Still very low, but when it was in the “2s”……..


Mortgage rate soars closer to 5% in its second huge jump this week.

  • The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage shot significantly higher Friday, rising 24 basis points to 4.95%, according to Mortgage News Daily.
  • The quicker-than-expected rise in rates has weighed on demand for mortgages and refinancing loans.
  • With both rates and prices considerably higher, the median mortgage payment is now more than Mortgage rates move higher with 30-year fixed hitting 4.95%The rate for the most common kind of mortgage just surged again.

    The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage shot significantly higher Friday, rising 24 basis points to 4.95%, according to Mortgage News Daily. It is now 164 basis points higher than it was one year ago.

    “That’s the second time this week, and it puts this week on par with the worst week from the 2013 taper tantrum — a record we didn’t see being legitimately challenged a few days ago,” said Matthew Graham, COO of Mortgage News Daily.

    On Tuesday, the rate had hit 4.72%, a 26-basis-point jump from March 18. The quicker-than-expected rise in rates has weighed on demand for mortgages and refinancing loans.

    The rate surged as the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury also took off. Mortgage rates follow that yield loosely, but not entirely. Mortgage rates are also influenced by demand for mortgage-backed bonds. The Federal Reserve is scaling back its holdings of these assets and is also hiking interest rates.

    It couldn’t come at a worse time, as the all-important spring housing market gets underway. Potential buyers are already facing extraordinarily tight supply and sky-high prices. With both rates and prices considerably higher, the median mortgage payment is now more than 20% higher than it was a year ago.

    Buyers are also facing inflation on everything else in their budgets, which exacerbates the affordability issues. Rents are also surging higher at a record rate, causing more potential buyers to be unable to put aside money for a down payment. In addition, as rates rise, some buyers will no longer qualify for a mortgage. Lenders have been much more strict about how much debt a borrower may take on in relation to income.

    Economists are already beginning to revise their sales figures lower for the year. Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said Tuesday that he expects the rate to hover around 4.5% this year, after previously predicting it would stay at 4%.

    NAR’s latest official prediction is for sales to drop 3% in 2022, but Yun now says he expects they will fall 6% to 8%. NAR has not officially updated its forecast.

On “permitless carry” vs “Constitutional Carry”

Recently a student of mine and reader of Bearing Arms reached out and asked me a question about permitless carry. With more and more states joining the ranks of those that don’t require any papers in order to exercise a constitutional right, the terms “permitless” and “Constitutional” get tossed around a lot.

The question he posed was rather simple:

My question is why do you use “permit-less carry” and not “Constitutional carry”?

Bringing this topic up is not to vilify, call out, or argue over semantics with any of my fellow writers, content creators, or advocates. But rather to at least put out there what the most accepted definitions and understandings are of the different terms.

FYI “Permit-less” is permitless. Regardless of different spell checkers.

Truth be told, the guy that asked me the question very much so reminds me of a dynamic I saw a friend of mine was in during his early 20’s. He worked at a fancy wine store after doing some time at the liquor department at a supermarket. He read Sideways because the store was pushing the book through some promotion and wanted to embrace wine snobbery the best he could. Embrace he did (and pretty much still does today, kudos!).  Most relevant and similar to the person who asked me the question, he became the type of guy that would talk about Champagne.

Picture a bunch of people celebrating and someone declares “Get the Champagne” in a gleeful exclamation. Scene in that one guy that has to step in and say “Actually, that’s sparkling wine. Since it does not come from the Champagne province of France you can’t call it Champagne.”

My answer to the question about permitless carry was a quick one talking about what it really looks like if a state or jurisdiction actually followed the Constitution. In essence, that would mean very few, if any, infringements (requirements, prohibitions, etc.) on our right to keep and bear arms. The response I garnered in reply was being told that some content creator (not any Salem Media contractors or personalities) I know prefers “Constitutional carry” over permitless. I’m like “Great. That YouTuber uses that term. I generally don’t.”

But, ya know what? That really did tick me off. This is a teachable moment though, perhaps for both of us.

Words and terms do have meanings. Personally, I try to describe things the best I can, as accurately as possible (often with too many words). Even the most astute writers won’t please all people all the time. I was once accused by a reader, who took the time to write to me, of being “woke”, and caving to progressive ideologies because I used non-gendered pronouns to describe another person. The person I was describing in the article was an anonymous source. Call me old fashioned, or maybe too cautious, but I assumed the anonymous person should also have their gender masked as well. That explanation was not good enough for a followup response or even a “thanks”. Haters gonna hate.

In the spirit of meaning, we need to define what these two dynamics are the best we can. The United States Concealed Carry Association defines these two terms in a very specific way (the accompanying video on their page is worth a watch).

Although the terms constitutional carry, permitless carry and unrestricted carry are often used interchangeably, definitions of the terms differ.

Constitutional carry: Constitutional carry means that the state’s law does not prohibit citizens who can legally possess a firearm from carrying handguns, (openly and/or in a concealed manner) thus no state permit is required. Sometimes, constitutional carry may be conditional such as in those states that have no laws prohibiting the open carry of a handgun but which require a permit to carry the handgun concealed.

Permitless carry: Permitless carry includes constitutional carry states as well as states where an individual must meet certain qualifications, e.g., no DUIs in the last 10 years, in order to legally carry (Tennessee). Some states are fully unrestricted, meaning no permit is required for open or concealed carry. Others allow the open carry of a firearm/or handgun without a permit but require a permit for concealment.

The analogy would be that all Constitutional carry states are permitless, but not all permitless carry states are Constitutional. All men are humans, but not all humans are men.

US LawShield has their own way of discussing the nuance of the definitions.

Constitutional carry refers to the legal carrying of a handgun without a license or permit.

Stated differently, in a constitutional carry state, if you can legally possess a handgun, you can legally carry that handgun without the need for a license or permit. Keep in mind, even though constitutional carry states allow for permitless carry, age, location, and residency restrictions may still apply.

Those “age, location, and residency restrictions” are what separate these two terms.

Tennessee was mentioned as one state that has certain restrictions which would classify it as “permitless” v “Constitutional”, as does Maine. There are areas which one must have a permit in order to carry concealed in Maine, such as State Parks and Acadia. Handgunlaw.us covers Maine, noting:

The following locations are off limits to those carrying under Permitless Carry in Maine. You have to have a Maine permit or a resident permit from a state Maine honors to carry in the below listed areas.

  • Acadia National Park (Permit required; (12 M.R.S. 209 §756)
  • State Parks (Permit required; open carry not permitted; (12 M.R.S. 220 §1803) (7)
  • Regular archery hunting-deer only (Permit required; (12 M.R.S. 915 §11403)
  • Employees’ vehicles on work premises (Permit required; vehicle must be locked and firearm  must not be visible; (26 M.R.S. 7 §600)
  • Allagash Wilderness Waterway (Park Rule 2.19D) Open Carry Not Allowed.

The reason I’ll personally use the term “permitless” over “Constitutional carry” is simply because I don’t know all the laws in all the states that are permitless. I’d rather be inclusive and accurate by describing the lack of a scheme as being permitless, instead of being super technical and accurate by drilling down the classification to “Constitutional carry”. The risk of being wrong or inaccurate is too high in my opinion, even if having just a casual conversation on the subject.

This is not to say that I’m going to go out of my way (or that I advocate for people doing the same) to correct or undermine someone that uses one term over the other. Or someone that uses the terms synonymously. I’m just stating the why I use the term that I do.

This is not my Champagne. My Champagne is calling magazines clips and .45 Colts .45 Long Colts. That’s a whole other fun debate we can have another day.

As freedom marches on in the United States, and more and more states adopt the policy of not needing a license to carry, just keep in mind, like a good sweepstakes, some restrictions may apply. The headlines may read Constitutional, but the devil would really be in the details of the law. Besides, true “Constitutional carry” would mean every man, woman, child, felon, criminal, addict, mentally defective person, etc. would be allowed to carry a firearm. No?

17 Inconvenient Facts For the Gun-Control Movement

Imagine if you only read The Washington Post and only watched MSNBC and like-minded media outlets. If you did that, you might be deceived into thinking America is a regular Wild West Show of daily mass shootings. You might think guns themselves are evil and that crime is the fault of people who legally own firearms. You might even believe that an American citizen could simply go online and buy a machine gun, as former President Barack Obama (D) once told us. You might also think that suppressors are the tools of assassins, and that semi-automatic rifles with pistol grips are commonly used by criminals. Perhaps you’d even surmise that President Joe Biden (D) was making a good point when he suggested a ban on pistols chambered in 9 mm.

At best, many of these gun-control narratives are simply based on ignorance of firearms. At their worst, a considerable percentage of the mainstream media’s storylines regarding the Second Amendment are outright falsehoods meant to convince people to vote away their freedom.

Every issue of America’s 1st Freedom is filled with sourced facts and honest perspectives designed to arm citizens with the truth, but sometimes these kinds of list articles are needed to refute the shotgun patterns of anti-Second Amendment propaganda coming from the mainstream media and gun-control groups.

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BLUF:
Veteran pollster Jim McLaughlin observed, “Unfortunately, Americans are seeing first hand through Vladimir Putin’s brutal, military invasion of the Ukraine the importance of our cherished Second Amendment rights. The brave Ukrainian citizens have been able to thwart Putin’s military aggression by arming themselves against the Russian invaders. Americans clearly associate the importance of their Second Amendment rights with maintaining a safe, free and democratic nation.”

‘Strong 2A Support Due to Ukraine Invasion’: McLaughlin Survey

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine one month ago has stirred strong support for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, according to the results of a new survey by McLaughlin & Associates, the nationally-known polling firm.

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Question O’ The Day
‘If gun control works so well, how does this happen?’


Violent Crimes Up 60% in LA According to Latest LAPD Data Since 2019
There has been an increase in the levels of violence and and firearm use during robberies

During a Los Angeles Board of Police Commission meeting earlier this week, LAPD Chief Michel Moore revealed that violent crimes have risen exponentially in the past year, moving the city closer to San Francisco in terms of the highest crime rates in the country.

According to the LAPD, citywide robberies are up 18% compared to this time last year, and up 5% compared to 2020. City wide robberies with a firearm also went significantly up, climbing 44% from this time last year, 57% from 2020, and 60% compared to 2019. While 36% of robberies and 74% of all robberies as part of the increase from last year used a firearm, the LAPD also got into specifics, such as noting that those who wore expensive jewelry in  public have been targeted more often in armed robberies.

“Over the course of this year, the Department has experienced an increase in robberies taking place in various communities in the City of Los Angeles,” the LAPD said in a press release on Tuesday. “Most concerning is that there has been an increase in the levels of violence used during these robberies and the frequency in which a firearm was used. During the Board of Police Commission meeting on March 22, 2022, Chief Moore discussed citywide robbery statistics, crime prevention techniques, situational awareness, and mitigation.”

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The Embarrassment In Chief

Genuine leaders never have to draw attention to how good their quality of leadership is.

Likewise terrible leaders almost always have crutches they lean on to hoist themselves upon to look like they’re  leading.

This weekend was a case study in both.

After ending the somewhat mystical trip *President Biden made to NATO this week he decided to pay the troops a “surprise visit.”

He immediately gave a bizarre speech to men and women in uniform, broke all military protocol and insulted them in the mess hall, and issued a proclamation about regime change.

Meanwhile a former uniformed Captain in the US Army was busy in another struggle to pursue excellence, chase improvement, and to conduct one’s self with such discipline and effort that they literally slept that night with no regret.

Biden told the troops he leads that “When they go to Ukraine soon, and some of them had already been there, that they were going to see women stand in the middle of… er in front of a damn tank… and say ‘I’m not leavin’, I’m holding’ my ground… they’re incredible.

Aside from the fact that our policy is that we are not sending our troops into Ukraine, it’s likely he pulled the rest of that made up imaginary scenario from stuff he saw on TV and or was from a dream that was caused by some undigested beef from the night before.

The other leader, when a camera was on him early in the week, had taken the moment to acknowledge the effort of those he labored against. “They were really tough,” he admitted. He then proceeded to give 100% of the credit to the people he leads, “but my guys, they worked so hard, and they’ve grown up so much in the past 10-12 days, and I just couldn’t be prouder. I kept thinking to myself ‘Holy Mackerel! I get to lead these guys.”

 After Biden’s speech it was time to eat and upon entering the mess hall, he wandered over to a table, saw a box of pizza, proclaimed “hey look the pizza’s here.” He then opened it, his shaky grip waving a piece back and forth he lifted it to his lips and scarfed it. The only problem being that in the military the officers eat last and the higher the rank the longer you wait. And as the commander in chief no one out-ranked him. The shock and dismay by the troops in the room was captured on video and in pictures that flooded social media.

Meanwhile as the other leader was preparing his young men for their next challenge, the most serious they had faced yet, they were effusive to the camera about their leader’s example to them. They spoke of his personal commitment to helping them become better men in all of life—not merely the pursuit of their established goal. And to a man each of them said that the success in their present challenge was driven by a desire to honor him, for his lifetime of pouring out that good example to generations of men.

Before boarding Air Force One to return to the United States, speaking on Polish soil, Biden free formed this proclamation, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” It was a reference to Putin and openly disputed current policy. But even if it is or was in the process of becoming policy one would think it pretty stupid to openly say it. Especially so when the named paranoid dictator already suspects it to be the aim of the US.

Meanwhile the other leader, former United States Army Captain, and the winningest coach in college basketball’s history, Mike Krzyzewski, when asked his strategy to defeating Michigan State, Texas Tech, and Arkansas in back to back difficult tests in this year’s March Madness, would only talk publicly about the need to respect their opponent and to use grit and smarts to out play them.

The fact of the matter is that “Coach K” has on every occasion his team has won the national championship given all the credit to his players. And in every major loss on the national stage he’s shoulder all of the blame and responsibility for not preparing them well enough.

With Biden every tiny success comes from his own genius, his storied toughness, his impressive ability to do things that no one else has ever seemingly done. (Even if most of them never happened.)

And in the middle of one of the most miserable administrations we the American people have lived through he blames everyone except the very policies he’s put in place that has created the national malaise he ushered in.

Sadly we are losing the humble faithful soldiers like Mike Krzyzewski on the national stage. His enduring excellence has produced 15 ACC Tournament Championships, 13 Final Fours, 11 Coach of the year honors, 9 Gold Medals and 5 national championships with one more shot dangling before him.

Instead we’re stuck with a man who’s been in politics roughly the same length of time that the Coach has been coaching and as his own former boss would say should never be “underestimated when it comes to the ability to ‘mess’ things up.”

Character, humility, and service to others.

I know which of these two men I want my sons to emulate.

Democrats (why do you think I call them demoncraps?) Need to Be Destroyed

How do you negotiate with a terrorist? You can’t. They want you dead, you don’t want to be dead; where is the compromise? Can you be half-dead? One-quarter dead? Can you offer them an arm if they’ll just leave the rest of you alone? If they accepted, would you believe them? You’d be an idiot to do so, just like you’d be an idiot to believe anything coming out of the mouths of Democrats these days. No “good faith effort” is going to make them honest, they are lying frauds out to destroy everything great in this country. They’re a Terminator for American Exceptionalism. As such, they have no conscience, they can’t be reasoned with, they must be destroyed.

Rush Limbaugh used to say he wanted to convince everyone over to conservatism, but he wanted a few liberals around still just to show people what they were like, otherwise no one would believe there were people that crazy. That was a couple of generations of insanity ago. What currently calls itself Democrats bears no resemblance to what once was “Democrats.”

Just 25 years ago, there was no question that Democrats knew what a “woman” was. Do you really think Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy were confused by the concept? No man has come forward claiming to have been sexually assaulted by them, so they either knew or managed to bat 1.000 with their guesses.

Nowadays, what a woman is has reverted to a mystery. All the knowledge accumulated throughout all of human history on the subject has been tucked back, far out of sight, so as to obscure even a chromosome test. Even God is confused, having made so many “mistakes” that even the angels in Heaven lost all understanding of what the other gender is. There are now men and other people who may or may not be men, or they’re something else, there’s simply no way to know.

The nation’s hotel doormat, USA Today, ran the dumbest piece ever written in any language in a desperate attempt to defend Ketanji Brown Jackson from criticism over not being able to define “woman.” (The answer, by the way, is: adult human female. Pretty simple.) Entitled, “Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson to define ‘woman.’ Science says there’s no simple answer,” this is a skillful piece of propaganda that would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Not being able to define woman because she’s “not a biologist,” Jackson exposed herself as a radical leftist moron, uninterested in reality. Any respect I had for her was gone. Granted, it wasn’t much; I refused to “celebrate” her because of her skin color or which bathroom she uses. Once she claimed not to be able to answer this basic question there were only 2 options for what type of person she is: stupid or liar. 

I don’t know which it is, nor do I care. Neither is acceptable for a Supreme Court Justice.

USA Today wrote, “Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology said Jackson’s response was commendable, though perhaps misleading. It’s useful, they say, that Jackson suggested science could help answer Blackburn’s question, but they note that a competent biologist would not be able to offer a definitive answer either.”

I added the emphasis to highlight exactly how these modern Nazi operate in their propaganda. Not biologists, but “competent biologists.” You either agree with your liberal masters or you are incompetent.

The “experts” the story quotes are, “a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College whose work explores the relationships between science and the social hierarchies of gender and sexuality,” “a Harvard scholar, historian and philosopher of biology who focuses on the sciences of sex and gender and their policy dimensions,” “a professor of gender studies at UCLA who specializes in gender and the law,” and “a gender studies professor at Wheaton College who studies social inequality.” When you’re as dumb as a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When your only prospects for employment are perpetuating left-wing lies in academia and government so those grant dollars keep rolling in, well, you can see how it works…

These people are evil. Not wrong; evil. They’re also wrong, but they know they’re wrong, yet they continue which makes them evil. 

It is impossible to know what it feels like to be any other person on the planet, let alone another gender. But the concept is a great tool for control over the feebleminded, and when you control the public education system and pop culture, you can churn out feebleminded people at an alarming rate. (I go into all of this in hilarious, but filthy, explicit language in my obscenity-laced weekly podcast “The Week in F*cking Review” this week. If you don’t have a sense of humor or are easily offended, it’s not for you. You have been warned.)

Beating Democrats isn’t enough. If you beat them, the regroup, repackage, and come back again. No one can focus group new ways to lie to people like Democrats.

No, they must be destroyed. Thoroughly. That means not only opposed, but roundly mocked everywhere they pop up. They have created a culture of fragile psyches who need external validation like Hunter Biden needs crack and hookers. Deny them what they need most and they crumble.

Refuse to play their game. They do it all the time. In the same USA Today there was an article entitled, “Bella Thorne, ‘slut-shaming’ and the consequences of policing women.” It quoted at length a Daily Beast article entitled, “Bella Thorne Is Tired of Being Slut-Shamed.” Aside from the fact that I can think of a pretty easy and obvious way not to be “slut-shamed,” the very concept of the articles acknowledge womanhood. These people aren’t stupid, they know what they’re doing.

They run stories about how COVID is deadly to the obese and how obesity is the leading cause of death in the country, then run “beautiful at any size” and anti-fat-shaming articles featuring “models” with a gravitational pull. You can’t have both; it can’t be both, if you’re honest.

But Democrats aren’t honest, they’re evil. Call them out for it, point it out everywhere. Sure, it may cause you to be punished by social media companies, but they already hate you.

The other day I tweeted that Elon Musk should buy Twitter – he’s worth about a quarter of a trillion dollars and Twitter is only just over $22 billion – his net worth would increase by more than the purchase price while the paperwork was being finalized. Maybe he saw it? Maybe he had a similar thought, since the next day he launched a cryptic poll on the subject.

Whatever the case, and it would be awesome if that happened, we can’t wait to be saved, we have to save ourselves. And to do that we must destroy the Democrats. Beat them on every front, but especially at the ballot box. A slim majority won’t do it, it has to be huge and it has to be everywhere.

Sorry to say it, but Rush was wrong about this. We don’t need to keep a few around as cautionary tales, we can read about them in books or watch old TV shows or movies. You don’t keep a few termites around to remind you of the damage they’ve done to your house, and we don’t need any Democrats to remind us of the damage they’ve done to the country. Destroy them all.

Well, until the next one. Because if there’s one thing learned, it’s that the next war will be different than can be imagined, or ‘properly’ prepared for. That’s why you always hear ‘they trained to fight the last war’


Ukraine Changes the Face of War Forever

There’s a powerful David vs. Goliath lesson emerging from Russia’s brazen, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that should give deep pause to global superpowers who still think they can simply muscle the world into any shape they want.

Every Russian tank that gets fried in Ukraine is sending the message that traditional armies can no longer expect to dominate simply because they have more troops, weapons, and money. Russian armored vehicles are falling victim to Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons (NLAWs), which can be carried by individual soldiers, unslung in seconds, and deployed with little training and fatal accuracy. There are credible reports that Russia has already lost $5 billion worth of military equipment in a month of fighting in Ukraine. The human cost for Russia is even more staggering: Nearly 10,000 soldiers have been killed in action, including at least five generals.

That’s the reality of contemporary warfare: Smaller, nimbler groups fighting back effectively against lumbering, dumb relics of the past. Despite being the fifth largest fighting force on the planet and starting the war with five times the number of active military as Ukraine, Russia has been stymied in what virtually all observers expected to be a cakewalk.

This isn’t to say that Russia isn’t also inflicting massive, horrific violence against Ukraine—or that it won’t prevail in this conflict, especially the longer things drag on. But this war underscores what James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg called the changing “logic of violence” and “the diminishing returns to violence” in their prophetic 1997 book The Sovereign Individual.

As weapons have become smaller, cheaper, more effective, and more widely dispersed, it’s harder and harder for old-style militaries and countries to quickly and effectively achieve their objectives through brute force as they meet resistance at every turn. That resistance includes “information warfare”—which includes hacking and cyber attacks—but also the use of social media, which Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has excelled at to project an aura of invincibility and to cast the conflict in stark terms of good vs. evil.

This lesson shouldn’t be new to Americans, as our failures over the past two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq underscored the new reality that old-school invasion and occupation is more expensive and temporary than it is quick and effective. But Russia’s incompetence drives home in graphic detail to us—and, one hopes, to the Chinese officials supposedly eyeing an invasion of Taiwan—that even if Goliath does take out David, the price is too high and the victory too transient to bother undertaking.

If the collapse of the Soviet Union—that gargoyle incarnation of belief in top-down authority, power, and decision-making—was the beginning of the end of the 20th century’s romance with the nation-state, then Russia’s blundering in Ukraine and the United States’ disasters in central Asia and the Middle East may be its epitaph.

The future belongs not to the ignorant armies of the night who seek to command and control but to those who embrace and empower the decentralization of weapons, technology, information, currency, and individual ingenuity and courage.

Lasting COVID legacy: a nation of rulers, not laws

SACRAMENTO – “The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced,” noted the late musician and satirist Frank Zappa. I often think of that snarky comment as I write about the sausage-making process in city councils, state legislatures and the federal government. Did I mention that California’s state government has 518 agencies, boards and commissions?

Our system of checks, balances, more checks, additional balances, impact reports, legal challenges, voter initiatives, regulatory rulemakings and administrative hearings frustrates people who want to “get something done.” Americans spent $14 billion on the 2020 election cycle to influence political outcomes – and that was just for the presidential and congressional races.

I once ran a modest state bill to reduce the insanely onerous licensing regulations for people who shampoo hair at salons. After months of hearings and debate, the Assembly defeated it for going too far. That explains the public’s desire to cut through the red tape and, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once promised, “blow up the boxes” of government.

Yet after COVID-19, it’s obvious our democratic system of lawmaking is, as Winston Churchill put it, “the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Given the choice between a system resembling a Rube Goldberg cartoon (with his bizarre and overly complex contraptions designed to complete simple tasks) and one that’s streamlined and efficient, I’ll take Goldberg’s vision any day.

As we saw throughout the country but in California in particular, governors were happy to dispense with the usual checks and balances and impose rules by executive order and fiat. Some initial rules were defensible during a public-health crisis, but it wasn’t long before elected officials operated like czars – imposing illogical and contradictory restrictions that made no rhyme or reason.

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The Spread of Constitutional Carry Has Dealt the Moms and Everytown Their Biggest ‘L’ Yet.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the amazing progress constitutional carry had made, though not without a number of failed efforts. The total at the time was 18 states, something that seemed unimaginable just a few years earlier. It wasn’t long ago that there were still fights to move no-issue states into the may-issue column, and may-issue states to shall-issue. No-issue is now ostensibly down to just a single state.

In other words, in the not-so-olden days, being able to carry, even with a permit, was a fight. Now an amazing amount of headway has been. With Indiana’s governor signing constitutional carry into law this week, we’re up to 24 states, making constitutional carry the most common model in the United States (it now far outnumbers shall-issue, may-issue, and no carry).

About this time last year, though, things didn’t quite look as optimistic. Yes, a few states, including “better late than never” Texas, had barely passed permitless carry laws. But Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown civilian disarmament subsidiary was only too happy to gloat about defeating constitutional carry bills in 15 states . . .

 

Now, a year later, things aren’t nearly as much fun for Everytown. We “gun extremists” managed to get the legislatures and the governors of ten of those fifteen states to pass constitutional carry either later last year, or this year. And, the legislative season isn’t over. Georgia seems poised to be next, and others may yet follow this year.

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Actually, and as seen in the second tweet,  the statute 26 USC § 5845 (b) states “….by a single function of the trigger”, not single pull of the trigger , but the rest of the article is dead on.


The ATF’s Latest Anti-Second-Amendment Overreach (Explained)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is never going to be beloved by the Second Amendment community. After all, it is the agency tasked with regulating firearms, and the gun community despises nanny state gun laws. That said, the ATF doesn’t exactly help their case. In fact, it often makes blunders that accomplish little but earn it even more disdain from gun owners.

One example was the ATF’s decision, under the Trump administration, to reclassify bump stocks as machine guns.

Now, the ATF has made another move to flex its regulatory muscles and needlessly antagonize the gun community. 

 

The Seattle Times reports:

Federal officials are notifying gun dealers that some forced-reset triggers, which allow guns to fire rapidly with a single continuous pull of the trigger, are considered machine guns under federal law and subject to strict regulation.

The notification was being made Thursday in an open letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to federally licensed firearms dealers. It spells out how investigators have determined the triggers to be ‘conversion devices,’ making the weapons machine guns.

The Biden administration has been working to strengthen gun regulation, step up its fight against gun violence and tackle rising violent crime rates in the country. The Justice Department has already announced it is taking a hardline approach to gun dealers who break federal law and has established several strike forces in cities to help stop firearms trafficking.

In the new letter, the agency said its examination of the devices in question determined that they ‘allow a firearm to automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger.’

Now, that language there at the end is interesting, because it implies that they’re well within their regulatory authority. But there’s a lot of context missing that calls this into question.

You see, the law defines a machine gun as a firearm that is capable of firing more than one round with a single pull of the trigger.

This cannot legitimately be applied to a forced reset trigger.

forced reset trigger forces the trigger to travel forward even with pressure still applied. As a result, that “continuous pull of the trigger” results in multiple actual trigger pulls. It’s simply a device that facilitates faster pulls of the trigger because the finger doesn’t have to release pressure for the trigger to reset for the next shot.

But it’s not a machine gun as the law is written—because a forced reset trigger does not make a gun fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. 

The problem is that the ATF has a notorious habit of stretching its regulatory authority further and further, especially when the administration in the White House favors gun control.

What the ATF should have done regarding bump stocks is simply argued that they couldn’t regulate them under existing law regardless of what President Trump wanted. They didn’t.

Instead, they jumped at the opportunity to regulate a device that didn’t meet the legal definition of a machine gun. And now, they’re doing it again, knowing that President Biden will support them fully.

Of course, it remains to be seen how this will ultimately play out. There will be lawsuits and this regulation may end up before the Supreme Court. Since the current Supreme Court seems to lean heavily pro-Second Amendment, it’s possible the ATF’s latest overreach could get smacked down. Eventually.

However, that’s years away. In the meantime, Second Amendment supporters will have to deal with these illegitimate restrictions—and brace for the ATF’s next overreach.

The White House staff has to continually ‘Clean Up’ after SloJoe.
So, who’s really in charge and running things?
It sure appears that Biden isn’t.


White House Rushes To Clean Up Disastrous Remarks Biden Made About Putin During Speech.

The White House was forced to once again clean up highly problematic remarks made by Democrat President Joe Biden during his trip to Poland this week.

“A dictator, bent on rebuilding an empire, will never erase the people’s love for liberty,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness. For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House had to quickly clean up the president’s remarks after they were widely interpreted in reports as him calling for regime change in Russia.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

The administration also had to clean up remarks that Biden made in Poland on Friday when he appeared to tell U.S. soldiers that they would be getting deployed to Ukraine, which would represent a serious escalation in the ongoing conflict, and would draw NATO into the war against Russia.

ABC News reported that Biden “raised eyebrows when he appeared to tell the group that American troops will be going into Ukraine, though he has repeatedly said that he will not send troops there.”

“You know, with the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian people have a lot of backbone, they have a lot of guts and I’m sure you’re observing it,” Biden said. “And you’re gonna see when you’re there, and some of you have been there. You’re gonna see, you’re gonna see women, young people standing, standing in the middle, in front of a damn tank, just saying I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground. They’re incredible. But they take a lot of inspiration from us.”

The Biden administration had to swiftly clean up after the president by issuing a statement claiming that his position on deploying U.S. soldiers had not changed.

“The president has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position,” the administration said.

The administration also had to clean up remarks that Biden made on Thursday when he said that if Russia were to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, “it would trigger a response in-kind.”

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the U.S. has “no intention” of using chemical weapons and that what Biden meant was that Russia would pay a “severe price.”

“And I won’t go beyond that other than to say the United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances,” Sullivan said. “I will just say, with respect to any use of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, biological — Russia would pay a severe price.”