Category: Mendacity O’ The Day

NPR talks about “major takeaways” from ATF report

The ATF has always at least felt politicized to gun owners. After all, it’s a federal agency that perpetually seems dedicated to restricting our rights. At no point is there any illustration that the agency actually wants to help gun owners or benefit them in any way.

Lately, though, things were turned up to 11.

But data is, at least in theory, just data. While it can be manipulated in various ways, there’s often some degree of usefulness to it.

Leave it to NPR to not just look at it, but try to present it in the most heavily biased way possible.

Stolen guns, untraceable weapons and other deadly devices are becoming more prevalent in U.S. gun crimes, new federal data shows.

Last week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released an expansive federal report on guns used in crimes in two decades, providing the public with more detail about stolen firearms and gun trafficking.

The data stretches from 2017 and 2021. During that period, local police reported a shrinking turnaround time for a legally purchased gun to be used in a crime. It also provides insight into the spike in ghost guns and conversion devices.

ATF Director Steven M. Dettelbach wrote that the findings offer “strategic intelligence” for policy makers, law enforcement and researchers to reduce gun violence.

Gun policy experts have said that the release of this data is a big step in better understanding gun crime in the U.S., and can better educate policymakers on the need to regulate several areas of the gun industry.

Because it’s always about regulation, isn’t it.

It should be noted that while this is posted on NPR’s website there’s no actual link to the ATF’s report. Nor does there appear to be a press release on the ATF’s website.

Interesting.

So what about these takeaways in question? Well, it’s interesting in how little framing we’ve got.

Legally purchased firearms are being used in crimes sooner than ever

The ATF found that 54% of traced crime guns were recovered by law enforcement more than three years after their purchase. Those guns were legally purchased, but were later used in crimes, the report indicated.

“Crime guns may change hands a number of times after that first retail sale, and some of those transactions may be a theft or violate one or more regulations on firearm commerce,” the ATF’s report reflected.

“We’ve had record gun sales in the United States, particularly in and around the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021. And the vast majority of those guns are, of course, purchased by law abiding citizens and with no intent to commit crime,” James Densley, a sociologist with the Violence Project, said. In addition to tracking mass shootings with the Violence Project, Densley also studies everyday gun violence and homicide.

“But what we know is from the large numbers of gun sales, there are lots of ways that legal guns end up in the hands of prohibited persons.”

OK, but what’s not mentioned is how much the time has reduced. Are we talking years earlier or mere days? That’s some important information. After all, if the time dropped from 20 years to three, then something sure does seem wonky. If it goes from 3.2 years to 3.1 years, not so much.

That’s far from the only takeaway, though. For example, they note more than a million guns are stolen, which is unfortunate to say the least. Stolen guns are a huge problem and something lawful gun owners want to help mitigate as best they can.

After all, if my guns get stolen, not only am I deprived of my property but someone else might be hurt with one.

NPR also brings up the ATF’s great boogieman, “ghost guns.”

Privately made firearms, also called “ghost guns,” and their involvement in crime “is an emerging issue,” the ATF said in its analysis. Still, law enforcement agencies are just beginning to establish uniform training on how to recognize, identify, and report ghost guns.

The number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement agencies and sent to the ATF for tracing and tracking “increased by 1,083% from 2017 (1,629) to 2021 (19,273).” This indicates, for one thing, that these ghost guns are increasingly being used to commit crimes, the ATF concludes.

Now, let’s be clear, that is a significant increase over such a short stretch of time.

However, the better question is what percentage of total guns sent for tracing did unserialized firearms account for from year to year.

Let’s remember that 2020 and 2021 were particularly violent years. It’s entirely likely that at least some of that increase was really just because of the increase in violent crime as a whole.

I suspect that if we looked at those numbers, the difference wouldn’t seem so stark.

Yet despite that, it does look like a lot more so-called ghost guns are being sent to the ATF for tracing. I can’t help but note, however, that until the media started freaking out over homemade firearms, remarkably few people were using them for criminal activity.

That didn’t make it in this report, I’m sure.

Look, I could go through the whole thing, but all we have is biased reporting of what the ATF’s report said and we know how that goes. Absolutely none of it changes the fact that our rights are what they are and that gun control laws uniformly fail to prevent criminals from arming themselves.

As such, the report was mostly a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In that way, it’s much like the ATF itself.

Fauci: now he tells us.

What if I told you that Anthony Fauci knew all along that the COVID vaccine could not possibly prevent either infection with or transmission of COVID?

Not surprised? Neither am I.

Now that is a bit of a surprise and exactly the opposite of what he told everybody during the push to get everybody vaccinated.

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Here’s the abstract of the piece published in Cell, a highly prestigious journal.

Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns.

Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.

In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines, emphasizing that all of these viruses replicate extremely rapidly in the surface epithelium and are quickly transmitted to other hosts, within a narrow window of time before adaptive immune responses are fully marshaled.

We discuss possible approaches to developing next-generation vaccines against these viruses, in consideration of several variables such as vaccine antigen configuration, dose and adjuventation, route and timing of vaccination, vaccine boosting, adjunctive therapies, and options for public health vaccination polices.

We haven’t gotten to the (not so) good part yet, but the bolded sentences tell you why these vaccines don’t work as advertised: the vaccines are delivered intramuscularly (you get a shot), which is intended to stimulate a systemic immunological response. You develop antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream.

Continue reading “”

Horrified That the Bruen Decision Protects Gun Rights, Academics Try Throwing Research Data and Statistics At It

A judge in Texas is using a recent Supreme Court ruling to allow domestic abusers to keep their guns

April M. Zeoli, University of Michigan and Shannon Frattaroli, Johns Hopkins University

For a large part of the history of the United States, domestic abuse was tolerated under the nation’s legal system. There were few laws criminalizing domestic violence, and enforcement of the existing laws was rare.

It was only in the past few decades that laws criminalizing domestic violence came to be widespread and enforced. But now, the U.S. is in danger of backtracking on that legal framework precisely because of the nation’s historical legacy of turning a blind eye to domestic violence.

On Nov. 10, 2022, a judge in the Western District of Texas struck down the federal law that prohibits access to guns for people subject to domestic violence protection orders. He did this based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, NYSRPA v. Bruen, which held that, to be constitutional, a firearm restriction must be analogous to laws that were in existence when the country was founded. In other words, disarming domestic abusers violates the Second Amendment because those types of laws didn’t exist at the founding of the country.

In a separate, but related, case, the 5th U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals on Feb 1. sided with the Texas judge, ruling that the federal ban was unconstitutional. The Justice Department has indicated that it will appeal.

We study the link between gun laws and domestic violence in the U.S. and know that backtracking on laws that prevent the perpetrators of domestic violence from getting their hands on guns will put lives at risk – the research has proved this time and time again.

Putting lives in danger

At present, federal law prohibits persons subject to final – rather than temporary – domestic violence protection orders from purchasing or possessing firearms. In addition, 39 states and the District of Columbia have similar prohibitions on their statutes, with many expanding the restrictions to include individuals under temporary, or ex parte, orders prior to a full hearing.

Ruling that these laws are unconstitutional will put mainly women and children in danger. More than 50% of women who are murdered are killed by intimate partners, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. A 2003 study found that when an abusive man has access to a gun, it increases the risk of intimate partner homicide by 400%.

Women constitute the majority of victims of intimate partner homicide, and almost one-third of children under the age of 13 who are murdered with a gun are killed in the context of domestic violence.

Moreover, 68% of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence or killed an intimate partner in the mass shooting.

Enforcement of gun restrictions is spotty, with further research needed as to how systematically they are ordered and whether restricted individuals relinquish firearms they already possess. Nonetheless, research shows that firearm restrictions on domestic violence protection orders save lives. Multiple studies conclude that these laws are associated with an 8%-10% reduction in intimate partner homicide.

Specifically, there are statistically significant reductions in intimate partner homicide when the firearm restriction covers both dating partners and those subjected to temporary orders. This decrease is seen in total intimate partner homicide, not just intimate partner homicide committed with guns, nullifying the argument that abusers will use other weapons to kill.

Moreover, these laws have broad support across the country – more than 80% of respondents to two national polls in 2017 and 2019 said they favor them.

Americans – whether male or female, gun owner or non-gun owner – tend to agree that domestic abusers should not be able to purchase or possess firearms while they are subject to a domestic violence protection order. Most seem to realize that such reasonable restrictions serve the greater good of keeping families and communities safe.

A disregard for data

The ruling in Texas was based on an originalist legal argument rather than the data. Under the judge’s interpretation of the Bruen decision, because colonial law – written before a time when women could vote, let alone be protected in law from violent spouses – didn’t restrict domestic abusers’ gun rights, then it simply isn’t constitutional to do so now. In effect, the ruling, should it stand, would mean the U.S. is unable to escape the nation’s historic legal disregard for domestic violence.

It also disregards the harm that allowing domestic abusers to keep hold of guns does. Multiple studies demonstrate that domestic violence firearm restriction laws are effective and save lives.

That research shows that, should the Texas ruling stand, people who suffer abuse at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk of that abuse being deadly.

Lisa Geller, director of state affairs at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, contributed to this article.The Conversation

April M. Zeoli, Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Michigan and Shannon Frattaroli, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

FACT CHECK: Biden Claims Mass Shootings Tripled After ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Ended

CLAIM: During the State of the Union Address President Joe Biden claimed mass shootings tripled after the “assault weapons” ban expired.

VERDICT: Misleading/Mostly False.

Biden said, “In the ten years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire, in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”

It should be noted that Biden has made this claim before, in one form or another, following a high-profile shooting.

He did so on May 24, 2022, following the Uvalde elementary school attack. The Washington Post quoted him saying, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

Ironically, the Post also called Biden’s claim into question:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

…The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.

Breitbart News reported that the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a report in 2004, as the “assault weapons” ban was coming to an end. The information in that study dovetails perfectly with the Post’s observation, inasmuch as the NIJ researchers could not credit the “assault weapons” ban with any of the reductions in crime or shootings which were sporadically reported elsewhere.

The Washington Times quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, author of the NIJ report, saying, “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.”

The NIJ report continued, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

The NIJ report put matters into perspective by pointing out that “assault weapons” were “rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”

Biden’s claim about mass shootings tripling and the sunset of the ban being causal is misleading, because no reliable connection between the end of the ban and an increase in shootings has been made.

Biden’s claim is also mostly false because the information from sources like the NIJ explicitly indicates the “assault weapons” ban cannot be credited with a drop in gun violence to begin with.

Like how that State’s Attorney (More commonly called a Prosecutor for the rest of us) slyly moves the goalpost of self defense so he can slide in ‘hurt feelings’? I’ve found very few prosecutors that like the idea that they can have their hands tied, legally speaking, from exercising every bit of power they have just exactly how they want?

Shooting at Roanoke supermarket reveals “substantial evidence” showing self-defense

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) – WDBJ7 has learned new details about a shooting over the weekend at a Food Lion in Northwest Roanoke. Roanoke City’s commonwealth’s attorney told WDBJ7 the suspect was released because there is a substantial argument for self defense.

Saturday night, there was a disagreement at the store on Peters Creek Road. Investigators say one man threw a punch at another man, who then took out his gun and shot several times.

He hit the person who initiated the fight and a woman who was caught in the middle. The woman’s injuries were not life-threatening, but Roanoke Police said the man’s injuries were serious.

The commonwealth’s attorney explained the store’s surveillance video will help investigators determine if this was self defense.

”That’s where it becomes a fine line; does a person have to stand there and take a beating or get beat up, or if they are armed, can they use deadly force to repel the attack?” Donald Caldwell said. “That will be a decision that we’ll have to get the actual video from the Food Lion and watch and make those determinations.”

The man who fired the gun stayed on scene and cooperated with police. Caldwell explained cooperation is rare in situations like this.

“The predicate act for using a gun has just become so low is there’s almost no bar,” Caldwell said. “Hurt feelings now, among some members of our society, justify using a gun. It is just a sad state of affairs.”

The commonwealth’s attorney also stated the man who started the fight could face charges for assault and battery.

So, those who want to ban guns from the citizenry are liars.
Yes, we know that.

Fact-Check: Mass Shootings Actually Increased During Federal ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

A widely cited study used to push for more state ‘assault weapons’ bans is flawed and does not show that the 1994 federal ban saved lives.

“Assault weapons” ban proponents say that such bans will save lives. A recent opinion column published in the Chicago Sun-Times claims that the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower during the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban. The column was published while the Illinois state legislature was debating a state-wide assault weapons ban, which passed a few weeks ago.

The study on which that claim was based is flawed and its conclusions unreliable. Yet gun-control advocates such as the Giffords Law Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Sandy Hook Promise continue to use the study as they push for more assault weapons bans like the one in Illinois. Legislators, media reports, and opinion writers have cited the study, and the column published in the Chicago Sun-Times has appeared in several media outlets.

The study was produced by Charles DiMaggio, lead author; Michael Klein, the opinion column’s author; and seven other medical professionals. It examined data from three open-source mass shooting databases. The study identified 44 mass shootings from 1981 through 2017 in which four or more fatalities were reported (not including the shooter), resulting in 501 fatalities. It determined that 34 of these shootings were committed with so-called assault weapons, which accounted for 430 (86 percent) of the fatalities.

The study found that mass shooting deaths decreased during the years the federal ban was in effect. It claimed that had the federal ban been in effect for the entire period from 1981 through 2017, it might have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the non-ban years.

Defining ‘Assault Weapons’

Measuring the effect of the federal assault weapons ban requires distinguishing mass shootings with assault weapons from mass shootings with non-banned weapons, such as handguns. After all, the point of an assault weapons ban is to reduce mass shootings with the banned firearms.

There is no consistent legal definition of “assault weapon,” so one must look to how each law banning such firearms defines them. An “assault weapon” under the 1994 federal ban included both specific firearms by name and any semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting a detachable magazine and having two or more features such as a folding or telescoping stock, pistol grip, barrel shroud, flash hider, or threaded barrel. Subsequently enacted state and local bans typically require only one such additional feature.

To identify whether a mass shooting occurred with an assault weapon, the DiMaggio study’s authors made no attempt to determine whether the weapons used actually met the 1994 ban’s definition of “assault weapon.” Instead, they simply searched the databases’ text for “AK,” “AR,” “MCX,” “assault,” and “semiautomatic.” (Klein claimed in his column that the authors “chose to use the strict federal definition of an assault weapon,” but this methodology belies that statement.)

Although all assault weapons are semiautomatic, not all semiautomatics are assault weapons. A semiautomatic firearm fires only one round with each pull of the trigger and automatically loads the next round after firing. The federal ban did not apply to all semiautomatic firearms, as the study’s authors assumed, but only to those with detachable magazines and two or more of the specified features. The vast majority of semiautomatic handguns do not have the additional features required by the federal ban.

Study Includes Non-Banned, Common Handguns in Statistics

Using “semiautomatic” as a search identifier vastly overstated the number of mass shootings committed with so-called assault weapons. The study’s weapon data set for the 34 incidents shows that in at least 20 (almost 60 percent) of the shootings, non-banned semiautomatic handguns — in 9mm, .45, and other popular calibers — were wrongly identified as assault weapons. This obviously skewed the study’s results.

Common semiautomatic handguns should never be confused with “assault weapons.” No federal or state assault weapons ban has ever included such handguns.

Perhaps the study’s authors were confused about what constituted an “assault weapon.” This is unsurprising. The term “assault weapon” was popularized in the late 1980s not to address a particular problem, but to enliven a waning gun-control movement by confusing and scaring the public about firearms. A report from gun-control advocacy group The Violence Policy Center explains:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

The study’s misidentification error was pointed out in a public letter to column writer Klein and his study co-authors by University of Massachusetts Professor Louis Klarevas, a well-known academic expert on mass shootings and author of “Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings.” After reviewing the study’s data set, Klarevas challenged the study’s conclusions based on this “large number of misclassifications.”

The authors responded: “We make no claim to have retroactively determined whether these guns would have been illegal under the original statutory language.” But both their study and Klein’s column are about the effectiveness of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban.

Ignoring the need for fidelity to what the statute actually banned in determining whether that statute was effective, they claimed that assault weapon definitions don’t really matter, but only the “main message” of the study, which is that “fewer people died in mass shooting incidents during the ban period.”

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Amy Klobuchar Cites Two Pistol Attacks to Push ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) posted a video to Twitter on Saturday in which she pushed an “assault weapons” ban in response to two shootings carried out with pistols.

Klobuchar cited the January 21, 2023 Monterey Park shooting (11 killed) and the January 23, 2023 Half Moon Bay shooting (seven killed).

She did not mention that both shootings occurred in stringently gun-controlled California, which has had an “assault weapons” ban since the 1990s. Nor did she mention that both shootings were carried out with pistols.

Klobuchar did, however, push for more gun control.

Breitbart News reported that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) blasted “weapons of war” after the suspected Half Moon Bay shooter used a handgun in his attack.

CBS News noted that the suspected shooter “drove himself to the substation located between the two businesses and surrendered to deputies.” They pointed out that the weapon used was “a [semiautomatic] handgun.”

Comment O’ The Day:
It is amusing watching Democrats in power walk the tight rope of pretending to know everything while at the same time being completely ignorant.
Nobody believes this overt and public anti-Semite. Nobody.

I mean, politicians lie all the time, but at least she could have tried to make this one sound somewhat reasonable.

Rep. Ilhan Omar: “I Wasn’t Aware That There Are Tropes About Jews And Money”

Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday morning on CNN said that she didn’t know about the offensive nature of antisemitic tropes regarding “Jews and money” when she made comments that have been cited by House Speaker McCarthy as the primary reason she was removed from the House Foreign Affairs committee.

REP. ILHAN OMAR: I might have used words at the time that I didn’t understand were trafficking in anti-semitism. When that was brought to my attention, I apologized. I owned up to it. That’s the kind of person that I am. And I continue to work with my colleagues and my community to fight against anti-semitism.

Now, I’ve never compared or made any comparisons, what I was referencing was a case that was in front of the ICC. If you want to debate political differences, that’s something that we should all have the opportunity to do so, but to smear someone and their character, their love for their country and the work they get to do on a committee is wrong, and it is politically motivated. And in some cases, it is motivated by the fact that many of these members don’t believe that a Muslim refugee, an African, should even be in Congress, let alone have an opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee….

I certainly did not or was not aware that the word hypnotized was a trope. I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money. That has been a very enlightening part of this journey. To insinuate that I knowingly said these things when people have read into my comments to make it sound as if I have something against the Jewish community is so wrong.

To insinuate that I knowingly said these things, when people have read into my comments to make it sound as if I have something against the Jewish community, is so wrong. If you remember, when I first got elected to Congress, it was when the FBI report came out on the rise of antisemitism. As a rep-elected, the first op-ed I wrote was on that report, which I talked about how it was important for us, as a community, to coalesce around the Jewish community and fight against antisemitism.

I voted for every single resolution — no Republican can say that — condemning antisemitism. My work is clear. The collaboration and work that I do with my Jewish colleagues is very clear. The reason that the Democratic Caucus has not removed me and will not support my removal on the Foreign Affairs Committee is because I have done the work to make sure that I do not support any bigotry.

Another problem with Gun Violence Archive’s numbers

Supporters of gun control love to use Gun Violence Archive as an authoritative source on the number of shootings we have in this country. The number of mass shootings as compiled by the site–a number that doesn’t reflect what most people think of as a mass shooting, it should be remembered–is presented uncritically by the media.

It happens all the time, and in the wake of two shootings in California, it’s happening yet again. While we know plenty about those two shootings and will likely learn more as we go forward, proponents of gun control site Gun Violence Archive’s total number of mass shootings to show it’s more than those two incidents.

Take this editorial as just one example.

History is full of horrific events in which we shake our heads and ask, “How did that happen? What were they thinking?”

The Holocaust and slavery are two prime examples.

It begs the question of what is transpiring today that will be regarded by future generations as deplorable. That historians will record with the hope that they will never be repeated.

Climate change, yes. And then there is gun violence.

California has had three mass shootings in the last four days. Seven people were killed and one injured in Half Moon Bay on Monday. One person was killed and six injured at an East Oakland gas station later that evening. Eleven people were killed and nine injured in Monterey Park on Saturday.

We are not even at the end of the first month of 2023. Yet the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings bring the number of mass shootings (in which four or more people were killed or injured) to 39 this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That follows the 647 mass shootings recorded in 2022 and 690 mass shootings in 2021.

Of course, what follows is the true-to-form call for gun control we typically see from many editorial boards.

Now, in the wake of two deadly mass shootings, I sort of get it. However, they’re not just holding those two incidents up as why we somehow need gun control. They’re holding Gun Violence Archive’s numbers up as well.

And yet, what do we know about any of those shootings?

Well, we know three or more people were injured at those shootings–the low standard the site uses to categorize something as a mass shooting in the first place, which includes gang warfare, drivebys, and so on–but little else.

If we’re going to have a conversation about how we need gun control, about how certain guns shouldn’t be allowed in private hands, or how certain people should be legally barred from buying guns, shouldn’t we also need to know about any of those hundreds upon hundreds of so-called mass shootings?

I ask because I know statistically where most of those weapons came from, and it’s not from lawful gun sales.

How can you say that the gun laws are insufficient when so few of these hundreds of “mass shootings” were carried out with a lawfully-obtained firearm in the first place?

See, Gun Violence Archive is a favorite among the media and anti-gun set (but I repeat myself), yet it only shows part of the picture. To cite their numbers without important context on where those guns were obtained amounts to little more than trying to view a masterpiece by only looking at one single bit with a microscope.

It’s not a full picture by any stretch.

And it matters because while actual mass shootings make headlines, the real violence problem in our country happens in our inner cities. They get counted by Gun Violence Archive to try and push gun control when all the gun laws in the world aren’t going to help.

Thank God this hack never made it to the Supreme Court.

Try Not to Laugh at DOJ’s Excuse for Not Sending FBI to Raid Biden’s Homes for Classified Docs.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is feeling the heat over the obvious double standard between the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home to retrieve classified documents and Joe Biden’s Car-a-Lago scandal. As a result, Biden’s hit man, who “can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” has clearly green-lighted his patented leaks to friendly media to make excuses for his duplicity. If this weren’t such a tell for how corrupt the Justice Department is, the excuses would be funny. But since America’s system of jurisprudence in the DOJ and the FBI is clearly so irretrievably fallen, and could take civil society sliding down the hill with it, we should consider Garland’s excuses in the seriousness with which they’re offered.

Now you can laugh.

It’s going to take more than one of Garland’s no-comment-comments to convince anyone paying attention to this ridiculous charade that there’s no gambling at Rick’s. Yet, Garland’s excuse-making is amazing to behold for his audacity in believing anyone is dumb enough to believe this claptrap.

Allow me to distill the nonsense that Garland’s Justice Department, characterized as “people familiar with the matter,” told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday afternoon.

First up, the Merrick Garland approved leak wants us to believe that gosh, we considered having the FBI SWAT team oversee the raid to get the illegal documents, but the Justice Department “decided against it, both to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation and because Mr. Biden’s attorneys had quickly turned over a first batch and were cooperating, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Just like Donald Trump. Just kidding.

President Trump had the authority to declassify documents and, as a president of the United States, was allowed to take them as his personal documents, according to Mike Davis of the Article III Project. Not so with the vice president, which Biden was when he purloined the documents with the highest security classifications. We’re told, but we don’t have proof since we have only the say-so of Biden’s lawyer Richard Sauber, that some of the documents pertained to Ukraine and China. Of course, those are the countries from which Hunter Biden was extracting millions for access to the Veep.

Garland’s lackeys leaked that President Biden’s own attorneys were allowed to search the documents without FBI presence (read: raid) because he trusted Biden’s attorneys to do the search for them. On his word as a Biden. “Not a joke, not a joke.”

Indeed, the two sides, presumably the DOJ and Biden, though it’s not clear, “agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them.” Did Biden get a back rub too? A day at the spa? Cognition lessons? Anything’s possible after telling Team Biden that hey, no problem you can go through the documents and then turn over the documents that Biden’s lawyers wanted to hand over.

WSJ postulates that by allowing Joe’s attorneys to curate and collect the illegally obtained classified documents he was not authorized to have, it laughably signals that “federal investigators are girding for a months-long inquiry that could stretch well into Mr. Biden’s third year in office.” What does that even mean? 

“Instead, the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them, ” WSJ straightfacedly reported.

Apparently, the discussions with the DOJ were very serious and deliberative, and “those deliberations, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on how the Biden team’s efforts to cooperate with investigators have thus far helped it avoid more aggressive actions by law enforcement.”

Oh please. Biden had the documents since January 2017. How is that cooperative, again?

Biden says he has no idea what those documents were in the box next to his vintage Corvette. We didn’t get a sexy staged photo of documents splayed out at the Car-a-Lago crime scene. Biden says he doesn’t remember having the documents in the three different properties (some of which had been moved multiple times). We have no trouble believing this. He likely doesn’t remember what he had for breakfast this morning.

Trump’s people were in negotiations with the National Archives, which apparently has somehow morphed into a law enforcement entity with gunned-up FBI SWAT-like officers at their disposal to go grab documents they didn’t want him to have. But not so for Biden.

The DOJ raided Trump’s house because they didn’t like him.

We don’t know who’s going after Joe Biden for what, but we won’t find out because there are only two ways this special counsel probe will go: As a Mueller-like CYA cover-up operation or as a wrist slap that will be spun as a well., we investigated him and all we got was his lousy 5th Amendment, a crack pipe, and the numbers of a couple of hookers. This will be a Hunter Biden/Joe Biden proxy “investigation,” and it will end there. 

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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Ranking Redux

Everytown for Gun Safety is rank. And by that, we mean their state gun control law ranking system is rank(ed at the top of the silliness scale).

Takeaways

Everytown’s state law ranking system:

  • Is arbitrary, lacking any criminological basis.
  • Shows very little gun violence variability between states based on their gun laws.
  • Omits the most violent district, which has stringent gun laws.
  • Includes suicides, which are inappropriate in such an analysis.

Echoing the Brady Campaign

The moribund Brady Campaign (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) used to produce a state gun law scorecard every year. It was, in a word, a gun control wish list and nothing more. We keep their last scorecard criteria to reference their arbitrary scoring system for reference and a few laughs (whichever laws they were promoting that year tended get a higher score).

 

Brady Campaign State Scorecard vs Violent Crime Rates

click for larger, sharable version
 

Everytown Gun Law Ranking and Homicide Rates

click for larger, sharable version

We would dutifully produce a scatter diagram each year showing the utter lack of correlation between the Brady Campaign scorecard and any variety of crime.

The Brady Campaign quit producing their scorecard some time after we demonstrated that the states with “strongest” and most “lax” gun laws had identical rates of violent crime (in this last chart we made, blue California on the left and red Arizona on the right).

With the Brady Campaign largely forgotten, Everytown for Gun Safety picked up the slack and started producing their own “ranking” system

Same game, new player.

Blighted Everytown

The headline element of note is that Everytown’s ranking system doesn’t actually prove their point. Quite the opposite.

Here we took their ranking and graphed it against both gun homicides and all modes of homicides. Though the slope of the line does rise as Everytown’s arbitrary rankings drop (left-to-right, “strongest” to most “lax”) the rise is minuscule.

More importantly, the vertical scattering of points shows high volatility all the way from California to Mississippi. For the statistics junkies, that’s an R2 of 0.02 for gun homicides, which basically means no correlation between Everytown’s gun law rankings and actual gun violence.

Let’s list some of the “research” sins Everytown committed:

  • They omitted Washington, DC, which year in and year out is the murder capital as well as of the nation. The District also has stringent gun control laws, so this omission is blatant data rigging.
  • In their analysis, Everytown included suicides. We have shown, using a more appropriate international scale, that there is no correlation between gun availability and suicide rates. This is because the probability of someone wanting to commit suicide is based instead on external factors and cultural attitudes about suicide.

Let’s score their scorecard:

  • No criminology basis.
  • Excludes important datapoint.
  • Includes inappropriate data.
  • Composed via an arbitrary wish list.

In short, meaningless equine effluvium.

Everytown Dumbs Things Down

We expect advocacy groups (Everytown, NRA… doesn’t matter) to promote their causes. But to present the public with wantonly dubious and disastrously constructed “research” only helps to destroy their own brand and weaken their mission.

 

 

BLUF
So let’s be clear about what the Defensive Gun Use Database shows, and what Heritage’s position is: Civilians—just like the law enforcement officers who are exempt from these restrictions—sometimes need to defend themselves with more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

And in those cases where more than 10 rounds are needed, the extra ammunition may mean the difference between life or death.

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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The FBI’s Response to the Twitter Files Is Not Going Over Well

As Matt covered, the FBI responded to revelations from the Twitter files that the federal law enforcement agency worked with the social media platform to categorize Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” by hurling accusations about “conspiracy theorists.”

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers,” the FBI released in a statement Wednesday. “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the statement concluded. “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

That response isn’t going over well, especially among First Amendment advocates with deep concerns about the government using private companies to censor information.

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Biden’s Stolen Valor rant is no surprise to gun owners

Joe Biden walked onstage in front of a group of veterans Friday and then stole their valor.

Biden told the veterans his Uncle Frank was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, but somehow never received the Purple Heart. Biden claimed he first learned of the oversight when he was vice president, from his father.

“So, I got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house and I came out and my father said; ‘Present it to him, okay?’ We had the family there,” Biden said at the veterans’ townhall, according to media accounts.

Of course, there are massive factual errors in Biden’s latest tall tale. Biden’s uncle died in 1999. His father died in 2002, but Biden wasn’t elected vice president until 2008, so there is no way he could have presented his uncle the medal while serving as vice president. Also, there’s no documentation that Biden’s uncle ever received or was recommended for a Purple Heart — either before or after his nephew became vice president.

Biden’s latest lie comes as no surprise to gun owners. We’ve been hooting and hollering about his Second Amendment-related lies for years, but no one listened.

In August, during a rambling and often incoherent campaign speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Biden added yet another outlandish fib to his usual list of firearm falsehoods.

“Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun?” Biden asked the crowd.

To be clear, the AR round is quick, but it’s certainly not the fastest, and it’s definitely not five-times faster than all other calibers, which would be ballistically impossible.

In April, Biden created another fanciful tale, and like his Stolen Valor rant, he gave himself the starring role.

Biden was in southern Delaware, he claimed, trudging through the woods during hunting season, when he happened upon a hunter in a creek bed. The hunter asked him if he was going to confiscate his rifle, which Biden said he realized held 20 rounds. “You must be a terrible shot to need that many rounds,” Biden claimed he told the hunter in the creek bed. “Do you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?”

This tale was the latest version of one of Biden’s favorite quips, which states that anyone who uses a standard-capacity magazine must be a terrible shot, because deer don’t wear Kevlar vests.

Takeaways

Biden’s stolen valor claims are far worse than his previous false tall tales about Corn Pop, blonde leg hair or fictitious prohibitions regarding civilian cannon ownership.

He is the Commander-in-Chief, after all, the very top of the chain-of-command. By definition, every single member of the military is his subordinate. The CINC receives a lot of salutes, but the job also comes with tremendous responsibility, which Biden seems to ignore.

There’s no doubt that among Friday’s crowd were real Purple Heart recipients — men and women who sacrificed parts of their bodies for our freedom. They deserve an immediate apology, although they’ll likely never receive one.

Be it guns or stolen valor, Joe Biden will never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Remember This Whenever Moslems Demand More ‘Rights’ in the West.

Egypt’s Ministry of Endowments recently announced a new record: 1,200 new mosques were opened in the year 2022.

Moreover, in the two years between September 2020 and September 2022, a total of 3,116 mosques were opened (2,712 new; 404 renovated).

Since Abdel Fateh al-Sisi became president in 2014, the total number of mosques to be opened, repaired, or replaced — costing Egypt more than ten billion pounds [~$400 million]— is 9,600.

(One can almost hear the “Allahu akbars!”)

What about the religious places of worship that, for centuries before Egypt’s conquest by Muslim Arabs, dotted that nation’s landscape — namely, Christian churches? How fare they?

As is well known, when it comes to any question concerning the indigenous Christians of Egypt, the Copts, and their churches, accurate information — especially by way of numbers — is difficult to ascertain from the official channels.

As such, I contacted and spoke with one of the most astute analysts on the so-called Coptic question, the Egyptian-born Magdi Khalil, an author and public debater (appearing in approximately 1,500 televised debates, including on Al Jazeera) who specializes in citizenship rights, civil society, and the situation of minorities in the Middle East.

During our phone conversation, Khalil offered up the best-known figures he has been able to ascertain, after making clear that, “as you know, there are no absolutely accurate numbers from Egypt that aren’t politicized.”

He said there are a total of approximately 5,200 Christian institutions in Egypt, including all churches and monasteries from every denomination. As for Islamic institutions, there are 120,000 mosques and over one million prayer halls in the country.

This disparity alone underscores the extreme discrimination Christians face in Egypt. Considering that Copts of all denominations make up, at the very least, 10% of Egypt’s population of 104 million, there is one mosque or prayer hall for every 83 Muslims, but only one church for every 2,000 Christians.*

In 2016, a new Egyptian law was touted as “easing” restrictions on and helping many more churches to open.  Since its implementation, however, human rights groups have noted that it has only marginally helped. Khalil agreed, and said that at best, the 2016 law has made a “5-10 percent improvement.” But, by applying only to churches, as opposed to being a universal law for all religious places of worship, the new law has also formalized the Egyptian government’s divisive — or in Khalil’s words, “racist” — approach to its citizens. He is not alone in making this charge; even Human Rights Watch says that the new law ultimately “discriminates against the Christian minority in Egypt.”

Along with the ease Egypt grants to the building of mosques, often overlooked is the fact that the government also completely subsidizes a great many, if not most, of Egypt’s mosques. (Over 4 billion Egyptian pounds are paid annually by the state to subsidize the Ministry of Islamic Endowments, which is charged with affairs related to mosques and Islamic da‘wa [propaganda]. Moreover, 22 billion Egyptian pounds are annually paid to Al Azhar, which has a parallel educational system, or madrasa, from KG to university, with 2.8 million pupils and students.)

Conversely, not only does Egypt make it immensely hard for Christians to open or maintain churches, but the government does not contribute a “single penny” to their survival, said Khalil. Churches are even required to pay their utility bills, which no mosque in Egypt does, as the government happily picks up their bill.

Aside from the obvious discrimination and legal obstacles the government of Egypt has set up against churches, Khalil and I also spoke a bit about the Muslim mob violence that sporadically rises up against Christian places of worship. According to Khalil, “close to one thousand churches have been attacked or torched by mobs in the last five decades [since the 1970s] in Egypt.” This is a much larger number than is commonly assumed.

Khalil closed by saying, “The persecution of Egypt’s Christian Copts is the longest ongoing persecution in the history of mankind, from 642, to today, 2022. Through all this time, maybe 70 years under British occupation were peaceful and good — the “golden era” for Copts in all this duration. Then [during the colonial era] there was much more diversity in the government, including some Coptic ministers, etc. But the overwhelming majority of the time witnessed the Copts’ persecution.”

“I know of no group,” concluded Khalil, “that has been persecuted for nearly 1400 years — with still no light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Feds’ ‘Misinformation’ Scam.

The biggest political story of 2022 was not the midterm election. It was the release of the “Twitter Files” by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter. In the sixth installment published last week on Twitter in a thread by journalist Matt Taibbi, the headline was “Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary.” The FBI had its own channel of communication for tipping off Twitter executives as to authors of tweets who needed to be censored, if not banned, for posting “election misinformation” during the 2020 election season. What was insidious is that some of the offending tweets were satirical in nature and posted by people with relatively few followers.

At least 80 FBI agents were assigned to a social media task force. The Department of Homeland Security had its own operation. Both were inspired by the alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election, known now as the “Russian collusion hoax.” However, it was just days before Election Day for the 2022 midterms that we learned that censorship has been a secret project for over two years of the DHS, the FBI, and “Big Tech.” Apart from Twitter, that included Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media.

The mission creep into attacking political speech, which is entitled to the greatest protection under the First Amendment, was inevitable. During the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election campaign, the New York Post was blocked by Twitter and other Big Tech giants from publicizing its story on the incriminating evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop. It was the smoking gun of influence peddling by Hunter Biden to enrich himself, Joe Biden, and his uncle to the tune of millions of dollars. We now know that the FBI joined in that censorship effort. It worked. A poll in 2022 showed that most Americans believe full coverage of the “laptop from hell” would have cost Biden the election.

To its discredit, most of the mass media joined in suppressing the news. Time magazine even ran a story bragging about how the media “fortified” the election to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat.

The other big free speech story of 2020 was the suppression of the doctors and scientists who refused to get with the program for an experimental mRNA therapy that was sold to the public as a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The subjects targeted for suppression have included the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Facebook created a restricted access portal to facilitate censorship requests from government bureaucrats.

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Another disingenuous Federal judge.

Federal Judge Denies Injunction Request Against Rhode Island Magazine Confiscation Law

Banning and confiscating commonly-owned ammunition magazines does not run afoul of the Second Amendment.

At least according to U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s reading of the amendment.

On Wednesday, McConnell denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Rhode Island’s recently passed law banning the sale and possession of ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. He said that so-called Large-Capacity Magazines (LCMs) did not count as “arms” protected by the U.S. Constitution.

“The plaintiffs have failed in their burden to demonstrate that LCMs are ‘Arms’ within the meaning of the Second Amendment’s text,” Judge McConnell, an Obama appointee, wrote in his order. “Moreover, even were they ‘arms,’ the plaintiffs have failed to prove that LCMs are weapons relating to self-defense. There is no Second Amendment violation from the LCM Ban because of those two shortfalls of persuasion.”

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Makes sense when “democracy”  means demoncraps are in charge

The Twitter files: leftism requires censorship.

One of the funny (although not ‘funny ha-ha’) things about all of this is that these same people bleat on about ‘democracy’ and its great value and worth. And yet they think of the public as unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as children in need of control from – yes – Big Brother Twitter. And they’re not the least bit ashamed about it. They had to do it to save democracy.

America’s Ruling Regime Doesn’t Fear Disinformation. It Fears Truth.

In Joe Biden’s America, attempting to cancel Joe Rogan is just counter-terror policy.

This is because our ruling class—in the name of “defending democracy”—classifies those who question the regime on any matter of consequence as a threat to the homeland, and pledges to pursue them accordingly.

Our ruling elites have engaged in an overt war on wrongthink masquerading as a domestic counter-terror mission since at least January 6, 2021.

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NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence. …

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

— New York Times Editorial Board in America’s Toxic Gun Culture