March 30

1822 – Congress creates the Florida Territory.

1842 – Ether is used as an general anesthetic in a surgical operation for the first time, by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia.

1867 – Alaska is purchased from Russia for $7.2 million by Secretary of State William H. Seward.

1870 – Texas is readmitted to the United States Congress following Reconstruction.
The 15th amendment’s ratification to the Constitution is formally certified.

1900 – Archaeologists in Knossos, Crete, discover the first clay tablet with hieroglyphic writing in a script later called Linear B, the earliest form known of ancient Greek.

1959 – Due to the Tibetan Uprising against communist Chinese oppression;  Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fearing arrest at the Chinese National People’s Congress, escapes Tibet and flees to India.

1961 – The international treaty to control illicit trade in drugs, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is signed in New York City.

1965 –  A car bomb driven by the Viet Cong explodes in front of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, killing 2 Americans, 1 Filipino U.S. civil servant, 19 Vietnamese and wounding 183 others.

1967 – Delta Air Lines Flight 9877, a Douglas DC-8 on a training flight, crashes at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, killing all 6 crew aboard and 13 more people on the ground.

1981 – President Ronald Reagan and 3 others are wounded by gunfire outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C., hotel by John Hinckley, Jr.

2017 – SpaceX conducts the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket the Falcon 9.

2021 – G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative in the Watergate scandal dies, age 90, at his daughter’s house in Fairfax County, Virginia due to complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Houston, represent

Veteran in wheelchair shoots man who tried to rob him downtown

HOUSTON — A military veteran in a wheelchair shot another man during an attempted robbery across the street from METRO headquarters in downtown Houston Monday night, authorities say.

Around 9 p.m., police were dispatched for a shooting in progress in the 1900 block of Main St. When authorities arrived, they found the man in a wheelchair, and a suspect collapsed with multiple gunshot wounds.

LT J.P. Horelica of the Houston Police Department said the man in the wheelchair told them he was waiting for a ride home from METRO when the suspect ran up and tried to take his bag.

This prompted him to pull out a gun and fire multiple shots at the suspect, Horelica added. The suspect attempted to run off before collapsing “several hundred yards away,” police say.

First responders were able to take the wounded man to the hospital, and it’s expected he will survive. It’s unknown if the man in the wheelchair suffered any injuries during this incident.

Suspect killed while trying to rob food truck on South Main Street in SW Houston

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A robbery suspect is dead after he was shot while trying to hold up a food truck in southwest Houston, police said.

According to the Houston Police Department, the robbery happened at about 1 p.m. on Tuesday in the 14500 block of South Main Street at Fondren.

Derick Howard, an owner of Elite Eats and Cold Treats, was on his way to the food truck to meet his mother, who is a co-owner, and his uncle, who were working the truck during the lunch hour.

Before he arrived, police said the suspect approached the food truck, asking what kind of food they serve. The suspect then tried robbing them, but Howard’s mother and uncle quickly closed the window.

The suspect got out of his truck, opened the food truck’s front window, and pointed the gun inside. Police said the suspect fired his gun, but it jammed.

“Thank God,” Jacqueline Mitchell, a family member, said. “She’s a godly woman. That’s why the gun jammed because God jammed it because when (suspect) opened that window, he could have shot her, but it jammed.”

That’s when the woman pulled out her own gun and fired multiple times. Howard’s mother is licensed to carry a gun, according to the family.

“Nowadays, you have to,” Howard said when asked if his mother kept a gun on her out of fear that something similar would happen. “It’s bad.”

The suspect tried running away but fell and died in the parking lot.

Howard said the truck had only made $40 for the day at the time of the robbery.

“People need to get a job instead of trying to rob people, because some people are trying to make an honest living,” Mitchell said.

The woman was taken to the hospital for a panic attack, according to police. No one is charged in the case, as police called it a “self-defense” shooting.

Authorities will collect evidence and present it to the district attorney’s office.

Karine Jean-Pierre Responds to Question About Gun Confiscation With an Alarming Answer

When faced with a relatively easy question about President Joe Biden’s position on gun confiscation policies, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Invoking repeatedly failed candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s 2019 presidential debate promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “Does the president support not just banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons but further than that, confiscation?”

It’s a straightforward question: Does President Biden think legally owned firearms should be confiscated by the federal government? But Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” in what should be an easy answer.

Instead, Jean-Pierre ignored the question and retreated to the usual Democrat talking points about “weapons of war” that “should not be on the streets across the country in our communities, they should not be in schools, they should not be in grocery stores, they should not be in churches — that’s what the president believes.”

Jean-Pierre went on to claim Biden “has done more than any other president the first two years” to address what Democrats say is a crisis of “weapons of war” in America. “Now it’s time for Congress to do the work,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s happy to sign, once that happens, he’s happy to sign that legislation that says, ‘ok we’re going to remove assault weapons, we’re going to have an assault weapons ban.'”

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say whether Biden supports gun confiscation for “assault weapons,” President Biden’s record on the subject is not a winning one, nor is Democrats’ obsession with eradicating “assault weapons” — a purposefully non-specific term usually paired with other buzzwords such as “military style” — a policy goal that’s been shown to limit instances of violence in which the perpetrator uses a firearm.

As we at Townhall have repeatedly noted, Biden’s frequent claim that the “assault weapons” ban he worked on as a U.S. senator was effective just doesn’t pass muster. Biden and his administration’s claim that it’s possible to get the specter of “assault weapons” off America’s streets is one this administration employs frequently while attempting to take advantage of tragedies. “But according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the ban cannot be credited with reducing violence or mass shootings,” Katie noted after Biden repeated the claim last May. Here’s what the DOJ found:

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury,” the summary of the report on the study’s findings states. “The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban.”

If banning “assault weapons” didn’t reduce gun violence, nor reduce the lethality of gun violence, then passing a new ban or going as far as confiscating such firearms — something Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t rule out this week — won’t make a difference either and will only further infringe on the rights of Americans.

USA Today Op-ed doesn’t think your rights matter

I’ve long argued that the Second Amendment is the insurance policy the Founding Fathers took out to protect the rest of the Bill of Rights. You can’t take away someone’s right to free speech, to freely assemble, and your freedom of religion without first taking away their ability to resist. Otherwise, someone’s going to fight you.

But in the wake of a mass shooting, we start to get a glimpse of who some people are.

As Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

For one USA Today writer, he’s clearly and firmly in that camp.

Three children and three adults are dead, gunned down in a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., by a human being who had no business possessing an AR-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun.

“But, but, but … the Second Amendment,” some will scream, like a myopic, zombified Greek chorus.

Hang your Second Amendment. It’s Monday in America, there has been yet another school shooting. Children are dead. The students who weren’t shot are forever changed by the trauma, and plenty more people across the country will be killed by gunfire in the days to come because, as I wrote a few words earlier, it’s Monday in America, and we have a whole damn week to go.

And at this point, it really doesn’t matter what else the writer has to say. He’s already made it clear that your Second Amendment rights are completely and totally irrelevant to him.

He’s also made it clear he’s not open for discussion about literally anything else that could potentially reduce mass shootings. Why? Because your rights don’t matter.

This is troubling in the Land of the Free.

See, one of the hallmarks of the United States is that we are a free land, that we value freedom. That freedom is protected in part by the fact that we have an armed populace that can react to any and all acts of tyranny.

We haven’t exactly used it, but mostly because the vast majority of us figure we can fight back without needed to expend ammunition.

Thankfully.

But we can’t “hang” our Second Amendment rights just because something bad happens. If we do that, we can then start hanging the rest of our rights when someone decides they need to go away.

Frankly, when you’re starting position is that my rights are completely and totally irrelevant, there is no discourse. There’s absolutely no reason to engage with you because there’s absolutely no chance of you being the least bit rational.

Do you want my rights? It’s not surprising. We’ve long known that gun control advocates ultimately want to gut the Second Amendment to the point that it’s little more than a trophy hanging on the wall.

The problem, however, is that it’s easy to say “hang your Second Amendment.” It’s a lot harder to do anything about it. Why? Because there’s an insurance policy in the Bill of Rights, and there are millions of Americans ready to act because of it.

GOP-controlled legislature completes override of governor veto of pistol permit bill

The Republican-controlled General Assembly accomplished Wednesday its first successful override of Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper veto since 2018.

The N.C. House voted 71-46 to override Cooper’s veto of Senate Bill 41, titled “Guarantee 2nd Amend Freedom and Protections.”

According to Cooper’s veto statement Friday, SB41 eliminates the current requirement that people have a valid permit from their local sheriff’s office before purchasing or acquiring a handgun.

Sheriffs will lose the authority to issue or deny these permits based on criminal background checks and determining the safety and character of applicants.

Tolerance and Acceptance Were Never Going to Be Enough for the Trans Crowd.

I try to bring humor to everything. I’m a comedian. As my wonderful friend and mentor Stephen Kruiser can tell you, comics find humor in the worst of conditions. Not only can I not see the “funny” in the Tennessee shooting, I don’t want to seek it.

The trans movement asked for tolerance, then acceptance. Then they just wanted to use the restroom of their preference for their safety, despite a lack of violence against trans people and a bushel full of trans attacks on kids. We allowed it. I regret that. A lot.

Today, we are at a point where a 6’4″ man named “Lia” Thomas has been allowed to dominate women’s college swimming, while the real women on the team were told to shut up and not complain about losing their accolades to Thomas and having to eyeball his twig and berries in the showers.

Major publications like the NY Post, the Daily Mail, and even the Post Millennial have called “he” a “she.”

People have lost their jobs for refusing to play make-believe with the small portion of the country plagued by a mental malady called “gender dysphoria.”

Despite all the ass-kissing the trans crowd has enjoyed, they feel they are being “genocided” out of existence. So much so that they are planning a “day of trans vengeance.”

In the United States, the trans crowd walks on water. Yet six people — three of them only nine years old — had to die, just five days before the “day of trans vengeance.” One of them was the daughter of the school’s pastor. I’m sure that was just a coincidence, right?

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Federal District Judge Wimes Creates Novel Excuses to Rule 2A Protection Act Unconstitutional

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)-— On March 6, 2023, federal Judge Brian C. Wimes ruled the Missouri Second Amendment Protection Act was unconstitutional, claiming the Act violates the Supremacy clause of the US Constitution, invalidates federal law, and violates the doctrine of “intergovernmental immunity”.

The Federal court system has long held states cannot be compelled to use their resources to enforce federal laws. States are not required to explain why they do not wish to use those resources to enforce federal laws. They have the power to refuse to do so. To hold otherwise is to collapse the power-sharing between states and the federal government into a monolithic entity controlled by the federal government. This doctrine is known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.

Judge Wimes appears to be nullifying the anti-commandeering doctrine by claiming Missouri must use state resources to investigate and prosecute federal law. Refusing to do so, Judge Wimes claims, is “obstructing” federal law enforcement, which is somehow a violation of the supremacy clause and intergovernmental immunity.

From the opinion:

SAPA is an unconstitutional “interposit[ion]” against federal law and is designed to be just that. Id. Section 1.410(5) states the Missouri General Assembly’s declaration that the Supremacy Clause “does not extend to various federal statutes, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules, regulations, or other actions that collect data or restrict or prohibit the manufacture, ownership, or use of firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition exclusively within the borders of Missouri . . . .” Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.410(5). However, the Missouri General Assembly’s assertion that the Supremacy Clause does not extend to acts of Congress does not make it so. To the contrary, 15 “[t]he law of congress is paramount; it cannot be nullified by direct act of any state, nor the scope and effect of its provisions set at naught indirectly.” Anderson, 135 U.S. at 490.

SAPA does not prevent agents of the federal government from investigating, arresting, prosecuting or convicting residents of Missouri who violate federal law. It prevents agents of the state and local governments from assisting federal agents in doing so. Judge Wimes claims the anti-commandeering doctrine does not apply by quoting reasons in SAPA for the purpose of the law. But the purpose of state law has not generally been an issue in anti-commandeering doctrine.  The Constitutionality of laws is based on what the law does, not what the law claims the purposes of the law are.

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Understand That Some of Them Want You Dead

Some psycho freak attacks a school and murders kids and teachers and you naturally want to draw a lesson from it. But it just happened and we do not actually know anything except a basic outline of the facts. One problem is that we may never know – if the facts are determined by the regime to be counter to the Licensed and Approved Narrative, then we will never know them This will go in the Forgotten Atrocity File, because it is not useful for the purpose of subjugating us.

Of course, some of these people are not satisfied with mere subjugation. They want extermination. For a slice of the Twitter pie, the massacre at a Christian school was a cause for smug celebration. Take that, Jesus people.

You need to accept that some people want you dead.

It’s nothing personal though, because you are not a person to them. You are an Other, an enemy, a designated villain for whom no suffering is sufficient to purge the crime of being you and not understanding that your proper role is submission. You look at how the other socialists through history, of various flavors, convinced people to engage in genocide and you realize it is all the same. The Other is bad, the Other is not human, the Other must die. The Russian Bolshevik socialists thought that way as they murdered millions. And the German national socialists thought that way as they murdered millions. And the Red Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, the Cuban socialists – all of them butchered those who were not quite human not because they were no homos sapiens but because they were not New Socialist Men.

This is the same with only the scope and the terminology. Maybe it was some antifa freak dreaming of a French Revolution here. Maybe it was some trans monster acting out his/her/zir homicidal fantasies. Maybe it was just a bastard. You can bet that if it was anything but an allegedly Christian Republican NRA member you won’t hear a damn thing. I would add race to the mix, but that’s not even important to their bogus analysis.

“White Latinos,” black people who are the face of white supremacy, it doesn’t matter. All their race hustling is simply cover for the real truth. They hate you because, whatever your race or religion or anything else, you refuse to submit.

And some of them want you dead.

Some on social media will tell you. If the freak killers do not murder you, something else will do. Remember during COVID how the plus side was all the bad people who refused the vaxx would die? Remember how East Palestine deserved it for liking Trump. When a fire or a tornado hits a place that did not go all in for Biden, the eager on-line onanism begins.

Many more will simply shrug. They are not broken up at all. Your deaths are of no particular import. It might as well be a famine in Burkina Faso for all they care. You do not matter. You do not enter into their consciousness, and if there are fewer of you, well, that’s a plus.

Now, they need not do it directly. They can do it indirectly. They will eagerly demand that you disarm, because guns are bad you see. Except no one ever wanted to help you by making you less able to defend yourself. This is not about helping you. You are never going to shoot someone in a drug deal gone south or a carjacking. You will never walk into a school with murder on your mind. All you will do with those big, evil guns of yours is defend yourselves against criminals and tyrants. But then, our enemies like criminals and love tyrants. And they hate you.

So, defend yourself you must. There’s no one out there who will ride to the rescue. The cops of Uvalde are a dire warning to the rest of us citizens. At the end of the day, a certain type of regime flunky will stop the cop who wants to go in and kill the criminal. And that certain type seems more and more common. It’s by intent. If you live in fear, you are easier to rule.

They want you disarmed, and if you are armed – until they can fix that – they want you neutered. Cops, at least many of them, will not stop the bad people. They have been told not to. Who needs to take the political hit for defunding the police when your Soros-bought prosecutor will just let the dirtbag you risked your life to bust go? Why take that risk? As a cop doing his job (or a citizen acting in the defense of himself or others), you risk more than your life. What if that criminal you bust dies as you take him down? It happens. And cops (and citizens) know that the same deference given to scumbags will never, ever be given to you. So the cops let the criminals prey on each other, which necessarily means they prey on citizens. And the citizens take their futures in their hands if they resist. Remember that guy robbed in his bodega who stabbed the career criminal to keep from being murdered? He’d be in prison now if not for the glare of publicity. Who wants to risk that?

We should not have to.

We need to pressure our Republicans in the states and in the House to act. We need pro-gun freedom legislation. We need pro-self-defense procedural rules that make it difficult for communist prosecutors to hassle innocent citizens who are simply ridding society of degenerate criminals. And we need laws that allow Republican governors to fire prosecutors who protect the criminals instead of the citizens

Understand that a lot of these people really do prefer you passed on. Time to stop letting them put that into action. We must defend ourselves because no one else will.

March 29

845 – Paris is sacked by the Viking raiders of Ragnar Lodbrok

1430 – The Ottoman Empire under Murad II captures Thessalonica from the Republic of Venice.

1549 – The city of Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of Brazil, is founded.

1806 – Construction of the Great National Pike is authorized by Congress, better known as the Cumberland Road – today mostly U.S. Route 40, west of Baltimore – and the first U.S. Federal Highway.

1847 – During the Mexican–American War, U.S. forces led by General Winfield Scott take Veracruz after a 20 day siege.

1865 – Federal forces in Virginia under Major General Philip Sheridan move to flank Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee as the final Appomattox Campaign begins.

1867 – Queen Victoria gives Royal Assent to the British North America Act which establishes Canada on July 1.

1886 – John Pemberton brews the first batch of Coca-Cola in his backyard in Atlanta, Georgia

1911 –  After extensive competitive testing by the military, Colt Firearms’ entry of John M. Browning’s short recoil design pistol is formally adopted by the U.S. Army as the Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, Model of 1911.

1927 – Sir Henry Segrave , driving the Sunbeam Motor Car Company’s twin V-12 engine powered Mystery, breaks the land speed record, driving for the first time over 200 miles per hour on Daytona Beach, Florida.

1941 – The North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, defining and regulating AM radio transmission, goes into effect at 03:00 Eastern Standard Time.

1951 – Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviets against the U.S.

1961 – The 23rd Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, allowing residents of Washington, D.C., to vote in presidential elections.

1971 –U.S Army Lt. William Calley is convicted of the premeditated murder of 22 South Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre, and sentenced to life in prison. With later appeals, sentence reductions and parole he ends up serving less than 3 1/2 years under house arrest.

1973 – As the communist government in Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam, with some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remaining behind in Saigon to aid the South Vietnam government.

1974 – The Terracotta Army guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China is discovered in Shaanxi province, China.

1999 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above the 10,000 mark  for the first time, during the height of the ‘dot-com’ bubble.

2002 – In reaction to the Passover massacre 2 days prior, Israel launches Operation Defensive Shield against Palestinian moslem terrorists, its largest military operation in the West Bank since the 1967 Six Day War.

2004 – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia join NATO as full members.

2010 – Two moslem terrorist suicide bombers hit the Moscow Metro system at the peak of the morning rush hour, killing 40 people.

2017 – Prime Minister Theresa May invokes Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, formally beginning the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union commonly called the Brexit.

Stop Lying: Watch How the Nashville School Killer Case Destroys Left’s Myth About Guns

No sooner had word emerged that a Nashville Christian school had been attacked by a mass shooter on Monday than the Left began dissembling about guns again. The shift from “thoughts and prayers” to “grab the guns from law-abiding gun owners!” occurred at hypersonic speed. And it was all wrong.

To save time, here’s a simple request by people who believe in the right to bear arms, which is explicitly guaranteed in the United States Constitution and is a God-given right. Stop lying. Try. It’s not that hard, and someone’s life depends on it.

First, let’s acknowledge that gender dysphoria is a real and treatable mental issue and obviously experienced by this 28-year-old biological female, who lived with her parents, and who police called a “she” even though the media insist we call her a “male.” She’s dead now, and her feelings won’t be hurt anymore by someone telling the truth about her. She can’t be defamed. And, obviously, “dead-naming” her is no longer an issue.

Think about this and many other after-effects of these lies. Imagine how this kind of “misgendering” will show up in crime stats. Males do the overwhelming number of mass shootings. It’s a fact. Will this wanna-be man show up in the crime stats as a male or female now? How does that help society understand the mentality of mass shooters? We need to stop lying about that too.

But here’s today’s lesson for the Left. You’ll want to commit this to memory, so pay attention as I explain this in words of one syllable.

Repeat after me: good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns.

And I can prove it.

First, who was called when the shooting broke out? That’s right, cops. Cops are called because they have guns. And let’s say something about these police officers who selflessly and bravely ran up the stairs to the sound of gunfire. They passed at least one body of a child without flinching and continued running to stop the monster. And they quickly dispatched this killer — unlike the cops in Uvalde, Texas. Watch the bodycam footage

You know the sad cliché: when seconds matter, cops are only minutes away.

And the killer knew it too. I repeat: the killer knew it too. This murderer knew this peaceful Christian school she’d attended as a girl years before was a gun-free zone, as are most schools in Tennessee.

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Biden says he can’t do any more gun control through executive action

Gun control groups no doubt disagree, but Joe Biden says he’s reached the limits of his executive authority when it comes to gun control, while once again calling on Congress to enact a gun ban on its own.

“I have gone the full extent of my executive authority, to do on my own anything about guns,” Biden said. “The Congress has to act. The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre, a crazy idea. They’re against that.”

Biden renewed his push for Congress to reinstate the nation’s ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2024, and to close loopholes for gun background checks after Monday’s deadly shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville.

“The last time we passed an assault weapons ban, violent shootings went down,” Biden said. “I can’t do anything except plead with Congress to act reasonably.”

Apparently USA Today’s fact checker is on vacation this week, since the ban on so-called assault weapons expired in 2004, not next year.
[Looks like USAToday has stealth edited their error to the correct 2004 date]
As for Biden’s claim that “violent shootings” (are there non-violent shootings?) decreased after the AWB took effect in 1994, according to the FBI’s uniform crime reports violent crime in the United States actually peaked in 1991, three years before the ban took effect. Take a look for yourself:

Violent crimes involving rifles are extraordinarily rare circumstances to begin with, so Bidens’ gun ban can’t be responsible for the plummeting crime rates in the 1990s, which continued even after the ban expired in 2004. In fact, despite the surge in violent crime in 2020 and 2021, rates are still far lower today than they were when Biden’s “assault weapons ban” was allowed to sunset.

The U.S. homicide rate peaked even earlier, reaching an historic high of 10.2 per 100,000 people all the way back in 1980. While there were several years in the late 80s and early 90s that came close to that terrible number, by 2014 the nation’s homicide rate had fallen to 4.4 per 100K. The rate has gone back up since then, particularly after the COVID shutdowns and civil unrest in 2020, but homicide rates are still far better than what many of us lived through in the 80s and 90s.

In other words, Biden’s full of malarkey when he touts the supposed effects of his gun ban, and his umpteenth demand for Congress to put a new ban in place isn’t likely to change any hearts and minds on Capitol Hill.

“We’re not gonna fix it,” U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told reporters Monday. “Criminals are going to be criminals.”

Burchett added: “My daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese. He told me, buddy, if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.”

With all due respect to Burchett’s daddy, I’m going to politely disagree with him and his son. No, we’re never going to completely eradicate violent crime or be able to prevent every committed killer from carrying out their murderous plots, but there absolutely are concrete steps that we can take to reduce violent crime in its many forms; from domestic violence to drug-related shootings to active shooter attacks. Each of those issues requires strategies and tactics that are designed to address the actual problem, however, as opposed to just trying to ban our way to safety as gun control activists demand.

Focused deterrence efforts aimed at the most prolific and violent, for example, can reduce homicide rates by 50% or more when implemented effectively, as even a few anti-gun activists will admit. Enforcing existing laws also matters, as we make clear every day on Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co with our recidivist report. Monday, for example, we highlighted a suspect in a Shreveport shooting who was given a suspended sentence and probation for a weapons charge, even after he repeatedly skipped out on his sentencing hearing. There are lots of things we can do to reduce violent crime without trying to reduce legal gun ownership or infringe on the fundamental rights of we the people, and many of them don’t require state legislators or congresscritters to act at all.

They also don’t involve executive actions by the president, and while I’m glad to see Biden say he’s reached the limits of his executive authority, the truth is that those limits were breached long ago. I’m also not convinced that Biden’s actually through with issuing any more executive orders on gun control, though so far he’s been unwilling to take the advice of gun control activists to enact a gun ban by having the ATF reclassify some or all commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms as machine guns. The anti-gunner-in-chief may want to leave it up to Congress to infringe on the rights of responsible Americans, but his fellow prohibitionists are going to continue to lean on him to go big before he leaves office.

Bodycam Footage of Nashville Cops Taking Out Trans Shooter Released.

“MNPD Officers Rex Engelbert, a 4-year veteran, and Michael Collazo, a 9-year veteran, were part of a team of officers who responded to the Covenant Church/School campus Monday morning and immediately entered the building. Both of those officers fired on the shooter, who was killed,” reads the department’s description of the footage on Twitter. “This is their body camera footage.”