Category: Mendacity O’ The Day

People can lie all they want. I’m not disarming, and I’ll call such liars, a liar to their faces.

Lies Aimed at Disarming You

Lies come in many shapes and sizes. Some are simple exaggerations. Some are absurd falsehoods. Unfortunately, we tend to believe a bald lie if it is expressed with enough emotion. That outrage also keeps viewers watching and clicking so the press is often more interested in outrage than in the truth. A lie doesn’t become the truth if it is repeated, but the lie may help politicians get re-elected if it is repeated by enough likely voters. We need to call out every lie we see even if that means calling “respected elected officials” liars. Congressman Jamaal Brown, you lie. Representative Jimmy Gomez, you lie. You lie because you say you want to save lives, yet you pretend that more gun-control laws will actually protect our kids. That is a lie and I’ll prove it right now.

Why would politicians hide the truth behind their emotional outbursts? The simple answer is that politicians lie to get what they want. They want press coverage and campaign contributions. Democrat Congressman Jimmy Gomez of California said that Republicans should resign from office if they are not going to pass more gun-control legislation. Democrat Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York yelled at reporters that “Republicans won’t do sh-t when it comes to gun violence.” Implied is the lie that gun-control laws actually save lives, and that anyone who won’t pass more gun-control laws is either corrupt or heartless. Both claims are a lie. Maybe if their Democrat controlled cities weren’t so corrupt then there would be fewer young men shooting at each other on the streets of the congressman’s districts. I think gun control is a distraction from their many failures.

Gun-control costs lives and endangers our children in school. Before you can believe that you need to know that armed defense by ordinary citizens is common. We use a firearm to stop death or great bodily injury about 2.8 million times a year. That is over 4600 times a day. In addition, ordinary citizens with a gun prevented several million more crimes than that. Your armed neighbors probably stopped tens of thousands of murders. Armed citizens probably stopped over a hundred-thousand sexual assaults. These armed good guys stopped an immense about of harm. That is good, but our virtue doesn’t stop there.

We started to train and arm volunteer school staff a decade ago after the mass-murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. We have accumulated several thousand man-years of experience with these armed volunteers. You might have missed that their efforts worked in the best possible way: their mere presence prevented attacks at their school. Let me underline that for you.

We have never had a mass-murder at a school that had a program of trained and armed school staff.

Perspective is everything when we want to understand the truth. Only one-criminal-out-of-six uses a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. Criminals use firearms about a quarter-million times each year and they violate our “gun-control” laws millions of times each year. That means that gun control is a failure. In contrast, we defend ourselves with a firearm about 2.8 million times every year. Mass murderers take about 600 lives a year. We protected hundreds of thousands of our children with armed school volunteers. If you haven’t heard it before then I’m telling you now, armed defense is much more common than the criminal use of a firearm.

Gun-control politicians say their laws disarm criminals. In fact, their 23-thousand gun-control regulations disarm far more honest citizens than criminals. Mass murderers deliberately attack us in gun-free zones where we are disarmed by law.

Politicians and the news media don’t tell us everything we need to know to make a reasoned decision. It is deadly public policy to solve a small problem by creating a larger one. We can’t save hundreds of lives by sacrificing tens-of-thousands. If we really want to save lives, then we’d repeal our gun-control laws rather than passing more of them. That won’t work for gun-control politicians who need to shout in public to get reelected. If gun-control advocates really wanted to save lives, then they would stop lying.

How many more innocent lives should we sacrifice on the altar of gun-control?

I’m giving you facts, but facts don’t matter to gun-control ideologues. For them, the ideal of gun-control is an end in itself rather than an instrumental means to save lives. Mass murders are simply an excuse to disarm more honest citizens.

I am not running for office, but I am trying to influence your opinion. Lies matter when we want to deceive. Facts matter when we want to save lives. Time and again, Democrats and Socialists in the USA have said that only Democrats care about children, and everyone else doesn’t care if kids die. I’m calling that a lie. Lives matter to me and they matter to you.

It is uncomfortable to call someone a liar but it gets easier with practice. I did it this time. I’m asking you to do it the next time you hear them lie about us.

What’s really funny is the fact the New Republic is so well known as one of the most far left, nearly commie, publications in the U.S. It’s as if they believe we’re so stupid, we can’t recognize BS when we see it.

So Called ‘Assault Weapons’ ~ When Words Are Used Instead of Guns To Disarm Us

Let’s start off at the very beginning, following the “Yellow Brick Road,” with a few definitions and essential information for those new gun owners, non-gun owners, and anti-gun critters. Please note I’m sorry if I insult those already in the know!
Definition of the word ASSAULT

assault – verb: a violent physical or verbal attack.

Definition of the word WEAPON

weapon – noun: something (such as a club, knife, gun, etc.) used to injure, defeat, or destroy someone or something.

Definition of a RIFLE

rifle – noun: a shoulder fired firearm with a rifled bore (spiral grooves in the bore).

Definition of a PISTOL

pistol – noun: a specifically handheld firearm whose chamber is integral with the barrel.

Definition of a SEMIAUTOMATIC FIREARM

semiautomatic firearm – noun: a firearm able to fire repeatedly through an automatic reloading process but requiring the trigger to be pulled for each successive shot (a semiautomatic rifle or pistol).

Definition of a MACHINE GUN

machine gun – noun: a firearm for sustained rapid fire, or burst,  on a single pull of the trigger. (a.k.a. an automatic weapon).

Definition of the phrase ASSAULT RIFLE

assault rifle – noun: any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire (a.k.a. Select Fire).

So where does the infamous Assault Weapon fit into the linguistic picture? It doesn’t! It’s essentially MADE UP! Here’s a brief history:

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Cue Captain Renault

Fact check: Democrats distort the record on guns after Nashville shooting

One week after a shooter opened fire in a Nashville, Tennessee, Christian school and killed six people, including three children, Democrats have continued to press for an assault-style weapons ban they have sought for years.

Democrats accused their Republican counterparts of blocking legislation that would protect children at school from mass shootings, while GOP lawmakers insisted that further limits on gun ownership would not have stopped the Nashville attack or others like it.

And while Democrats still don’t have the votes yet to advance an assault-style weapons ban, they have relied on occasionally misleading rhetoric to push for one anyway.

Here is a fact check of some of the latest Democratic gun arguments.

“[We’ve had] more school shootings than days in the year so far in 2023.” — Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), CBS’s Face the Nation, April 2

This is a misleading claim from Murphy.

The Connecticut Democrat has long served as a voice for gun control advocacy due to the painful history of his home state, where a school shooter claimed the lives of more than two dozen people, most of them children under 7 years old, in 2012. Murphy was the congressman representing the district of the school at the time.

He appeared to cite statistics from the K-12 School Shooting Database, a data resource compiled by the Violence Project.

That database claims 95 shooting incidents have taken place at schools so far in the 93 days of this year.

But the claim is misleading because of just how broadly the group defines a shooting incident. The total includes any incident “when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason,” according to the Violence Project.

That means, for example, that a gang-related shooting near a school during which a bullet strikes a sidewalk on a weekend, with no students present, would still count toward the total number of school shootings for the year.

Most people would provide a very different definition of a school shooting, and the type of shooting that occurred in Nashville is much rarer. According to the same dataset, only 105 school shooting incidents since the 1970s have involved “indiscriminate shooting.”

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Second Amendment Myths and Misinformation

False Claim #1: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Has Always Been Heavily Regulated.

FACT: Restrictive gun control laws are a distinctly modern phenomenon in the United States. For the first century of American history, serious state-level regulation of individual gun ownership or usage was almost non-existent for law-abiding citizens. For example, despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary, nothing prohibited private citizens from owning cannons. In fact, private cannon ownership was apparently so common that one of the first types of arms restrictions imposed by some towns were ordinances restricting the times and locations where people could fire off those cannons inside town limits.30

Similarly, because gunpowder at the time was very unstable and prone to easy ignition, a number of states and cities limited the amount of gunpowder that could be stored in private residences, hoping to reduce the risk of accidental explosions or fires in urban areas.31 But beyond these sorts of “time, place, and manner” regulations, the right to keep and bear arms was virtually unrestricted in most states until the end of the 19th century.

Restrictive gun control measures are an even more recent phenomenon at the federal level. The first major federal law regulating firearms was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which was relatively tame by today’s standards.32 It merely required that machine guns and certain types of “short-barreled” long guns be subjected to a special tax and be registered with the Secretary of the Treasury. The federal government did not even prohibit certain categories of individuals (such as felons) from possessing firearms until the Gun Control Act of 1968, and did not require licensed gun sellers to conduct background checks until the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.33

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False Claim #2: Armed Civilians Stand No Chance Against Modern Militaries Equipped With Fighter Jets and Tanks, so the Second Amendment No Longer Serves a Purpose.

FACT: This claim misunderstands the importance of the protective role of federalism, in which each state already has well-trained and well-equipped organized militias of their own that can be mobilized and used in tandem with armed civilians. These National and State Guards are better equipped than the entire national militaries of many countries, with their own fighter jets, tanks, heavy artillery batteries, and special forces units. A handful of states even have their own naval militias. It is highly likely that, should a tyrannical federal government attempt to impose its will with the might of the American military, these state-level military entities—acting under the direction of liberty-loving state governments—could be deployed as a meaningful countermeasure, just like the colonial governments mobilized existing militias against the British army during the American Revolution.

Likewise, in the case of sudden foreign invasion, armed civilians would not be expected to act on their own in some ad hoc or unorganized fashion. Just like the colonial militias worked together with the professional soldiers of the Continental Army, armed civilians and their private weapons would, during any modern invasion, be integrated into the nation’s existing military structure and mobilized according to a coherent national or state defense strategy.

Beyond this, the right to keep and bear arms continues, of course, to protect countless Americans in their everyday lives against far more common threats to life and liberty.

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False Claim #3: The Founders Had Little Understanding of How Firearm Technology Would Develop and Would Be Horrified to See Modern “Assault Weapons” in Civilian Hands.

FACT: This common assertion assumes that modern guns have a fundamentally different nature than weapons that were available in 1791 when the Second Amendment was ratified and 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. In reality, small arms have changed very little, especially when compared to other advances in technology. The Founders would likely be far more dumbfounded by the internet or smart phones—and their implications for the First and Fourth Amendments—than they would by guns that merely fire projectiles at a faster rate without having to reload them as often. Indeed, by 1791, the idea of rapidly firing dozens of bullets in quick succession or even at the same time was already well developed. By the time the Second Amendment was ratified, repeating rifles capable of firing more than 10 rounds in rapid succession had been around for centuries. By the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, their possession and use by ordinary Americans was very common.34 If anything, modern firearms are much “safer” than 18th and 19th century firearms because they are far less prone to accidental discharges or misfires that injure the shooter.

But, most importantly, this is simply not how we understand constitutional rights. Just like the Constitution protects the broad concept of “speech” instead of particular modes of speech, it protects “arms” as a general concept of weaponry. The idea was not to protect a specific type of weapon, like a musket, any more than the idea of the First Amendment was to protect a specific mode of speech, like a quill pen or printing press. That is in large part because the Framers of our Constitution and the people who ratified it knew that while technology and circumstances would undoubtedly change in unanticipated ways, these broader concepts of self-defense and free speech would remain vital to a free society.

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We only saw “fact checkers” appear when the truth started getting out.

The Crusade Against ‘Malinformation’ Explicitly Targets Inconvenient Truths.

The legal challenge to censorship by proxy highlights covert government manipulation of online speech.

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According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the “censorship-industrial complex,” I had committed the offense of “malinformation.” Unlike “disinformation,” which is intentionally misleading, or “misinformation,” which is erroneous, “malinformation” is true but inconvenient.

As illustrated by internal Twitter communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation can include emails from government officials that undermine their credibility and “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” The latter category encompasses accurate reports of “breakthrough infections” among people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of “true vaccine side effects,” objections to vaccine mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity.

Disinformation and misinformation have always been contested categories, defined by the fallible and frequently subjective judgments of public officials and other government-endorsed experts. But malinformation is even more clearly in the eye of the beholder, since it is defined not by its alleged inaccuracy but by its perceived threat to public health, democracy, or national security, which often amounts to nothing more than questioning the wisdom, honesty, or authority of those experts.

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So when an LEO has one it’s called a “patrol rifle”.
But when a citizen has one it’s a called an “assault rifle”. Got it.

Observation O’ The Day
This is a perfect example to show how media purposely directs the narrative instead of simply reporting facts. They would have called the exact same rifle an “assault rifle” if had been stolen from a non-cop, and there would have been discussion about how unsecured firearms in people’s possession are how criminals obtain guns and that private ownership of these “weapons of war” makes us all less safe as a result.

Patrol rifle stolen from trooper’s cruiser overnight in Malden, Massachusetts State Police say

MALDEN, Mass. — A department-issued rifle was stolen from a Massachusetts State Police cruiser overnight in Malden, according to the State Police.

The burglary happened with the Ford Explorer cruiser was parked in a garage of a residential complex in Malden, state police said.

“A Department-issued patrol rifle was stolen from the cruiser,” State Police spokesman David Procopio said in a statement, adding, “the cruiser was locked and the rifle secured in a mount.”

Forced entry was made into the cruiser, Procopio said. Sources tell WCVB the incident was not a smash-and-grab, but a professional break-in.

“At this time, we have no indication of the rifle being used subsequent to its theft,” Procopio said.

The incident is under investigation. Police are focusing on security cameras in the garage — but they’re not sure they were working overnight — and Malden city cameras outside the garage.

The cruiser was towed from the scene on a flatbed.

BLUF
It was a cover-up from the beginning, and the media colluded in it every step of the way. The only question now is what kind of accountability can be applied, and whether we have stopped playing with GOF entirely at this point.

Former CDC director: Gain-of-function research “probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen”

No kidding. However, don’t consider Robert Redfield a johnny-come-lately to the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19’s origin. Almost exactly two years ago, just after the former CDC director took his leave of the Biden administration, Redfield stunned CNN host Sanjay Gupta by declaring his conclusion that the pandemic started as a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and resulted from gain-of-function (GOF) research funded in part by the US despite warnings against it.

Two years later, Redfield declared himself even more convinced today of his conclusions. Redfield testified today at a hearing of the House select subcommittee on the pandemic, and he didn’t hold back:

Redfield also argues that GOF created the virus, and the global pandemic, just as scientists warned would happen in 2014:

This brings us back to the reasons why the lab-leak theory got so enthusiastically suppressed by both the government and the media. In 2014, a group of scientists formed the Cambridge Working Group to urge governments to stop funding GOF, as both too dangerous and not valuable enough to pursue. When Francis Collins lifted a moratorium on GOF in December 2017, CWG founder Marc Lipitsch offered a prescient warning about what would happen, as I wrote earlier:

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TUCKER CARLSON’S EXPOSE BLEW A RATHER LARGE HOLE IN DEMS ‘DEADLY INSURRECTION’ STORY

Carlson has promised to reveal additional footage on Tuesday night.

For over two years, Democrats have portrayed the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a deadly insurrection staged by supporters of then-President Donald Trump and elevated the threat it posed to our “democracy” to the level of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

They did so by cherry-picking the surveillance footage the public was allowed to see and keeping the rest under wraps for “security reasons.”

On his Monday night show, Tucker Carlson shared some of the previously unseen footage and it told a remarkably different story than the one that has been force-fed to the American people by the highly partisan and duplicitous House Jan. 6 Committee.

Before airing the clips, Carlson told viewers:

It doesn’t answer every question from Jan. 6. Far from it. But it does prove, beyond doubt, that Democrats in Congress, assisted by [then-Reps] Adam Kinzinger [R-IL] and Liz Cheney [R-WY], lied about what happened that day. They are liars. That is conclusive.

The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress. Instead, it shows police officers escorting protestors through the building.

Carlson acknowledges that while a small minority of the protestors turned violent, breaking windows and injuring Capitol police officers, the vast majority of them were peacefully protesting what they believed had been a fraudulent election. Numerous irregularities had been identified and detailed in sworn affidavits from approximately 1,000 poll workers at battleground state vote-counting centers. Additionally, Big Tech and the legacy media had conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

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Whistleblower: FBI’s D.C. Office Tried To Sic Local Agents On Innocents After Bank Of America Volunteered Gun Records

An FBI whistleblower told congressional investigators that the D.C. field office pushed local offices to open criminal investigations into Americans based solely on financial transactions Bank of America tracked and voluntarily provided to the bureau, according to testimony reviewed by The Federalist.

“Bank of America, with no directive from the FBI, datamined its customer base,” whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Hill’s testimony.

Hill had identified himself last month as one of the whistleblowers cooperating with congressional investigators when speaking with Just the News’ John Solomon about the disclosures he made to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition. A review of Hill’s testimony confirms the details the military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst told Solomon. It also reveals more troubling details.

According to the material reviewed, Hill testified that on either Jan. 7 or 8, 2021, Bank of America provided the FBI’s D.C. field office a “huge list” of individuals who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then elevated to the top of the list anyone who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm.

There was no geographic or date-range limit to the search for firearm purchases, Hill stressed, meaning the individual would be flagged at the top of the list had he “purchased a shotgun in 1999” in Iowa, and used a Bank of America credit card to check out of a hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, in the Northern Virginia area, following a trip that could be completely unrelated to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The D.C. field office, which oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation, distributed the Bank of America list internally to field offices throughout the country, Hill testified in his deposition. Hill further explained that his supervisor at the Boston field office refused to open an investigation on the individuals flagged on the list because there was “no predication.” “There’s no crime that was committed by using a [Bank of America] product in the District or around the District,” Hill testified, explaining his supervisor’s reasoning for why no “further action” was required.

But the D.C. field office pushed back, according to Hill. The D.C. field office told Boston’s supervisory special agent, or SSA, he needed to open up the cases. When the local office’s SSA refused, the D.C. field office threatened to call the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the local office, Hill told the congressional committee. The SSA stood firm in his refusal, as did the local ASAC, Hill said, even though the D.C. field office then threatened the ASAC that it would escalate the matter to the office’s special agent in charge, or SAC.

The D.C. field office then pushed the office’s SAC to open investigations into the targeted Americans. But to the SAC’s credit, he refused, Hill noted, saying the Boston SAC countered, “No, we’re not going to open up cases based on credit card or debit card activity that took place.”

While Boston’s FBI office refused to open the requested cases, Hill stressed that “what I don’t know and could not give accurate testimony to,” was whether the D.C. field office “took it upon themselves to open cases.”

Hill’s deposition testimony raises another troubling possibility: that one or more of the other 54 local FBI field offices either complied with the D.C. field office’s initial request to open investigations into innocent Americans, or later capitulated when the D.C. office escalated the request up the chain of command to the ASAC and then the SAC.

The only reason the Boston FBI office did not launch investigations into the Bank of America customers flagged by the D.C. field office is that the Boston office’s leadership stood firm against the pressure. And the only reason we know about the D.C. field office’s attempt to target innocent Americans based on Bank of America’s data mining gun owners who happened to be in the greater D.C. area on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021, is that a whistleblower came forward.

What the FBI’s other 54 field offices did in response to the D.C. field office’s pressure is unknown. According to a person familiar with Hill’s testimony, Hill had no information on that question either. Also unknown is whether any other private businesses mined the financial information of their customers, as Bank of America had, and then handed that private information over to the feds.

Congressional investigations and more whistleblowers will be needed to uncover the extent of the FBI’s political targeting of innocent Americans.

Bank of America did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

The most ridiculous “I’m a gun owner, but” ever?

The gun prohibition lobby loves to claim that the vast majority of gun owners support their “reasonable” infringements on an inherent individual right, to the point that they even create their own astroturf groups like “Gun Owners for Safety” and the now-defunct American Hunters and Shooters Association.

The whole point of these outfits is to advance that narrative, and one of the most common tactics is the “I’m a gun owner, but” argument. You’ve seen it countless times. “I’m a gun owner, but I support ‘commonsense measures’ like”:

  • making it a criminal offense to possess commonly-owned firearms and magazines
  • prohibiting lawful concealed carry almost everywhere in public
  • making it more expensive to purchase, possess, and even train with a firearm
  • holding firearms manufacturers liable for the actions of violent criminals

I’m reasonably sure that attorney and columnist Mario Nicolais would be in favor of each and every one of those things, because his own “I’m a gun owner, but” narrative goes much further. Writing at the Colorado Sun, Nicolais says he’s a gun owner, but he wants the state to tell him to turn ’em in.

As I have written, the Colorado Republican Party is dead. While I am sure the ghosts of 2013 recall elections still haunt some Democrats, the fear of the next child dead from a gunshot wound should scare them more. They are not going to lose their majorities in the next decade, if ever. They may even solidify them if they take even more direct action.

That means getting assault-style guns off the streets. It means cracking down hard on handguns. It means going after ghost guns and criminals who resort to violence.

I happen to be a gun owner. But I have also run through a Las Vegas casino afraid of an active shooter, texted with my wife as she hid huddled inside a classroom as a gunman walked outside, and paid attention as an officer married to a high school friend has recovered after being shot in the neck by an assailant.

I would hand over my gun if the legislature took action.

Why wait for the legislature to do something? If Mario Nicolais doesn’t want to own a gun, no one is stopping him from selling it or even melting it down to turn into a garden trowel or something like that.

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The Hard “Nope”

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”

It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint.

Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

I’ve got another couple of hard “nopes” – but anthropogenic climate change is just the main one at present. What are some other personal hard “nopes” among you all? Discuss as you wish.

New York’s Message to Gun Owners: You Can Have a Carry Permit. Good Luck Using It.

“New York’s Gun Laws Sow Confusion As Nation Rethinks Regulation,” says the headline over this morning’s lead story in The New York Times. But after implicitly (and correctly) blaming state legislators for the “confusion,” the Times identifies a different culprit in the subhead: the Supreme Court’s June 23 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which “overturn[ed] century-old New York gun regulations” and “produced scores of new lawsuits,” leaving “jurists and citizens” to “sort out what’s legal.”

In Bruen, the Court held that the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment precludes states from requiring that residents “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community” before they are allowed to carry handguns outside their homes. The New York State Legislature responded with a law that eliminated the state’s “proper cause” requirement for carry permits but simultaneously imposed new restrictions on public possession of firearms.

“Anticipating more gun-toting,” Times reporter Jonah E. Bromwich says, the legislature “made certain areas off-limits to firearms.” That gloss makes the new restrictions sound prudent and modest. In reality, they are so sweeping that they create a risk of felony charges for anyone who tries to exercise the right recognized in Bruen while engaging in quotidian activities. The Times barely hints at the breadth of New York’s location-specific gun bans, which is crucial in understanding why federal judges have deemed many of them unconstitutional.

Next month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit will hear several of those cases. The plaintiffs argue that New York has defied Bruen by making it very difficult for permit holders to legally carry guns for self-protection. It is impossible to assess that claim without recognizing the vast territory covered by what the Times describes as “certain areas” that are “off-limits to firearms.”

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Debunking the gun-banners’ false constitutional-carry claims
Gov. DeSantis will likely sign the bill long before its July 1 effective date.

Nearly every anti-gun group in the country has descended upon Tallahassee to try to stop Florida from becoming the 26th state to allow residents and visitors to carry concealed firearms without a permission slip from the government.

It’s an important mission for the gun-ban industry, because once Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the bill — and he will — a majority of states will allow unlicensed or permitless carry. For pro-gun advocates, this would be a significant victory in the war to restore our Second Amendment rights, and the other team will do anything they can to prevent that from happening.

It’s important to point out that neither Florida’s HB 543 nor its companion bill, SB 150, are traditional constitutional-carry bills, since neither bill legalizes the open carry of arms. True constitutional carry allows gun owners to decide for themselves whether to carry arms openly or concealed. Despite Republican super-majorities in both the House and the Senate, and a governor who’s promised to sign “constitutional carry” legislation, open carry was not included in either bill. We still have not been told why, at least not officially.

In what has been called “smart bundling,” SB 150 also includes numerous school-safety provisions, such as expanding Florida’s School Guardian program, adding funds for hardening schools, providing additional money for gun-sniffing dogs, clarifying zero-tolerance policies and ensuring every law enforcement agency has an active-shooter policy. So, a vote against the bill can be seen as a vote against school safety.

Regardless of what the bill is called or its other offerings, the very thought of restoring more gun rights — especially in Florida — has brought the gun-banners out in droves. We’ve seen members of Everytown, Demanding Moms, Demanding Students, Giffords, Brady and Florida’s extremely anti-gun League of Women Voters all shuffle to the mic. Their testimony before House and Senate committees has been interesting, desperate and at times, comical. If the gun banners sent their A-team to Tallahassee and this is the best they can do, freedom will most certainly prevail.

It’s clear the gun-banners’ moves are well organized and orchestrated. Too many of their objections seemingly come from the same playbook. Keep in mind anti-gunners have phones, Skype and Zoom, too. They’re sharing information and ideas. Florida has become their latest battle template. They are throwing a lot of crap against the wall. That which sticks likely will be used in the next state they attempt to victimize.

Here are some of the lowlights of their testimony.

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