Comment O’ The Day
I have to wonder if this is about getting in front of something big about to drop. Washington Post is the mouthpiece of the CIA. They just don’t drop this kind of thing for no reason. Two Dem Senators? That is suspicious too. You don’t take shots at your teammates. Something fishy going on.–Scruffy
This Just In™
No Money for Crack Pipes: Feds Douse Social Media Firestorm.
As New York Times owner Tom Cotton notes:
“Good news. Biden’s HHS is no longer funding crack pipes. But make no mistake: yesterday’s change in policy is because HHS got caught. Unfortunately, HHS is still proudly using your tax dollars to fund heroin syringes for drug addicts.”
By Design, Biden’s Border Crisis Actually His Biggest Success.
*****
Biden gives illegal immigrants free tickets to ride buses that whisk them deep into the U.S. interior. Illegal aliens in Brownsville, Texas, score free cab rides to the airport, whereupon they jet off to Atlanta, Houston, and other cities.
Still other illegal aliens—including single adult males—board clandestine night flights that land after closing time in New York’s Westchester Airport and other airfields. As if in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, illegal aliens without papers may use their arrest warrants as IDs to board aircraft. Specifically, this is Immigration and Customs Enforcement Form I-200, Warrant for Arrest of Alien.
And these are just the illegal immigrants that Customs and Border Protection intercepted. Biden let an estimated 500,000 “got-aways” get away. Where are they? Who knows?
Biden has had an entire year to improve this rapidly deteriorating mess. Instead, he hasn’t lifted a cuticle.
Having done nothing about this for a year, one must conclude that this is what Biden wants.
But why? Why would Biden willfully obliterate the U.S.-Mexico boundary and vacuum millions of illegal immigrants north?
Oh, that question is easy to answer:
Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors:
“One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
That’s one answer, the article continues with the primary answer i.e. population replacement.
The open “border” is designed to import the maximum number of Future Democrats of America. Biden and his ilk see these people as potential voters and, they reckon, a majority will be Democrats.
“For the Left, these policies are practically a fantasy come true,” Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies with the Center for Immigration Studies, told me. “The Democrats think that, in the long run, these new arrivals will not only stock certain congressional districts with fresh bodies, but also become loyal Democrat voters.”…………….
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.
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.
Civil Liberties Concern Prompted by House Sergeant-at-Arms’s New Capitol Access ID Plan
Why do you think I call them Bureaucraps?
ATF Actions Show Selective and Inconsistent Rules and Enforcement
It figures the self-styled “experts” misspelled “identifying.” This piece of self-promoting propaganda deserves a “5 Fast Facts” rebuttal, starting with “Unconstitutional, but there’s not a damn thing your ‘representatives’ intend to do about it.” (ATF/Facebook)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- With anticipated ATF raids over reports on a purported ATF email concerning forced reset triggers, with similar concerns arising from ATF actions on stabilizing braces, with renewed expectations om the classification of Shockwave-type firearms, and with the hysterical reclassification of “bump stock” type devices as machineguns, one thing is clear: These attacks on the right to keep and bear arms have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with an ATF being pressed by higher-ups to pile on infringements through “rule” changes.
In 2005, the Congressional Research Service published a memorandum regarding ATF firearms testing procedures. Among other things, it revealed that the ATF has “over 300 cubic feet of classification letters stored in file cabinets.” The Bureau hasn’t scanned any of these documents into a searchable database to assure consistency of interpretation, to identify and resolve regulatory conflicts. The extent to which this inconsistency has grown and compounded in intervening years is unknown and unknowable without a major organization and review effort, which ain’t gonna happen.
Republicans MUST defund this when we get the majority back. A federal gun registry is illegal in the United States. https://t.co/05SoFN7O6A
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 1, 2022
the exact moment my trust in our public heath experts began to erode was in June 2020 when they said “racism is a public health issue and therefore it’s okay to gather in public in the middle of a pandemic” https://t.co/hlg7pUfOz4
— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) December 28, 2021
Federal Register Publishes Schedule For ATF’s Firearm, Silencer, and Pistol Brace Final Regulations
Set to publish tomorrow [which is today], but for some reason already public on govinfo (or download the PDF HERE), the January 31, 2022 Federal Register details ATF’s plans to finalize its rulemaking and regulations related to the definitions of firearm, firearm frame/receiver, complete weapon, complete silencer, and more, plus will publish its final factors for determining whether a specific pistol equipped with a pistol stabilizing brace is, in fact, a pistol or if it’s a short barreled rifle.
From the summary in the Federal Register:
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ATF issues regulations to enforce the Federal laws relating to the manufacture, importation, sale, and other commerce in firearms and explosives. ATF’s mission and regulations are designed to, among other objectives: (1) Curb illegal traffic in, and criminal use of, firearms and explosives; and (2) assist State, local, and other Federal law enforcement agencies in reducing violent crime. ATF will continue, as a priority during fiscal year 2021, to seek modifications to its regulations governing commerce in firearms and explosives in furtherance of these important goals. ATF plans to finalize regulations regarding definitions of firearm, firearm frame or receiver, gunsmith, complete weapon, complete muffler or silencer device, privately made firearm, and readily, and finalize regulations on marking and recordkeeping that are necessary to implement these new or amended definitions (RIN 1140–AA54). The intent of this rulemaking is to consider technological developments and modern terminology in the firearms industry, and to enhance public safety by helping to stem the proliferation of unmarked, privately made firearms that have increasingly been recovered at crime scenes. Further, ATF plans to finalize regulations to implement certain provisions of Public Law 105– 277, Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999 (RIN 1140– AA10), and to set forth factors considered when evaluating firearms with an attached stabilizing brace to determine whether they are considered firearms under the National Firearms Act and/or the Gun Control Act (RIN 1140–AA55). This second rule would make clear that all weapons that fall under the National Firearms Act, however they are made, are subject to its heightened regulations—including registration and background check requirements. ATF also has begun a rulemaking process that amends 27 CFR part 447 to update the terminology in ATF’s import control regulations based on similar terminology amendments made by the Department of State on the U.S. Munitions List in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and the Department of Commerce on the Commerce Control List in the Export Administration Regulations (RIN 1140– AA49).
BREAKING: this proposal would double the ATF’s budget, giving them more funding and opportunities than ever before to restrict our #2A rights.
GOA stands ready and willing to fight Schumer and all the anti-gunners in Congress.https://t.co/JiMbnQoRP0
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) January 31, 2022
ATF to Treat Imports from Hong Kong the same as China.
Depending on who you ask, you will receive a different answer to the question: How many Countries are there currently in the World? Over the last 600 years, the concept of a country or state has also driven geopolitical events, as the milieu shifted from kingdoms to nations in the Western Hemisphere. In the 21st Century, the ramifications of the last decades of conflict have resulted in situations where some entities recognize a geographical region to be a country of itself, where others do not. Hong Kong has been one of these locations, where until recently the BATFE did not follow the same embargo on defense articles that it did with China.
As tensions rise between Taiwan and China, at the same time that Russia postures around Ukraine, so the BATFE has chosen to treat Hong Kong as if it were part of China in regards to the importation of defense articles, which could include components and optics. Although the BATFE is still waiting on guidance from the Department of State, they have chosen to delay requests from Hong Kong until clarification on the Arms Export Control Act has been made.
Both import and export laws apply to defense articles, which are defined as follows:
Defense Article means any item or technical data that is specifically designed, developed, configured, adapted, or modified for a military, missile, satellite, or other controlled use listed on the USML. Defense articles also include things such as models, mock-ups, or other items, i.e. technical data related to items. Note that sometimes defense articles include items not listed on the USML.
Many items fall under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) related to firearms. While equipment such as night vision and suppressors are regulated, so can a trigger, upper receiver, or optic.
Companies or manufacturing that take place in Hong Kong face new challenges, now that the BATFE has chosen to bring up the concern over their import or export status.
I’m old enough to remember when people thought censorship was an inherent evil. Now censorship is the go to solution for every public ill. https://t.co/dLUKBOl89X
— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) January 26, 2022
Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after being convicted for arson that resulted in a man’s death. More than two months after the arson, 30-year-old Oscar Lee Stewart was found dead in the rubble. Lee set the blaze during the riots after George Floyd’s death.
While sentencing guidelines indicated that Lee should be incarcerated for over 200 months, a memo from the US Attorney’s office for the District of Minnesota at the time of sentencing recommended a lesser sentence. The US Attorney stated that while “Mr. Lee committed a crime that cost a man his life,” his motives for setting the blaze should be taken into consideration at sentencing…………….
ALERT: Leaked internal ATF email – ATF moving on FRT and WOT triggers.
Trying to close the ‘Amish Loophole’?
ATF agents seize guns from Leacock Township property; Amish farmer admits sales
“Governor DeSantis: Obey His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal, Al Hadji, Joe Biden, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, Conqueror of North America in General and The United States in Particular, or your citizens get it.”
As a result of the @US_FDA's abrupt decision to remove the EUAs for two monoclonal antibodies, monoclonal antibody treatment sites will be closed until further notice. Full press release is below. pic.twitter.com/RGeWTPwxCs
— Florida Dept. of Health (@HealthyFla) January 25, 2022
1 jab, 2 jab, 3 jab, 4
5 jab, 6 jab, 7 jab, more!
“up to date” is the new catch phrase for ‘fully vaccinated’.
Are you fully vaccinated? CDC working to ‘pivot’ language.
(NEXSTAR) – If you haven’t gotten your booster shot yet, you may no longer be considered fully vaccinated as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepares to “pivot the language.”
Since the COVID-19 vaccines became available, many health officials have been focused on getting all Americans to be fully vaccinated. You are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after you complete your primary series (meaning you’ve received both doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine), according to the current CDC guidelines.
As booster shots became available, many wondered whether the definition of fully vaccinated would change. In early January, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said it wouldn’t.
During a Friday press briefing, Walensky said the agency is working to “pivot the language” for being fully vaccinated. She explained that the goal is to ensure Americans are caught up on their vaccines.
“We really want to make sure people are up to date. That means if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date,” Walensky said. “If you are eligible for a booster and you haven’t gotten it, you’re not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date.”
Biden Administration Finalizes “New” Firearm Storage Rule
On January 3, the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it would be finalizing a new rule on firearm storage for Federal Firearm Licensees (FFLs). The DOJ additionally announced an update to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATFs) “Best Practices” Guide for FFLs.
The new storage rule, which was first proposed by the Obama Administration in 2016, makes four substantial changes to federal firearms law.
First, the rule updates the regulatory definitions of “rifle,” “shotgun,” and “antique firearm” to match statutory changes that took effect in 1998.
Second, the rule defines “secure gun storage or safety device,” which generally tracks the existing statutory definition, but also includes a requirement that the secure gun storage or safety device be compatible with the firearms offered for sale by the licensee.
Third, the rule adopts ATF’s existing practice of requiring firearm dealers to certify that secure gun storage or safety devices are available at any location where firearms are sold to non-licensees.
Fourth, the rule extends the certification requirement to manufacturers and importers when they sell a firearms to non-licensees.
The rule will take effect on February 3, 2022. FFLs that engage in transactions with non-licensees should ensure that they have suitable locks or safes available for any firearms that they sell.
While the storage rule may not seem like a substantial change to federal firearms law, the Biden Administration has already proposed two other rules that would make drastic changes to federal law. As NRA-ILA has covered before, the administration has proposed a new rule to effectively ban pistol stabilizing braces and another rule that drastically alters key definitions in federal law.
The regulations pages for these proposed rules now indicate that the “frame or receiver” rule will be finalized in June while the stabilizing brace rule will be finalized in August. These dates may not reflect when the rules are actually finalized, so please check back regularly to www.nraila.org for updates on these terrible rules.
We shall see.
I was the ‘guinea pig’ for one of the LGS here when we ran their first eform 4 for a suppressor past week. Everything online seemed to work okay. The major hang-up has been that Martinsburg West By God Virginia had a major snow storm hit and the Postal Service has my print cards stuck somewhere in the Post Office there for the past 4 days.
ATF Problems with Rollout of New eForms Online System
