New Student-Led ‘Red Guard’ Installed in Maine School District Causes Fury at Board Meeting

If you’re unfamiliar with the Red Guard instituted by Chairman Mao in China, get ready to understand it better than you ever wanted to. Critics of the sweeping transgender ideology infecting the school and medical systems have likened the ideology’s proponents to China’s Red Guard, a group of students trained to turn against their parents and other adults to usher in a brutal dictatorship. The Red Guard famously tortured its own teachers and parents in the name of the Communist cultural revolution. It was a dark and dangerous time in China for anyone who would not bow to the demands of tyrants.

A school system in Maine has instituted its own burgeoning Red Guard called the “Civil Rights Team.” This benign-sounding organization of kids is supposed to ensure that student rights are upheld. What has happened instead led to parents sounding off at the latest school board meeting to complain that the Civil Rights Team is just a bullying organization with an agenda. The Maine Wire covered the story:

Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.

“They insisted she was gay because she dressed gay and listened to gay music,” Day said of her daughter, who was a 7th grader at the time of the alleged harassment.

“She was then called homophobic because she wasn’t at least bi,” Day said.

“She’s not political, but she does not want to talk about her sexuality in school,” she said.

Day went on to describe how the CRT (Is it a coincidence that their acronym mirrors Critical Race Theory?) founded by the Maine Attorney General’s office, pressured the kids into wearing pronoun pins.

Civil Rights Teams (CRTs) operate in Maine schools as a project of the Maine Attorney General’s Office, and the nominal goal of the student organizations is to reduce “bias-motivated” bullying and harassment in schools.

Day said her daughter was harassed about her sexuality by students affiliated with the school’s CRT under the pretext of opening a discussion about student sexuality.

CRT members also created surveys for their peers to take with questions about sexuality and gender, and they pressured them to don “pronoun” pins, Day said.

Windham Superintendent Christopher Howell, instead of investigating the allegations, wrote an email denying it ever happened.

“In short, the focus of [Civil Rights] teams is on helping to create a safe school environment for all,” said Howell.

“We are not aware of the Civil Rights Team being involved in the situation you’re referring to,” he said.

Using students to pressure other students into “group-think” is right out of the Commie playbook. It is not only disturbing that the Attorney General of Maine is complicit in doing this, but it should be a shocking wake-up call to parents nationwide. This threat of Communism is real. It is happening right now in this country. The question is, what are you going to do about it? If left unchecked this only ends one way: the same way it ended in China. NPR reported the sad reality in China as a result of the cultural revolution.

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Climate Change Whackos Are the Real Danger to the Planet.

The climate alarmists have gotten so many things wrong in the last 50 years that they’d have no credibility in a sane world. Alas, we do not live in a sane world and these crazies are better funded and have more power than ever before.

The Biden administration is slavishly devoted to the Climate Church message, forcing the green agenda into every area of policy. It’s an even higher priority than making first-graders take field trips to drag shows. It’s full speed ahead with the assault on carbon, whether the world is ready for it or not.

Or whether the technology is ready for it or not.

Athena wrote a post earlier in the week about one effort to go green that isn’t working out well at all:

E-bike lithium-ion batteries have already ignited 25 fires within New York City limits this year, killing at least two and injuring 36. According to officials, that was quadruple the number of fires sparked by these batteries over the same timeframe last year.

In the climate-cult vision, the future of transportation is electric. The battery technology—whether for bikes or cars—isn’t where they want it to be yet, but that’s not preventing leftists from mandating transitions to their all-electric fever dream.

The vehicles that burn fossil fuels aren’t the only enemies of the climate state. This is from something Lincoln wrote yesterday:

As part of an English assignment, teacher Kim Cutler purchased bugs approved for human consumption from a website and gave them to her students. It was part of an assignment on–what else? Climate change. The premise was that cows, which produce methane, are depleting the ozone layer and should be replaced with ze bugs.

Your tax dollars at work! They’re indoctrinating kids to eat bugs rather than burgers to save the planet. And it’s an English assignment. Yeah, the Department of Education has got to go.

It is something that the climate lefties are now admitting that the methane gas from cow flatulence plays a part in ozone depletion. Not too many years ago, they were saying that the cow flatulence theory was a right-wing conspiracy to deflect from all of the havoc that humans were wreaking.

The bugs-for-dinner thing is part of the climate cult’s overall devolution blueprint for humanity. I attended the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico. I’d been sent there by Americans for Prosperity (Koch Brothers money!) to document and mock the proceedings.

The big expo showcasing “solutions” for saving the planet was, put mildly, insane. It wasn’t a vision of the future, but of the past. Dirt floors. Toilets that were little more than camping latrines. Hand-washing clothes. You can see how easy it is to get from that to having bug stroganoff for dinner.

The real threat to humanity is the stupidity of these people. Again, they’ve been wrong about virtually everything. Their solutions to problems, real and imagined, never fix anything. The only thing they’ve succeeded in is bleeding the American taxpayer dry and frightening a generation of young people so much with their lies that some are being treated in therapy for climate anxiety.

The only upside to this is that many of the younger climate cultists don’t want to breed because they’re convinced that we’re doomed, so a voluntary culling of the herd is underway.

We’ve got to take the wins where we can find them.

To the Governor: Kentucky Passes Bill to Ban Enforcement of Some Federal Gun Control, Including Pistol Brace Rule

FRANKFORT, Ky. (March 16, 2023) – Yesterday, the Kentucky Senate gave final approval to a bill that would ban state and local enforcement of any federal gun control enacted or implemented after Jan. 1, 2021. This includes the new ATF rule on pistol braces. Passage into law would take a step toward ending some federal acts that infringe on the right to keep and bear arms within the state.

Rep. Josh Bray (R) and Rep. Derek Lewis (R) introduced House Bill 153 (HB153) on Feb. 7. The legislation would prohibit Kentucky law enforcement agencies, local governments, and public agencies from adopting a rule, order, ordinance, or policy under which the entity enforces, assists in the enforcement of, or otherwise cooperates in a “federal ban” on firearms, ammunition, or firearm accessory. It would also prohibit the expenditure of public funds for the same.

HB153 defines a “federal ban” as “a federal law, executive order, rule, or regulation that is enacted, adopted, or becomes effective on or after January 1, 2021, or a new and more restrictive interpretation of a law that existed on January 21, 2021, that infringes upon, calls into question, prohibits, restricts, or requires individual licensure for or registration of the purchase, ownership, possession, transfer, or use of any firearm, ammunition, or firearm accessories.”

The legislation is modeled after a law passed by Montana in 2021 and already taking effect against two ATF regulations from executive orders issued by Joe Biden – including the most recent pistol brace rule.

On Feb. 22, the House passed HB153 by a vote of 78-19. On March 15, the Senate approved the measure by a 27-9 vote.

HB153 now goes to Gov. Beshear’s desk for his consideration. Although he is expected to veto HB153, the legislature can override the governor with a simple constitutional majority.

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BLUF
….the only person Biden is trying to save with this rhetoric is himself.

Gun Control Is Joe Biden’s Safe Space
With more economic problems looming, the president returns to an old favorite.

When things are going poorly, Joe Biden usually heads out for another gun-control push, issuing executive orders, demanding more legislation, and repeating many of his most preposterous anecdotes and claims. Because Biden’s gun rhetoric offers little more than emotionalism, it doesn’t have to make much sense — which, of course, plays to his greatest strength.

During the spring and summer of 2022, when inflation kept hitting new 40-year highs, Biden gave one cynical speech on gun violence after the next. This week, as the banking system yawned under the weight of his reckless policies, Biden was in Monterey Park, where 11 people were murdered by a 72-year-old lunatic during last year’s Lunar New Year celebration, to demand Congress pass more laws.

Obviously, it’s all meant to be a distraction. But it also needs to be debunked.

Here is CBS News giving the White House the lead it was looking for:

President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that aims to increase the number of background checks to buy guns, promote better and more secure firearms storage and ensure U.S. law enforcement agencies are getting the most out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer.

Biden’s executive order will direct U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to increase background checks by “cracking down on gun sellers who don’t perform them when required.” This is already the law, and there’s no evidence of any widespread problem with licensed gun sellers circumventing checks to illegally sell firearms to criminals.

Even if gun dealers were a bunch of disreputable characters, it makes little sense for them to risk their businesses when a healthy market for legal guns exists. But it is true that occasionally, as happened with the Charleston Church shooter, law enforcement doesn’t do its job. So maybe Biden should sign an executive order demanding the FBI try harder.

The attorney general is free to crack down on criminals whenever he pleases. Biden’s executive orders feed the false perception that more background checks would lead to less violence. Biden admits in his speech that goal of his new EO is “moving us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.”

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18-year-old shot while trying to steal car; stray bullet hits nearby home in Tacony

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — An 18-year-old suspect was shot multiple times while trying to steal a car in Philadelphia’s Tacony section.

It happened around 3:30 p.m. Thursday on the 4400 block of Princeton Avenue.

Police say the 18-year-old and another suspect were in the process of stealing a Toyota Corolla, but the 26-year-old owner came outside.

That’s when a gun battle erupted on the residential street.

“I heard a few gunshots and then I heard more gunshots. And it was close to my window. So I jumped on the ground and then I heard my neighbors screaming,” said one resident.

The 18-year-old was shot four times and tried to run away. He made it to the 7100 block of Cottage Street before collapsing on the pavement.

“They found a handgun that the 18-year-old had in his possession and was firing at the 26-year-old that came out,” police said.

The suspect was taken to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital and placed in critical condition.

Police say the other suspect was able to take off in the Toyota Corolla but crashed the vehicle into a nearby Jeep during the escape.

The Jeep belongs to the man who lives on the block. His home was hit by stray gunfire during the shootout.

He didn’t want to speak on camera but says the bullet flew past his head as he worked in his office.

Neighbors are shaken up by such a brazen crime right in the middle of the day.

“I just said, we have to police our own neighborhood at this point because no one else is going to do it for us. It’s a shame,” said Stephanie Dina of Tacony.

The car owner who fired the weapon was licensed to carry, police said.

No other injuries were reported. The second suspect was able to get away.

March 17

180 – Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius dies, age 58 at Vindobona, province of Pannonia Superior, modern day Vienna Austria.

1776 – During the Revolutionary War, the British Army evacuate Boston, ending the Siege of Boston, after George Washington and Henry Knox place artillery in positions overlooking the city.

1942 – The NAZI death camp near Belzec Poland opens for business. By the time camp is closed in mid 1943 an estimated 500,000 Jews are murdered there.

1945 – 10 days after being taken by troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Division, the Ludendorff Bridge crossing the Rhine river at Remagen, Germany, collapses, killing 28 U.S. Army engineers.

1958 – The U.S. launches Vanguard-1, the first solar powered satellite, which is also the first satellite to achieve a long term orbit, still in orbit to this day.

1960 – President Eisenhower signs a National Security Council directive for an anti-Cuban covert action program that will ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

1966 – Off the coast of Palomares, Spain in the Mediterranean, the DSV Alvin submarine finds the missing  hydrogen bomb dropped by a B-52 bomber after its midair collision on January 17.

1968 – As a result of open air nerve gas testing at the Dugway Proving Ground in southwest Utah, over 6,000 sheep are killed in Skull Valley, Utah, around 27 miles east of the testing site.

1969 – Golda Meir becomes the first female Prime Minister of Israel.

1985 –  Richard Ramirez, aka the serial killer “Night Stalker”, commits the first 2 murders in his Los Angeles murder spree.

1988 – Colombian airlines Avianca Flight 410A, a Boeing 727, crashes into a mountainside shortly after takeoff from Camilo Daza International Airport in Cúcuta, killing all 143 passengers and crew aboard.

2000 – In Kanungu, Uganda, after the prophesied date of January 1 passes and second revised date of the Apocalypse arrives without it occurring as well, most of the leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God kill themselves and over 500 members of the group by locking themselves in the church building and setting it afire.

The Impact of Liberalized Concealed Carry Laws on Homicide: An Assessment

This paper uses panel data from 1980 to 2018 in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia to examine the relationship between liberalized concealed carry laws, homicide, and firearm homicide…. The relationship between shall-issue and constitutional carry laws and homicide were statistically insignificant at the 1%, 5%, and even 10% level. The results were robust to multiple alternative model specifications. We find no evidence that looser concealed carry laws pose a significant public health or criminological risk.

SSRN-id4368641

Pistol purchase permit repeal headed to North Carolina governor

When SB 41 is delivered to Gov. Roy Cooper, he’s probably going to send it right back to the legislature, but the chances of a veto override appear to be pretty strong at the moment, at least if the bipartisan coalition that approved the bill sticks together.

SB 41 doesn’t just scrap the state’s pistol purchase permit system, which was put in place back in 1919. It also changes state law to allow licensed concealed carry holders to lawfully bear arms in churches and other religious services held in private or charter school settings. Cooper has vetoed similar bills in the past, but thanks to legislative victories last November Second Amendment supporters should have the votes to turn the bills into law over his objections.

The proposal would make it so sheriffs no longer have to perform evaluations of an applicant’s character and mental wellness before they can purchase a handgun. Supporters of the bill say the permit requirement has become duplicative in light of digitized mental health records and thorough updates to the national background check system. Rep. Jeff McNeely, an Iredell County Republican, said it would streamline the process for law-abiding gun buyers.

“It just allows everybody, every citizen in the state of North Carolina, to have their constitutional right granted to them so that they can protect their self,” McNeely said.

While people who buy from a gun store or a licensed dealer would still be subject to a national background check, Democrats raised alarms again Wednesday that background checks are not required for private exchanges between two individuals. Private sales only require buyers to obtain a sheriff-issued permit, or face a misdemeanor charge.

Rep. Pricey Harrison of Guilford County said the repeal would create a loophole that could enable dangerous individuals and those with mental health issues to more easily obtain weapons.

“The sheriffs know best back home who should and should not be carrying a pistol,” Harrison said during floor debate. “There’s so much more we could be doing about keeping our communities safe. But unleashing and letting access to guns to individuals who absolutely pose a danger to themselves and others is a real problem.”

Violent actors are not strolling in to their local sheriff’s office to apply for permission to purchase a handgun. They’re getting their guns through theft and the illicit market, or perhaps through a straw purchase involving someone who has obtained a permit-to-purchase.

At the same time, folks who want to stay inside the law are forced to satisfy the arbitrary and subjective concerns of their county sheriff before they can exercise a fundamental right. This law has been abused throughout its time on the books, and as Grassroots NC’s Paul Valone has pointed out, while the law may not have been explicitly racist in its language, in practice it has been used to deny many black North Carolinians access to their right to armed self-defense.

Following race riots in East St. Louis in 1917, both Missouri and North Carolina quickly passed handgun “permit to purchase” (P2P) laws. (3) Although North Carolina’s version has changed since passage in 1919, permits were originally issued by Clerks of Superior Court, who were required to satisfy themselves of the “good moral character” of the applicant – a measure which scholar Clayton Cramer suggests may have been “a euphemism to hide something that even in 1919 would have been an embarrassment…”

Cramer goes on to say, “…race has often been at the heart of gun control laws, and while there are no ‘smoking gun’ quotes with respect to P2P, there are some pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that the law was intended to be enforced in a racially discriminatory manner.”

Indeed, newspaper clippings from the era suggest about how the P2P law was enforced. Said a December 31, 1930 Durham Sun headline: “Pistol Permits Issued to Many: 450 Citizens Received Permission Since 1919; Mostly Whites” [emphasis added]. It goes on to explain, “A total of 450 permits to purchase pistols have been issued to Durham citizens since 1919, according to records kept in the office of clerk of superior court. Few permits were issued to Negroes, the records show, the issuance being restricted almost entirely to white persons [emphasis added].

An April 1, 1920 piece in the Rockingham Post-Dispatch – just months after the P2P law took effect – published the name and race of people who got permits, such as this one: “July 19 – Alex Wall, colored, age 46” [emphasis added]. Cramer found two clippings from Winston-Salem – one in which 14 of 15 defendants charged with carrying concealed weapons were described as “colored” and another in which 19 of 20 defendants are described as “colored.”

Supporters of the pistol purchase permit have alternately tried to argue that the law was never really a part of Jim Crow, or that if it was racially discriminatory in practice in the past that’s no longer the case today, but research has shown that in Wake County black applicants are still almost three times as likely to be denied a permit than white applicants. That might not be proof of racial discrimination, but it’s definitely cause for concern.

On paper, the votes to override Gov. Cooper’s expected veto are there, but there’ll be enormous pressure on the handful of Democratic lawmakers who supported SB 41 to reverse course and back Cooper’s veto during an override session. North Carolina’s gun owners have done a fantastic job of communicating with legislators and keeping up the pressure to support SB 41 so far, but there’s a little more work to be done before they can be assured of victory.

Critical Defense Skills: There’s more to self-defense than simply carrying a handgun.

Every once in a while, I run Into something that just makes me cringe, and that’s the person who says, “Well, I just bought a gun and a box of bullets, so I’m good to go—after I figure out how to load this thing.”  Whether he or she knows it or not, that person sure is depending on having a lot of good luck when facing bad guys. They may not know that owning a gun doesn’t make them an automatic winner. Developing useful defensive skills is something that we all have to work at, and there are three major areas that require our continual attention.

The first of these is marksmanship, the ability to hit a target. Now, I’m not talking about that once-in-a-while lucky shot that all of us have made at one time or another. I’m talking about the ability to hit what we are shooting at on a regular basis, on demand. It requires the combination of correct sight picture, breath control and trigger press. And, in a defensive situation all of that has to be done in an almighty hurry.

Another thing to remember is that shooting, like all hand-eye coordination movements, is a quickly diminishing skill. If we don’t practice it, we lose it. Under the pressure created by a violent threat, we will most likely not perform as well as we did in practice. What that means is, if we are hitting exactly right 90 percent of the time in practice, we may only do the same in an actual gunfight about 50 to 60 percent of the time. Even a person who is really serious about regular practice can be expected to drop about 10 percent.

The second critical skill to work on is gun handling, which covers a number of abilities, not the least of which is gun safety. Those of us who are your neighbors have the right to demand that you do so. If lightning strikes your handgun in such a way as to make it go off, that is an accident; just about everything else is a negligent discharge. And there is never a good excuse for a negligent discharge.

Gun handling also involves developing the skill to make a smooth, fast pistol presentation—one without any wasted motion. Once the fight starts, that holstered gun isn’t doing anyone any good. When we work for smoothness and lack of wasted motion, speed will eventually come.

Regardless of what kind of gun the armed citizen chooses, he or she should know what the potential malfunctions are and how to deal with them. Different types of guns are subject to different problems.

A failure to feed is different from a double feed, and both are different from a revolver that has a cylinder frozen in place. A person should not only know what to expect and how to correct it, but he or she should also know how to properly maintain their chosen gun(s) so as to minimize the chance of a malfunction.

Another aspect of gun handling is the ability to reload quickly. Although the need to reload rarely occurs in citizen-involved shootings, one would not want to be the exception to the rule. And, it is not just a matter of reloading the gun, but to do it quickly and smoothly while keeping an eye on what is going on. Good training and lots of practice are the keys to developing good gun-handling skills.

The third area of critical defensive skills is making yourself a harder target. It is important to know what is going on around you. None of us are as aware as we should be or could be. If we see the threat way over there, we have a lot of options as to how we will deal with it, including just getting away. On the other hand, if we look up and the threat is right in our face, our options have diminished considerably. Some people look but don’t actually see, and that can cause some really serious problems.

It is also important to educate one’s self about criminals and what they actually do. What actually happens during a home invasion, carjacking or armed robbery?  What are the telltale signs we should be looking for?  It might be a good idea to start using the NRA’s Armed Citizen column (on page 10 of this issue) as a study guide.

Personal defense is a lifestyle, not a hobby. On-the-job training is not a good way to deal with a criminal attack. When we continually work to improve our ability to truly defend ourselves we can better control the stress that comes from a violent criminal attack and have a better idea of how to deal with it. Working on these three skills—what Jeff Cooper called the Combat Triad—is the path to success and safety.

March 16

1621 – Samoset, a Mohegan tribal Sagamore, makes the first visit to the settlers of Plymouth Colony, surprising them when he greets them using the English he had learned from fishermen that sailed along the coast.

1802 – The Army Corps of Engineers is established to found and operate the United States Military Academy at West Point.

1916 – U.S. General John J. Pershing commanding the 7th and 10th US Cavalry regiments, crosses the border into Mexico to command the campaign against Pancho Villa.

1926 – Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts.

1935 – Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.

1945 – On Iwo Jima, after 23 days of continuous combat, organized Japanese resistance ends, but small pockets of soldiers still fight on for a short time.

1962 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, a Lockheed Super Constellation, on a charter flight for the U.S. military to the Philippines, disappears in the western Pacific Ocean after a refueling stop on Guam, with all 107 passengers and crew aboard missing and presumed dead.

1966 – Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott, aboard Gemini 8, the 12th manned American space flight and first mission to dock with an Agena Target Vehicle, launch from Cape Kennedy, Florida.

1968 – At Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khê hamlets of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi Province, Republic of Vietnam, between 300 and 500 men, women, and children are killed by U.S. troops of the 23rd Infantry Division before being stopped by other U.S. troops.

1984 – William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, is kidnapped by Hezbollah.

1985 – Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut.

1988 – U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States as part of the Iran–Contra affair.

1995 – Mississippi formally ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment which was officially ratified in 1865.

2003 – Pro-Palestinian American activist Rachel Corrie is run over and killed by a bulldozer while trying stop the demolition of a house in Rafah, Gaza Strip, used as a tunnel entrance for terrorists to enter Israel.

2020 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 2,997.10, the single largest point drop in history and the second largest percentage drop ever at 12.93%, an even greater crash than Black Monday of 1929 following the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing that it will cut its target interest rate to 0–0.25%.

2021 – Robert Aaron Long shoots and kills 8 people and wounds another in attacks on 3 different spas in and around Atlanta, Georgia. At trial he pleads guilty and is sentenced to life without parole.

Biden’s Plan To Unilaterally Expand Background Checks for Gun Buyers Is Legally and Logically Dubious
The president wants to redefine federally licensed gun dealers in service of an ineffective anti-crime strategy.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday issued an executive order that the White House says will move federal regulation of gun sales “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.” The order relies on a legally contentious redefinition of who qualifies as a gun “dealer” and therefore must obtain a federal license and comply with related rules, including customer background checks.

Federal law defines a gun dealer as someone who is “engaged in the business of selling firearms,” which until last year was defined as “devot[ing] time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act excised “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” and replaced it with “to predominantly earn a profit.”

As the Congressional Research Service explains, that change was “intended to require persons who buy and resell firearms repetitively for profit to be licensed federally as gun dealers, even if they do not do so with ‘the principal objective of livelihood.'” According to the amendment’s supporters, “there was confusion” about whether the definition of “engaged in the business” covered “individuals who bought and resold firearms repetitively for profit, but possibly not as the principal source of their livelihood.” The statutory definition still explicitly excludes “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.”

Biden’s order does not say exactly how he intends to expand the number of people who are classified as dealers. Instead it instructs Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose department includes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), to “clarify the definition of who is engaged in the business of dealing in firearms.” Garland may do that through “rulemaking, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.”

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BACKDOOR UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS INCOMING

Despite GOA Warnings, Republicans Helped the Biden Administration Implement Backdoor UBCs

President Biden just announced that he would be mandating backdoor UBCs or “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”[i] His claimed “authority” comes from Section 12002 of the Cornyn-Murphy Compromise.[ii] According to the White House:

Specifically, the President is directing the Attorney General to move the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation by clarifying, as appropriate, the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, as updated by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.[iii]

Unfortunately, Gun Owners of America has been expecting this since the passage of the unconstitutional compromise on gun rights known as Cornyn-Murphy, or the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. GOA warned:

Expanding the definition of FFLs (Federal Firearms Licenses) could require anyone who sells more than one gun to do so through an FFL, resulting in a backdoor mechanism for universal background registration checks—just as the Obama Administration attempted.[iv]

Nevertheless, Congress, including 15 Senate GOP, rushed to “compromise” our gun rights away with hastily-written, secretly-negotiated legislation.[v]

Senator Cornyn’s Definition of “Engaged in the Business” Led Directly to Backdoor Universal Background Checks

Prior to Senate Republicans’ compromise, the legal definition of a Federal Firearms License (FFL) Gun Dealer read as follows:[vi]

The term “dealer” means (A) any person engaged in the business of selling firearms at wholesale or retail, (B) any person engaged in the business[vii] of repairing firearms or of making or fitting special barrels, stocks, or trigger mechanisms to firearms, or (C) any person who is a pawnbroker.

Anyone “engaged in the business” must have a license to deal in firearms, but law-abiding citizen’s private transfers were not included in this 53-year-old definition. The definition of a Federal Firearms License (FFL) was a critical boundary between the mandatory background checks performed during commercial gun sales and law-abiding private transfers and sales that take place daily in more than half of the United States. But Cornyn-Murphy added this foolish clarification, which the Biden Administration now proposes to weaponize:

The term `to predominantly earn a profit’ means that the intent underlying the sale or disposition of firearms is predominantly one of obtaining pecuniary gain, as opposed to other intents, such as improving or liquidating a personal firearms collection

Not only that, but this asinine definition even “Provided, That proof of profit shall not be required” for a violation—making President Biden’s backdoor Universal Background Check scheme even easier! Expanding the statutory definition of FFLs (Federal Firearms Licenses) allowed the Biden Administration a strong excuse to vastly expand federal regulations and require anyone who sells more than one gun to do so through an FFL, resulting in a backdoor mechanism for universal background registration checks—just as the Obama Administration attempted.[viii]

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Remember: ‘Feminists’ did this to themselves
(Makes you wonder who women’s real enemies are)

It’s the End of Women’s Colleges as We Know It, and You Know Why.Cartoon Guy Laughing And Pointing Stock Photo - Image: 31869170

Wellesley College, an all-women’s school that has long prided itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world,” has truly lost the plot.  Currently, the school’s policy is that students who were “assigned female at birth who identify as men are not eligible for admission,” but students who were “assigned male at birth who identify as women are eligible for admission.”

So, in reality, Wellesley hasn’t truly been an all-women’s college since 2015, when it last updated its policy to accept applications from biological males who identify as women. But even that policy allowing biological men to attend wasn’t woke enough for the student body, which, on Tuesday, voted in support of a non-binding resolution to allow “trans men and nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth” to be admitted as students.

In addition to advocating for the admission of “nonbinary” and transgender students, the referendum also proposed implementing gender-inclusive language in the college’s communication. This would involve replacing so-called gendered terms such as “women” with gender-neutral alternatives like “students” or “alumni.”

According to a report from The Wellesley News, “The purpose behind a ballot question is to demonstrate how much support it garners among the student body. If a ballot question gains enough support from the student body, it could influence decisions the College Board of Trustees makes.”

But even if you believed that Wellesley was still an all-women’s college when it allowed males “identifying” as women, how can it continue to claim to be such when it will allow women who identify as men, or so-called “nonbinary” students, to attend? If the school abides by radical leftist gender ideology, trans men are men, and if they are men, you can’t claim to be an all-women’s school, can you? On top of that, if the school does allow “trans men” to attend, then why not just drop all pretense of being a single-sex school and allow biological men who don’t identify as transgender to apply to the school? If you’re going to allow men who “identify” as women, and women who “identify” as men to apply, why not include men who don’t suffer from gender dysphoria?

Women’s colleges have a long and rich history of providing education and opportunities for women, who were once excluded from higher education institutions. Sadly, there are only a small number left in the United States, and thanks to the transgender cult, I suspect it won’t be long before all women’s colleges are gone.

New Mexico governor signs gun storage bill, but fate of other gun control bills still in doubt

The first gun control bill of the legislative session to get to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has now been signed into law. The big question now is how many others will show up on her desk before the session wraps up this Saturday.

HB 9 creates the new crimes of “negligently making a firearm accessible to a minor” and “negligently making a firearm accessible to a minor resulting in great bodily harm or death”; misdemeanor and fourth-degree felonies, respectively. In practice, gun owners in the state are now expected to store their firearms locked up unless they’re being carried, at least if there are minors in the home, but the law is utterly unenforceable from a proactive standpoint. Even when the law is applied after a tragedy occurs the legal consequences are usually nothing, especially compared to the loss of a child. Take this recent case from North Carolina, for example.

A Gaston County assistant district attorney said that two parents and an uncle charged in the shooting death of a 4-year-old reached sentencing agreements on Monday.

Assistant district attorney Zach Holeve confirmed that Savannah Leigh Brehm and Hector Manuel Mendoza-Saucedo got 36-month probation sentences, while gun owner Keith Deshawn Sturghill received 24 months of probation.

Brehm, 22, Mendoza-Saucedo, 22, and Sturghill, 21, faced several charges, including felony involuntary manslaughter, felony child abuse, and the misdemeanor charge of storing a firearm in a manner accessible to a minor.

During a court hearing, prosecutors said the adults knew a loaded gun was on the home’s coffee table with the safety off. The gun belonged to Strughill.

Mendoza and Strughill left for work when the 5-year-old child and 4-year-old child found the weapon. A 5-year-old sibling shot the 4-year-old, according to investigators.

These three were charged with multiple felonies but only received probation for their negligence; presumably when their charges were reduced to a misdemeanor. Given the overwhelming number of felony cases that result in plea bargains, I doubt that New Mexico’s gun storage law is going to have much teeth to it. Encouraging responsible gun storage, either through incentivizing the use of gun safes and locks or through public safety campaigns aimed at gun-owning parents, seems like a much better approach than creating a new crime, but this is still probably the least offensive gun control bill introduced by New Mexico Democrats this session.

There are still a number of other measures that could still get to Grisham’s desk before Friday, including SB 428, which would amend the state’s Unfair Practices Act to include firearms with an eye towards encouraging lawsuits against gun makers for allegedly fueling violence through their marketing. The measure passed out of the Senate last week, but so far has not received a committee hearing in the House.

Meanwhile, a bill banning the sale and possession of unregistered “assault weapons” is sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, and Grisham has run into some behind-the-scenes opposition that could derail the measure completely, Other legislation raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 and establish a 14-day waiting period on gun sales are also still kicking around, but haven’t seen any committee action in recent weeks.

Any bills that aren’t approved by both Houses by noon on March 18th are theoretically done for the year, though Grisham has suggested she could call lawmakers back for a special session on gun control if they don’t enact her anti-2A wishlist. Given the lack of movement on many of the governor’s demands, it may be that Democrats have just decided to kick some of these cans down the road a couple of months, but I suspect that gun owners and groups like the New Mexico State Shooting Association are also having an impact on at least some of the legislators that Grisham hoped would be reliable votes for her gun control agenda.

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Programs Firearms 101 – Introduction to Handguns

Learn Firearms Safety and Marksmanship!

This Introduction to Handguns class focuses on firearm safety and marksmanship in a low-stress, family-friendly environment. It is perfect for those who want to learn more about firearm safety, handguns, and target shooting in a safe environment with certified firearms instructors.

The following topics are covered:

  • Safe handling and storage of firearms
  • The parts of semi-automatic pistols and revolvers
  • Marksmanship
  • Live fire on paper and steel targets

All firearms and ammunition is provided!

Eye and ear protection, as well as a .22 rimfire handgun and all the ammunition needed, is provided free of charge. If you already have your own handgun and appropriate ammunition, please feel free to bring it for use in the class.

What you need to participate

You will need a Wildlife Heritage License to participate which can be purchased below, at local probate offices, and at many sporting goods stores.

Note: Participants must be 16 years of age or older.

BIDEN EXECUTIVE ORDER: UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS WITHOUT CONGRESS?

In what many conservatives and pro-gun groups paint as a chilling overreach by the White House, President Biden on Tuesday announced a new Executive Order aimed at guns.

The rambling EO signed by Biden on March 14, on “on Reducing Gun Violence and Making Our Communities Safer,” is multi-faceted.

Among its “whole-of-government approach” tenets are marching orders to the Justice Department to publicly release more inspection reports of licensed gun dealers, expand existing campaigns to promote the safe storage of firearms, step up the entry of ballistics data collected from crime scenes, and increase efforts to encourage the use of “red flag” gun seizure laws.

Other measures include calling on the Federal Trade Commission to issue a public report analyzing how “gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and how such manufacturers market firearms to civilians, including through the use of military imagery.” This is even though only those over the age of 18 can legally purchase a firearm at retail.

Further, the Pentagon is directed to use “principles to further firearm and public safety practices” in their acquisition of firearms, a possible reference to mandating the use of unproven so-called “smart gun” technology.

[That can also be a vague hint that the DOD should try some kind of force play on the U.S. manufacturers to make them kowtow to restricting sales of guns to the civilian market that SloJoe doesn’t like; As in: “Nice lucrative .gov contract ya got there. Be a shame to lose it by continuing to sell those eeee-vil assault weapons to the public.”]

However, one part of the executive action has struck a strong chord with those on both sides of the national conversation on guns: more aggressively defining who is considered “engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” by the ATF and Justice Department. Past guidance from federal gun regulators on the topic of selling guns without a federal firearms license has proven fuzzy, with the agency noting that “courts have upheld convictions for dealing without a license when as few as two firearms were sold, or when only one or two transactions took place.”

Biden, in prepared remarks delivered Tuesday at an anti-gun event in California, was frank that the order was a move toward controversial universal background checks without the required legal framework of going through Congress to make it a law.

“First, this executive order helps keep firearms out of dangerous hands, as I continue to call on Congress to require background checks for all firearm sales,” said Biden. “And in the meantime — in the meantime, my executive order directs my Attorney General to take every lawful action possible — possible to move us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.”

Speaking of prepared remarks, while the White House, Justice Department, and ATF were quiet as to what exactly are the new qualifiers for crossing the “engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” threshold, Everytown, a national gun control organization founded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, fired off a press release hours before the Oval Office made public the executive action with a window on what could be coming from the administration.

In the statement, the group offered its vision for a proposed new rule by ATF: “Enforcement guidance and substantive rulemaking should make clear that anyone who offers a gun for sale at a gun show or pursuant to an advertisement — including online ads — is presumptively engaged in the business of selling guns and needs to run background checks.”

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Should the Fifth Circuit Reconsider Rahimi En Banc?

The Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimi, which held that the federal statute prohibiting possession of a firearm by a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order violates the Second Amendment, has managed to stay in the news for longer than most circuit court decisions. On March 2, a month after it initially released its decision, the Fifth Circuit panel withdraw its original opinion and substituted a revised version.

The end result is the same, and the updates to the controlling opinion appear to be modest, but Judge Ho significantly expanded his concurring opinion, in which he sets out to “explain how respect for the Second Amendment is entirely compatible with respect for our profound societal interest in protecting citizens from violent criminals.” Judge Ho emphasizes that “[t]hose who commit violence, including domestic violence, shouldn’t just be disarmed—they should be detained, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated.”

But because the law at issue in Rahimi “disarms individuals based on civil protective orders—not criminal proceedings,” the panel found no “analogous historical tradition sufficient to support” it. That was especially true, given the way that civil protective orders are used (and abused) in our system, including by a common practice of issuing “mutual restraining orders” in domestic violence cases, a practice that results in the federal prohibition actually disarming domestic violence victims.

Judge Ho’s concurrence also highlights the importance of the Fifth Circuit getting this case right. He notes that before Bruen, circuit courts routinely misapplied Heller despite frequent criticism from the members of the Supreme Court that they were “disfavoring the Second Amendment.” And he correctly recognizes that Bruen was a response to the lower courts’ intransigence: “The Supreme Court has now responded by setting forth a new legal framework in Bruen. It is incumbent on lower courts to implement Bruen in good faith and to the best of our ability.”

Of course, the issue is fraught, so Rahimi has received a lot of attention. Given that it invalidated a federal statute, it seems like a likely candidate for catching the Supreme Court’s attention too. In fact, it appears that the Justice Department views this as a particularly good vehicle to ask the Supreme Court immediately to consider (or reconsider) some of the effects of its decision in Bruen. Attorney General Merrick Garland made a statement over a month ago, vowing to “seek further review of the Fifth Circuit’s … decision,” but there is no indication he intends to seek that review from the Fifth Circuit.

For those of us who believe Bruen got it exactly right, Rahimi may be a bad vehicle for the Supreme Court to flesh out its decision in Bruen. As much as the Justices may try to focus on the bigger-picture legal issues, bad facts make bad law, and Rahimi is full of bad facts. Even if the law that kept him from possessing firearms in this case is unconstitutional—and the panel opinion makes a compelling case that the law lacked support from the founding era—it seems clear that Mr. Rahimi is exactly the sort of person who should be able to be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment. He was involved in five shootings in two months, including one instance when he “fired multiple shots in the air after his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger restaurant.”

The Fifth Circuit should consider rehearing the case en banc. This would have the advantage of setting the clearest possible precedent to govern future Second Amendment challenges under Bruen and, perhaps just as importantly, permitting other Second Amendment challenges to get to the Supreme Court first. The federal rules of appellate procedure say a case is a good candidate for reconsideration if it “involves a question of exceptional importance.” The issue in Rahimi meets that standard several in different ways.

The Third Circuit recently heard en banc argument in United States v. Range, a case raising the constitutionality of the federal law against felon possession of a firearm—a separate subsection of the same law at issue in Rahimi—and it decided the issue was worth en banc treatment just three days after receiving the petition for rehearing was filed. More recently, the Eleventh Circuit issued a decision in National Rifle Association v. Bondi, holding that a Florida law restricting the Second Amendment rights of 18-to-20-year-olds to purchase a firearm was constitutional under Bruen. That same day, before any petition for rehearing could be filed, a judge of that court apparently called for an en banc poll, because the court entered an order withholding issuance of the mandate.

Under Fifth Circuit Internal Operating Procedures, any judge may initiate a vote to take a case en banc, even without a petition. And since it appears no petition for rehearing is forthcoming from the Justice Department, the judges of the Fifth Circuit should exercise that prerogative here. Rahimi may well wind up at the Supreme Court anyway, but given the importance of the issues, and Judge Ho’s (correct) assessment that Bruen has tasked the courts of appeals with fleshing out its method first, the Fifth Circuit may do well to consider Rahimi as a whole court first.