Inconvenient Truth: CNN Admits Majority Doesn’t Want More Gun Control!

You can’t tune into Morning Joe nowadays without hearing it trumpeted that somewhere between 85-90% of Americans want more gun-control laws.

But over on CNN, Wednesday morning’s New Day was telling an inconvenient truth. Check out how co-host John Berman framed matters. You might normally expect him to present things from a strongly pro-gun control perspective, but this is how he teed up Enten:

“One thing you hear is that around 90% of Americans support background checks, but does that tell the whole story about how much agreement there really is? . . . Maybe not exactly what you think.”

They pointed to a Gallup poll showing that a majority of Americans are either satisfied with the current level of gun control—or actually want less gun control!

Enten displayed numbers showing that only 36%, barely one-third,of Americans, want more gun control, whereas 54% are satisfied with current laws or want less gun control!

Enten also cited two recent state referendums on background checks. He noted that in Maine, the proposal to expand background checks was actually defeated, and in Nevada, passed with the slimmest of margins, at barely over 50%.

Summing up, Enten said:

“So you look at those polls that say background check: 80%, 90%! When you look at people actually voting on the measure, it’s not anywhere close to that! It’s much more of a 50/50 proposition.”

Meanwhile, back at Morning Joe, it’s more gun control, all the time.

This NewsBuster is a regular New Day viewer, and for some time now has noted inklings of a move away from the hard-left line it had taken for years. The Chris Licht [CNN’s new head honcho] effect? But MSNBC seems committed to toeing the liberal line — to the bitter end?

Woman Injured in Brooklyn Subway Shooting Sues Gun Manufacturer Glock

Lawsuit says Glock should be held liable because it ‘endangered the public health and safety’ with marketing and sales of its guns

A woman wounded in last month’s mass shooting on a New York City subway car filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Glock, the maker of the handgun allegedly used in the attack.

Ilene Steur, 49, was one of 10 people hurt by direct gunfire when she was hit by a bullet in her buttocks during her commute to work on 12 April.

Her lawsuit against the Austrian gun manufacturer, filed as a federal lawsuit in Brooklyn, claims that Glock should be held liable because it “endangered the public health and safety” with the marketing, distribution and sales of its guns. It accuses the firearm manufacturer of “reckless disregard for human life”.

A man charged in the attack, Frank James, is described a “Black nationalist” in the complaint. He has pleaded not guilty to terrorism and other counts after turning himself in.

Prosecutors allege James set off smoke canisters and then fired a 9mm Glock handgun at least 33 times inside the crowded subway car. In addition to the 10 people wounded in the attack, 13 others were injured by smoke inhalation and in the ensuing chaos.

Steur’s lawsuit accuses Glock of “marketing that emphasizes firearm characteristics such as their high capacity and ease of concealment, that appeal to prospective purchasers with criminal intent”.

It claims Glock is aware that its design is “unsuited to personal defense or recreation, enables an individual in possession of the weapon to inflict unparalleled civilian carnage”.

The complaint goes on to accuse Glock of making an “intentional effort for their pistols to be used in movies and rap songs”.

Mark Shirian, one of Steur’s lawyers, told the New York Times “gun manufacturers do not live in a bubble.

“They are aware that their marketing strategies are empowering purchasers with ill intent and endangering the lives of innocent people,” he said.

The gun manufacturer has not immediately commented on the lawsuit. It has in the past rejected calls to curb sales of its high-capacity magazines……

Federal Jury Convicts High-Level ISIS Member of Providing Material Support to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Including Two Counts Resulting in Death

Mirsad Kandic Faces Up to Life Imprisonment for Becoming an ISIS Fighter, Recruiting Other ISIS Fighters, and Providing Weapons, Equipment, and Battlefield Intelligence to ISIS

A New York man was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn, following a three-week trial before U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, of one count of conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and five substantive counts of providing material support to ISIS.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Mirsad Kandic, 40, of Brooklyn, New York, and Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a high-ranking member of ISIS, a designated foreign terrorist organization. He had multiple responsibilities within the global terrorist organization, including recruiting foreign fighters, trafficking foreign fighters from the West through Turkey and into Syria, and obtaining weapons, military equipment, maps, money, and false identifications for ISIS fighters. In carrying out these responsibilities, the defendant worked directly with ISIS emirs and battlefield commanders, including Bajro Ikanovic, who commanded an ISIS training camp in Syria beginning in or around 2014. Ikanovic, in turn, reported to Omar Shishani, then the top military commander for ISIS, and a key advisor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was, at the time, the leader of ISIS and the self-declared Caliph of the Islamic State.

“Pretend to Work Somewhere Else”: Elon Musk Says All Tesla Employees Must Return to the Office

As some companies try and delicately walk the line between returning to the office and offering “work from home” benefits to their employees in a post-Covid world, Elon Musk has taken a stance without quite as much nuance.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Musk wrote in a company email that was leaked this week.

“Remote work is no longer acceptable,” was the name of the email. In it, Musk put his employees to a choice: return to your desks and offices or start finding work elsewhere. The email was reported on by Fortune.

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Suspect dies from shooting linked to Fayetteville home invasion

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — Police responded to a home on South Shield Drive in Fayetteville on Wednesday morning as a suspect was killed in a shooting that happened after a home invasion.

Police said a man, who they consider a suspect, was found shot outside a home just before 4 a.m. He was pronounced dead shortly after their discovery.

Another man, who lived at the home, was found shot in the leg and is in stable condition at the hospital. Police believe a man they feel is another suspect in the shooting left the home before their arrival.

Several officers, detectives and a forensics team were parked along the street in a residential area after sunrise. Crime scene tape surrounded the home.

Preliminary findings revealed the shooting was the result of a break-in in the 7700 block of the road.

One neighbor told WRAL News that she heard a lot of noise around the time of the shooting., but couldn’t make out what exactly was happening. Many retired military members live in the neighborhood.

BLUF
The truth is that proposals for a prison society of disarmed and surveilled subjects shepherded by public employees are unworkable. The state can’t defend us from danger, and nothing obligates us to pretend otherwise. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to do it yourself.

If You Want Protection for Your Loved Ones, Do It Yourself

Police in Uvalde, Texas, face a barrage of criticism for delays in confronting the shooter who slaughtered children and teachers last week. Officials admit law enforcers screwed up; worse, they impeded parents who wanted to intervene, leaving the crime to be ended by agents who ignored police orders. As politicians rush to leverage tragedy to advance legislative agendas, we’re reminded again that it’s foolish to place our trust in authority or to surrender our ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted of police choosing to wait for backup and equipment before intervening in a massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers. “It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”

That decision delayed the response for over an hour. Finally, a Border Patrol team that drove 40 miles to the scene defied orders and stopped the shooter’s rampage.

“Federal agents who went to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday to confront a gunman who killed 19 children were told by local police to wait and not enter the school — and then decided after about half an hour to ignore that initial guidance and find the shooter,” noted NBC News.

The feds weren’t the only ones willing to intervene. Instead of taking on Ramos, local police tackled, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed parents rather than allow them to take action at which officers balked.

“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez who was briefly arrested for challenging official indecision.

“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”

This isn’t the first time police faced criticism for dithering in response to danger. By the time officers entered Colorado’s Columbine High School in in 1999, 47 minutes had passed allowing the shooters to do their worst before killing themselves. Columbine was supposed to spur changes in police policy, but that wasn’t apparent during a 2018 incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

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4 killed in shooting at Tulsa medical building, shooter dead

A gunman carrying a rifle and a handgun killed four people on Wednesday at a Tulsa medical building on a hospital campus, police said, the latest in a series of deadly mass shootings across the country in recent weeks.

Tulsa Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish confirmed the number of dead and said the shooter also was dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“Catastrophic”: Five Dead Including Shooter At Tulsa Medical Building

Update (2030ET): Authorities in Tusla, Oklahoma, confirm five dead, including the shooter. Police said the man used a rifle and a handgun during the shooting on the second floor of the Natalie Medical Building.

Excellent lambs

In the 1960s, campus protesters rejected adult authority, writes William Deresiewicz. Now the “young progressive elite” want the grownups to protect them from emotional and psychological harm, writes William Deresiewicz on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.

Not much has changed since he wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite in 2013, he writes.

We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.

. . . The attributes of adulthood — responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control — are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how.

“Beware of prepackaged rebellions,” he tells the Class of 2022. “That protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd.”

Becoming an independent person isn’t easy, writes Deresiewicz. “Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”

Stanford University (motto: “Let the winds of freedom blow.”) doesn’t want to let students grow up, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute in the Washington Examiner.

The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.

Under the ResX plan, students are assigned to a campus “neighborhood” for their undergraduate careers, Evers writes.  They will find ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community).”

Students’ social life is regulated: Students must register any party they host, he writes. Get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals are banned, as is hard liquor and drinking games, even for students 21 and older.

These measures “have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends,” Evers writes. “These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.”

BLUF
Any number of factors could be at play, including the proclivity of fire to break out at these plants, supply chain stresses, deferred maintenance, and the possibility of insurance fraud and arson, which is hardly unheard of. We have also seen some high-profile cyberattacks, and the FBI has warned that more could be on the way.

So, while no trend has emerged, it’s still something to keep an eye on, and it continues to cause more stress on an already overburdened domestic food supply system.

Update on Food Plants Blowing Up: More Explosions, More Stress on Domestic Food Supply

Over the past several weeks, PJ Media has covered the growing number of food plants across America that have caught fire, exploded, or had planes crash into them. More food processing plants, and more industrial fires of note, have occurred since those reports.

As we reported on May 2:

To be crystal clear: no pattern has yet emerged. The incidents still appear random. Nobody has produced a connection between all these incidents. There are just a LOT of them, and they’re continuing.

The FBI has not made any mention of the fires, plane crashes, and explosions, but it has issued an alert about cyberattacks possibly timed to disrupt the grain harvest season.

Well, in the subsequent month, several more incidents have occurred.

Last week, a large chicken processing facility burned in Minnesota, killing tens of thousands of chickens.

 

That came on the heels of another large chicken processing facility catching fire. On May 23, the Cargill plant in London, Ontario, suffered “significant damage” from a large fire over a holiday weekend.

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When you’ve lost NBC……………

I love this part:

Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct [yeah, sure baby] statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.

Well, when you have apparently have senile dementia, making stupid off the cuff remarks that constantly get corrected by your staff the lackeys of your puppet masters, and also sound like a broken record repeating utter crap-for-brains nonsense, it sure does appear that he isn’t in command of anything. 
Just me, but the question arises about SloJoe­™ feeling his staff ‘undermines him’. If he feels that way, why weren’t those people fired the second time it happened? (figuring you’d warn them after the first time to stop it) One obvious answer is that he can’t, because he’s been told who is really running the show, and it ain’t him. He’s nothing more than a figurehead who gets ordered about like an actor.

BLUF
“We’re on a track — a losing track,” Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said of the Democrats.

Inside a Biden White House adrift
Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party.

WASHINGTON — Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.

Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say. 

Crises have piled up in ways that have at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed: record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in Covid case numbers — and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder that he has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence. Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November, when midterm elections may cost his party control of Congress. 

“I don’t know what’s required here,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., whose endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primaries helped rescue Biden’s struggling candidacy. “But I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.”

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Whatever happened to retiring in shame after being so wrong?

Secretary of the Treasury, January ’21 to date.
Member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from ’94 to ’97.
Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from ’97 to ’99.
President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from ’04 to ’10.  Vice chair of the Federal Reserve from ’10 to ’14.
Chair of the Federal Reserve from ’14 to ’18.

Yellen is supposed to be THE expert on the U.S. economy.
She has no excuse to be this incompetent, unless it isn’t ‘incompetence’.
What is that line about it not being a bug, but a feature?

‘We Need Your Guidance’ — Joe Biden Meets with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Gun Control and Online Extremism

President Joe Biden warmly welcomed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to the White House on Tuesday, expressing his interest in her views on gun control and online censorship in her country.

“We need your guidance,” Biden said as he welcomed Ardern to the Oval Office. “And it’s a pleasure to see you in person.”

He praised the prime minister warmly for making progress on issues like climate change, combatting “violent extremism online,” and gun control.

“You understand that your leadership has taken a critical role on this global change, it really has,” he said.

Ardern has become a darling of the left after she pushed forward strict gun control laws in New Zealand, banning most semi-automatic rifles after the horrific Christchurch shooting in 2019. She also has repeatedly called for more tech censorship of online extremism, blaming the internet for radicalizing the shooter.

Biden appeared impressed.

“I want to work with you on that effort and I want to talk with you about what those conversations are like if you’re willing,” he said.

Biden expressed sadness that mass shootings continued happening in the United States, renewing calls for change.

“There’s an expression by an Irish poet that says too long a suffering makes a stone of the heart,” he said, claiming he had been to more “mass shooting aftermaths” than any president in American history.

Biden said he met with about 250 of the family members of the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for about four hours on Sunday.

“Much of it is preventable, and the devastation is amazing,” he said.

Ardern said she was willing to work with Biden on issues of violence, noting that there was a need for global progress on the issue.

“If there is anything we can share that would be of any value, we are here to share it,” she said.
Biden told reporters he planned to meet with members of Congress on the issue of gun control.

“I will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you,” he said.

Mass shootings renew efforts to target gun manufacturers’ legal shield

Efforts to hold firearms manufacturers legally liable for gun violence could become a new battleground in the nationwide debate over gun control after a series of fatal mass shootings.

Democratic state legislatures have shown a renewed interest in broadening the industry’s liability with new laws while a recent landmark settlement between a gun manufacturer and victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting could embolden other potential plaintiffs.

In California in the immediate wake of the Uvalde shooting, state legislators advanced a gun control package that included a bill that would open up gun manufacturers to civil legal liability for certain marketing and design practices.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) had vowed in recent months to push for a gun control law similar to the controversial Texas abortion restriction that allowed private individuals to sue healthcare providers who performed banned abortions.

“California will not stand by as kids across the country are gunned down,” Newsom said following the Texas school shooting. “Guns are now the leading cause of death for kids in America. While the U.S. Senate stands idly by and activist federal judges strike down commonsense gun laws across our nation, California will act with the urgency this crisis demands.”

The proposals are similar to a New York state law enacted last year that opens manufacturers up to civil public nuisance lawsuits if they fail to implement reasonable safeguards against unlawful distribution or use of their firearms.

On Wednesday, the New York law survived an initial legal hurdle when a federal judge dismissed a gun industry lawsuit challenging its constitutionality.

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A better term might be ‘willful ignorance‘. And the willfully ignorant take pride in their ignorance. They wear it like a medal. They don’t want to know anything about those icky guns. And in the case of politicians, they’re equal parts stupid and deceitful.

Certain Americans reveal their Second Amendment illiteracy

Biden capitalizes on every opportunity to broadcast how severely uninformed he is — but this Memorial Day, he settled on airing his ignorance via the gun debate, saying a 9mm bullet will blow a “lung out of the body.”  Those of us who have seen a 9mm round know how emphatically wrong he is.

Yet, despite the gross magnitude of his blunder, it’s not the worst I’ve heard.  As it turns out, many Americans are completely uneducated on every facet of the gun debate, and they share one common denominator — they’re all Democrats.  Let’s take a look back at some of the top contenders for the Democrats’ stupidest moments regarding the right to bear arms.

Patricia Eddington, a former state legislator for the state of New York, once said:

Some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat-seeking device. So, you don’t shoot deer with a bullet that size. If you do, you could cook it at the same time [emphasis added].

What does Eddington think?  You could shoot a deer and then walk over with a knife and fork, ready to feast?  Despite actually making this claim, Eddington said this prior to the introduction of a gun control package, including a bill she sponsored.

Next up, Mr. Thomas Binger, the prosecuting attorney in the Rittenhouse case.  Although Binger’s registered political affiliation is unknown, FEC contribution data lists donations to ActBlue.  Mr. Binger’s first blunder was picking up a rifle, immediately putting his finger in the trigger well, and aiming it at a room full of people.

Binger’s second mistake was speculating that hollow point rounds “explode” upon impact.  Again, for the educated among us, the appropriate word would be “expand,” as this type of bullet doesn’t detonate into fragments — it’s not a grenade.

Now we have Dianne Feinstein, federal senator from California, who declared:

We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.

What?  Hunting humans is not legal.  The only legal way to kill humans is via abortion, which she unequivocally supports.

And lastly, we have Donzella James, a state senator out of the great state of Georgia, who stated, “Yes, I believe in the Second Amendment.  But why are we spreading the access to guns to everyone?”

Although we didn’t need a reminder, it is worth pointing out that somehow, being a Democrat politician apparently makes one incapable of understanding firearms, or the idea of a God-given right that is not to be infringed — and brings us a few laughs.

I always have.

Take Gun Banners Rhetoric Seriously

In the wake of a tragic shooting like the one in Uvalde, Texas, one thing is certain to come” The hateful rhetoric from anti-Second Amendment extremists. It’s been the same old, predictably vicious lie that has come since Columbine (or sooner): Because Second Amendment supporters exercise our First Amendment rights to protect the right to keep and bear arms, we are now child-killing domestic terrorists (or worse).

The owner of the company who made the firearm the shooter used to commit the horrific deeds at Robb Elementary School had been labeled an enabler of the murder of children on social media over ads the company ran. That’s a lie, too.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course. It could take a thousand columns to outline all those lies. But Second Amendment supporters need to take the level of rhetoric seriously.

Part of it is simply holding anti-Second Amendment extremists to their own standard. After all, some claimed that Sarah Palin incited Tucson with no more evidence than a symbol laid out on a congressional district in the 2010 midterm elections. That particular blood libel still persists in some quarters.

Crickets made more noise than those same people when someone who intended to carry out a mass shooting at a socially conservative think tank admitted in court that he used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to select his target. But the SPLC never faced any heat for that, certainly nothing near what Palin endured.

And don’t let yourself be gaslit by the likes of Nicolle Wallace, either. The idea that anti-second amendment extremists want to take away guns is not a “frothy delusion” when we actually have people extolling the injustices that England, Australia, and New Zealand inflicted on gun owners for crimes and acts of madness they did not commit.

But at the same time, this rhetoric needs to be taken seriously. These days, we have no idea what sort of permission slip is being signed in someone’s mind because of the words coming from a talking head, a Hollywood celebrity, or even from the White House itself.

Will it be a bank or credit card company CEO deciding to financially deplatform gun-rights groups, gun manufacturers, or FFLs? Will it be an employer who decides to fire someone because they are a member of the NRA? Or could it be something worse? This is a question that is out there these days.

Second Amendment supporters have a very tough row to hoe in beating back attacks on our freedoms. But we should also remember those who smeared us – and protect ourselves by defeating anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level via the ballot box.