikipedia profile mentions several Trudeau scandals, including blackface photos, that might have ended the career of an outsider politician, but from which he survived.

Once in a while something cuts through the muck of modern life with diamond-cutter precision and finality, yielding a moment of clarity. The juxtaposition of two images creates just such a moment. The one: thousands of Canadians braving the the bitter cold to cheer and succor 18-wheelers and their drivers rolling towards Ottawa. The other: the empty chair of an empty-suit prime minister who absented himself rather than face what his arrogant totalitarianism had wrought.

Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors.

“Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, March 3, 2016

Justin Trudeau has done more to usher in that dawn than any other globalist. His invective and cowardice have rendered him contemptible in the eyes of millions of Canadians and others around the world despite the best efforts of the kept media to protect him. That he and his ilk are intellectual and moral inferiors is the first great truth to emerge from the truckers’ protest.

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There is one confirmed quote of Yamamoto;
“….it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House.”
And anyone could figure that would result in a catastrophic failure because there would be those multitude of rifles.

Ukraine considers private gun ownership to fend off invasion

I’m rather glad the United States isn’t in the same position as Ukraine.

The prospect of invasion from a larger, more powerful neighbor is never a pleasant one. As we’ve noted, steps are being taken to deal with that potential outcome.

While there have been some indications that tensions are lessening, that potential still exists. As such, it seems some are considering private gun ownership as a solution.

Allowing people in Ukraine to legally own handguns would greatly improve national security against outside “aggressors,” Ukraine’s Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov told news agency RBK Ukraine on Thursday. The move would “increase citizens’ personal security, help law enforcement and certainly reduce crime rates,” the minister claims.

Reznikov said on Thursday he has been a “longtime gun-rights supporter”, adding that “as a lawyer” he believes a gun law is long overdue in Ukraine. In late 2021, the local UNIAN news agency published a piece calling Ukraine “virtually the only nation in Europe lacking a gun law.”

The defense minister has advocated the idea of people “getting a right to … carry handguns” and pointed to the experience of “many other nations.” Reznikov also argued that it would help Ukraine prevent a potential aggression.

Sounds good, right?

Well, it’s definitely a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t really go far enough. Resnikov wants the kinds of weapons that would actually be useful kept away from the public, issued only to reservists should the need arise.

So that’s less than ideal.

However, I still find it interesting that at a time when Ukraine is legitimately concerned about an invasion, they turn to private gun ownership as a potential solution.

Our Founding Fathers did the same when they wrote the Second Amendment. They’d just come out of the other end of a war with a foreign power and knew that there would potentially be another. They were mistrustful of standing armies and wanted the citizenry to be able to defend themselves.

It seems the Ukrainian defense minister is following a similar line of thinking with his statement.

And, to be fair, a population armed with handguns could be useful in the event of an invasion. Oh, they might not be able to do much during the initial push into the country, but for guerilla operations, I can see how the handgun can be used to take out enemy troops and secure their weapons for more offensive punch.

Regardless, though, this is a good move and I’m glad to see someone in Ukraine make the suggestion. I only wish he’d recognize that an armed populace is better when it can be fully armed rather than only partially. Still, when you’re worried about Putin sending troops across the border because he has nothing better to do, it’s better than nothing.

It’s only too bad no one had this revelation a year ago so people could have taken still more steps to defend their homes from Russian aggression.

And it’s a firm reminder of why protecting and defending our Second Amendment is so important, so that we’re never in this position.

While it’s unlikely he ever said it, the quote attributed to Japanese Admiral Yamamoto is certainly accurate. If you ever try to invade the United States, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.

American Truckers Plan Convoy to DC in Protest of COVID-19 Mandates

Taking a cue from truckers bordering America’s north, a political action committee will partner with truck convoys to protest what it deems as overreaching government COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.

The Great American Patriot Project on Wednesday asked volunteers to contribute, join or support a convoy of truckers slated to travel to Washington D.C. next month.

Routes for the convoys will start in Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio and Fresno, California and will end on March 6 in Washington. They will be met by a congressional welcome committee to discuss policy changes, organizers said.

“I don’t think that anybody wants to be told what to do,” Erica Knight, spokeswoman for the PAC, told Fox News. “They don’t want to deal with these mandates and it’s kind of a way to stand up for all the American people against it.”

In an email blast, the PAC said the truckers represent “peaceful, non-violent Americans who are dissatisfied with the unscientific, unconstitutional government overreach in regards to mandates.”

The convoy comes amid ongoing protests by Canadian truckers calling for an end to COVID-19 mandates in their country. The resistance began several weeks ago when truckers decided to stand and oppose a rule requiring them to be fully vaccinated.

Not being vaccinated could impact their livelihoods as well as the country’s supply chain.

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked that country’s Emergencies Act, a rare move that gives the country’s government temporary powers to deal with the border blockades, including using tough legal and financial measures against participating truckers.

Trudeau’s actions against Canadian truckers are ‘absolutely outrageous’ and ‘overkill’: David KraydenVideo

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“I’m sure that having a bunch of protesting and standing up for their rights are definitely part of the inspiration here,” Knight said.

Cold War-era East Berlin had armed checkpoints — now Ottawa does too.

It has already been nicknamed Checkpoint Trudeau.

Actually, like Cold War East Berlin, there may be need for many checkpoint names.

“The secured area includes almost 100 checkpoints that will have police presence to ensure that those seeking entry to that secure area for a unlawful reason, such as joining a protest, cannot enter the downtown core,” acting Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said Thursday.

Canada’s capital, operating under the Emergencies Act, now has ‘no go zones” similar to a police state. Authorities set up checkpoints with armed police officers in downtown Ottawa on Thursday — from Highway 417 (Queensway) to Parliament Hill, where dozens of trucks have been parked for three weeks.

To get through the Berlin Wall under communism, people had to go through entry points known as Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo and, of course, Checkpoint Charlie. Now to get into through Ottawa’s police manned border points, people must produce papers to prove they live in the area or have a reason to be there.

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‘This is far from over’: Freedom Convoy truckers ‘hold the line’ and continue to block access from Canadian side of Ambassador Bridge after cops cleared them away earlier. Protesters march in Ottawa and NY Gov. prepares for Niagara Falls disruption

  • The Freedom Convoy trucker protest has continued into Saturday night on the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario following a lengthy demonstration day
  • Canadian demonstrators have been holding protests in light of Justin Trudeau’s order for truckers to be vaccinated or quarantined after returning to the US
  • These protests have been active at US-Canadian borders in cities such as Ottawa and areas in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta
  • The problems linked to the protests have contributed to the supply chain crisis as vehicle companies were forced to shut down due to a lack of auto parts
  • An additional protest has reportedly been planned on the Fort Pierce Bridge in Ontario which connects to the US city of Buffalo, NY
  • New York Governor Kathy Hochul has since announced she is preparing to handle the possible disruption, with the Empire State home to multiple crossings into Canada

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So, ballistic ‘forensics’, like a lot of forensics is a ‘by guess, best estimate’ of something, and again confirms that the politics of the police department, the prosecuting attorney, and of you and your ‘status in society’, are a major factor in the decision making process of whether or not you get charged.

Why a High-Ranking FBI Attorney Is Pushing ‘Unbelievable’ Junk Science on Guns

Late last year, a forensic firearms analyst in Wisconsin emailed a remarkable document to more than 200 of her colleagues across the country. It was a handout from an online lecture given by Jim Agar, the assistant general counsel for the FBI Crime Lab.

For years, forensic firearms analysts have claimed the ability to examine the marks on a bullet found at a crime scene and match it to the gun that fired it—to the exclusion of all other guns. It can be powerfully persuasive to juries. But over the last decade or so, some scientists have cast doubt on the claim.

Forensic firearms analysis falls into a subcategory of forensics colloquially known as “pattern matching.” In these specialties, an analyst looks at a piece of evidence from a crime scene and compares it with a piece of evidence associated with a suspect.

The most damning criticism of the field came in a 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, which found that “firearms analysis currently falls short of the criteria for foundational validity,” and that the studies the field’s practitioners often cite to support their work are poorly designed and “seriously underestimate the false positive rate.”

After decades of deferring to these forensic analysts, a handful of judges started to heed the warnings from scientists, and have put limits on what some forensic witnesses can say in court. Those decisions have sparked a defensive backlash in the forensics community, along with rebukes from law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

Agar’s document is part of that backlash. In the two-page handout, Agar instructs firearms analysts on how to circumvent judges’ restrictions on unscientific testimony. He even suggests dialogue for prosecutors and analysts to recite if challenged. Most controversially, Agar advises analysts to tell judges that any effort to restrict their testimony to claims backed by scientific research is tantamount to asking them to commit perjury.

Agar’s document was so volatile, it was upbraided by the Texas Forensic Science Commission (TFSC). That agency—the only one of its kind—was formed in the wake of revelations that bogus expert testimony likely caused the state to convict and execute an innocent man, and is tasked with ensuring that expert testimony given in Texas courtrooms is scientifically valid. The TFSC called Agar’s advice to firearm analysts “irredeemably faulty,” and stated that it “runs counter to core principles in science.”

“This is just really unbelievable,” Ellen Yaroshefsky, a professor of legal ethics at Hofstra University, told The Daily Beast after reviewing Agar’s memo. “He’s encouraging false testimony and he’s undermining respect for the judiciary. I mean, he’s saying that if a judge says you can’t give unscientific testimony, you’re being forced to commit perjury? It’s just absurd.”

A Short History of FBI Forensic Blunders

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‘You can’t stop the signal…”

ATF Tries To Ban Forced Reset Triggers As People Begin To 3D Print At Home

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has been coming after the Orlando-based Rare Breed Triggers (RBT), the manufacturer of a drop-in AR-15 forced reset trigger since last summer.

Everyone in the gun-rights world has been following the ATF’s attack on RBT. The Feds say RBT’s FRT-15 (forced reset trigger for an AR-15 platform) is classified as a “machine gun,” but the company claims otherwise.

Less than two weeks ago, Gun Owners of America, one of the most prominent pro-gun organizations, published an alleged leaked internal ATF email documenting plans to start seizing lawfully-owned FRT-15s from manufacturers and resellers. RBT’s president Lawrence Demonico responded to the leaked memo and said while he couldn’t confirm it, “I can tell you we’ve received word from one dealer in Illinois late yesterday afternoon stating that the ATF visited him and handed him a cease and desist order and seized FRT-15 triggers.”

The ATF under the Biden administration is getting bolder and could rule by executive fiat on new guidelines for gun braces, serialized uppers, and 80% lowers as early as spring. The Feds are also pursuing the ban of forced reset triggers. Many in the gun community have a bad feeling about an overreaching ATF ahead of midterms as President Biden must appease his anti-gun base.

With that aside, we enter the world of 3D printing and how the gun community has embraced this technology over recent years to stay one step ahead of the ATF. This brings us to one YouTuber named “Hoffman Tactical,” who released a video days ago explaining how he 3D-printed a forced reset trigger.

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Australia’s BIGGEST convoy descends on the capital: A huge anti-mandate protest is underway in Australia today.

“A huge crowd is building in Canberra as the anti-mandate Convoy To Canberra protest gains momentum in the nation’s capital. Last night traffic was brought to a standstill as cars, caravans, trucks and buses flooded into the city from all states. The crowd today met at Commonwealth Park before starting the march to Parliament House where a range of speakers will address the crowd.”

Protecting Second Amendment rights from Washington

SOUTH DAKOTA GOVERNOR KRISTI NOEM:

The Constitution is specific when it comes to our right to defend ourselves. The words boldly declare, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The fact that I will defend that right is an important distinction between myself and politicians like President Joe Biden , who said from the White House in April of last year that, with regard to the Second Amendment, “no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute.” These are the words of a politician with plans to chip away at the Bill of Rights.

The Biden gun-grabbing agenda includes bans on certain firearms, gun buyback programs, lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers, and restrictions on private firearm transfers that fundamentally end gun shows. I am 100% against federal politicians restricting gun rights because I stand with our founders who wrote this country’s founding documents.

The Constitution recognizes an existing natural right of all people to be free from government oppression. It also allows personal protection through the right to keep and bear arms. I have stood strong to protect the rights of my people here in South Dakota. Those on the extreme Left have opposed my thoughtful approach to COVID-19 and condemned my refusal to infringe on the freedoms of our citizens. I kept our state open and did not impose unconstitutional mandates. This battle for our right to bear arms will require the same fortitude and determination.

Our outdoor heritage and hunting culture are popular in my state of South Dakota, yet they’re not so popular with politicians from states such as New York, California, and Delaware. Unlike so many other politicians, I am an actual hunter. My Grandma Dorris taught me how to hunt birds when I was a young girl, and my father was the one who took me big-game hunting. Our family has made so many memories enjoying and exercising our Second Amendment rights. I have never lost that love for the outdoors and hunting, and I have passed it on to my children. Hopefully soon, I will also enjoy this pastime with my brand new granddaughter, Miss Addie. Hunting is an important part of gun rights, yet we must never forget that these rights were protected in our Constitution for another reason, too. Our founders wisely included this language to also guard against tyranny, like we experienced from Great Britain at the founding of this great nation.

Politicians should be judged by their actions. The first bill I signed into law here in South Dakota was constitutional carry. A previous governor had vetoed it, but I wanted the people of South Dakota to know I would protect their Second Amendment rights. Earlier this month, I announced at my State of the State address that I am eliminating all fees associated with permits and federal background checks for gun sales. It won’t cost a penny to exercise your Second Amendment rights in South Dakota.

I recently received the “Courage Under Fire” award from the Safari Club International . I was honored when CEO Laird Hamberlin spoke on my behalf at the event and said, “No governor has fought more to protect our hunting traditions, and we cannot wait to recognize Gov. Noem as we celebrate SCI’s 50 Years of Freedom.” He cited my record for respecting “the rights of her people by trusting them to use personal responsibility to make the best decisions for themselves, their loved ones, and, in turn, their communities.” He thanked me by saying I have been “a leader in promoting hunting, public access, and conservation across her state.” I cite this because it is an award that should be shared with the people of South Dakota who are standing strong against oppressive ideas coming from Washington, D.C.

Conservatives in this country need only look to the states for leaders who have fiercely fought to protect their rights in the past. We will continue to protect Second Amendment rights, even if Democrats have total control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. As governor of South Dakota, I have proven I will stand strong against any attempt by Biden or a woke Congress to take away fundamental rights from South Dakotans. And I am ready to defend our constitutional right to bear arms once again and always.

Kristi Noem is the governor of South Dakota.

Eric is nothing if not determined….. and patient.

Measure derided as the ‘Make Murder Legal Act’ killed in Missouri Senate committee

JEFFERSON CITY — A Missouri Senate panel on Thursday terminated a proposal one county prosecutor called the “Make Murder Legal Act.”

The official name of the measure is Senate Bill 666, which the sponsor, Sen. Eric Burlison, R-Battlefield, said he didn’t choose.

Members of the GOP-controlled Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Public Safety Committee failed to advance the bill out of committee on Thursday.

Burlison, however, told the Post-Dispatch that he could bring the measure back as an amendment to other firearms legislation he’s sponsoring.

“There are multiple ways to pass language,” Burlison said.

The legislation would’ve established a presumption that a defendant acted reasonably in self-defense when they use force against another person.

“I refer to it as the ‘Make Murder Legal Act,’” Stoddard County Prosecuting Attorney Russ Oliver, a Republican representing the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said in a Senate committee hearing last week.

“What we are doing with this bill is … basically saying the 6,500 assaults that are committed every single year in Missouri — that every single one of those are automatically presumed to be self-defense,” Oliver said.

Burlison said the claims are overblown.

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Much of that concentration is the result of goobermint policy.

Joel Kotkin: The Zaibatsu-ization of America.

Our tech overlords have forsaken innovation for consolidation.

Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.

At the time, Japan had developed an economic model around a handful of large corporate conglomerates called zaibatsu. Organized as a “financial clique,” with a bank at the center, these firms extended their interests into virtually all economic activity. They included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Mitsubishi led the way in shipbuilding, steel, and of course aircraft, being the creator of the famous Zero fighter.

Until bested by their onetime allies in the military, the zaibatsu dominated Japan. The war initially benefited them, but ultimately ruined their businesses as Japan was devastated. Yet they were so essential to the function of the economy that they were gradually rehabilitated during the U.S. occupation, recreating their historic pattern of using smaller firms as convenient subordinates.

Today we see the rise of a few companies, who have moved into virtually every aspect of our economy. The nerds of Silicon Valley are no longer just interested in gadgets to make life better but are seizing control of both the production and dissemination of information. Arguably the greatest beneficiaries of a pandemic that hooked people ever more on their products, the tech giants now have the capital to lead the drive into space and the forced march to electrical vehicles, while also looking into dominating more prosaic fields like healthcare and finance.

The zaibatu-ization of America’s economy presents an enormous problem of governance. Our constitutional structure is based on the notion of many competing players. When concentration became too evident, and politically potent, as during the early decades of the last century, measures were taken to slow, and even reverse, over-concentration. Yet in the past few decades, the largest emerging corporate interests—Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon—and a handful of large financial institutions gained unprecedented control over the economy. By last summer six tech firms, including Tesla, accounted for half the value of the NASQAQ 100.  By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined.

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Is that like ‘coincidental’?
Paul can confirm what I think about ‘coincidence’.

BLUF:
All this may seem a distant worry, or something that should not garner so much ink, but rights – of all kinds – are lost by inches, by indifference, by assuming the best, by forgetting the adage offered by Lord Acton, centuries ago: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The best way to protect citizen rights – of all kinds – is to watch closely that infringements of all kinds are prevented, even the incremental and seeming innocuous – especially those infringements.

Accidental National Gun Registry?

The creation of a national gun registry, or centralized database for every gun in America, is prohibited by statute. Nevertheless, a backdoor appears to be left open – and fear mounts that records traditionally used to assure guns do not fall into the wrong hands by legal sale, will be used for other purposes.

Specifically, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, a 1986 law amending a 1968 law, makes clear that gun owners have rights secured to them through the Second Amendment, and further secured by both judicial interpretation and legislative protections.

The 1986 act grew out of concern that average gun owners were being harassed by overzealous federal officials, in effect eclipsing the Second Amendment by implicit coercion, intimidation, and attempts to reduce overall gun ownership, or minimize use of firearms for legal purposes.

The concern was not one-sided, but bipartisan, and came at a time when perhaps two-thirds of all Americans owned firearms. While ownership has trended down in recent decades, especially in urban centers, it has trended up markedly – including in urban centers – in the past several years.

A committee of Congress found, in 1982 – in the run-up the 1986 law banning a registry and supporting citizen owners – that citizen rights are critical.

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BLUF:
….the DHS bulletin provides absolutely no evidence or citation to affirm its claims regarding what motivates these “extremists.” One is left only with vague assertion, backed by claims of secret “intelligence,” which ought not be satisfying to any serious interlocutor.

But it is certainly curious that, according to Homeland Security, terrorists always seem to be most interested in topics on which Joe Biden is polling poorly, and on which his administration faces growing criticism from the broader American electorate.

DHS: American Thought Police
The transition from tracking terrorism to chasing thought crime has a major advantage. It exonerates U.S. counterterrorism officials from the meddlesome job of catching actual terrorists.

The Department of Homeland Security, which under the Biden Administration routinely lets watch-listed terrorists cross the southern border unmolested, and which approved entry to the United States for Colleyville Synagogue hostage-taker Malik Faisal Akram despite his being known to British authorities as a terror risk, has taken upon its broad bureaucratic shoulders an even more challenging job.

Stopping the flow of MDM.

MDM isn’t the latest flavor of fentanyl, produced by the Communist Chinese regime for sale to Mexican drug cartels, and now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 to 45. No, MDM stands for mis- dis- and mal-information, the latest government acronym from which you must be protected.

DHS’ latest “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” released Monday, has much to say about the dangers of American minds being polluted with MDM, and curiously little to say about actual terror threats.

MDM is a term developed by the DHS Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to replace the old-fashioned phrase “foreign influence.” Now let us caveat that the U.S. government does indeed have a responsibility to monitor and to identify foreign influence operations. This was the remit of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group, which worked tirelessly to identify Soviet lies being spread to undermine the United States’ global standing in the world, and then countered them with the truth.

But under the latest iteration, DHS is no longer concerned solely with enemy lies spread abroad, but increasingly with information spread by “domestic threat actors” (read: American citizens). And no longer are they merely concerned with disinformation, false material spread to manipulate an opponent, but with misinformation, which DHS considers information that is false but not intended to cause harm, and “mal-information,” which means information which is true but the government considers harmful anyway.

This raises the question of who put a government intelligence and law enforcement agency in the position of declaring not only what is true or false but also determining whether information is good or harmful for consumption by free citizens. Of course, no law prohibits American citizens of spreading information of any kind, whether true or false.

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PRESIDENT BIDEN CALLS LAW-ABIDING AMERICANS ‘THE RESISTANCE’

President Joe Biden traveled to New York City for a media event to try and show America he’s doing something about rampant crime. Instead, he blamed the Second Amendment and lawful gun owners, said nothing about holding criminals to account and repeated the same tired lies about the firearm industry he keeps at the ready – lies “fact-checked” as being false each time he’s previously recited them.

It makes no difference to the president. He’s not even trying anymore. To President Biden and national gun control groups the problem is always the gun and the law-abiding members of the industry. It’s never the criminal.

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