Mark McCloskey, Pardoned for Brandishing Guns at Protesters, Can’t Get the Guns Back

From [the 26th’s] Missouri Court of Appeals decision in McCloskey v. State, written by Judge James M. Dowd and joined by Judges John P. Torbitzky and Michael S. Wright:

This appeal arises out of a petition for replevin in which appellant Mark McCloskey sought the return of two firearms that police had seized pursuant to search warrants in connection with a June 28, 2020, incident in which McCloskey and his spouse exhibited the firearms as a group of protesters passed by their home. They were charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon punishable by up to four years in prison. McCloskey and the State reached a plea agreement whereby McCloskey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor fourth-degree assault and forfeited ownership and possession in the two firearms in exchange for the State dismissing the felony charge….

Soon after, the governor pardoned McCloskey and he filed against the State, the Sheriff, and the Mayor (Respondents) his underlying petition for replevin of the weapons in which he claimed the governor’s pardon gave him the right to their immediate return….

While we agree that the pardon restored all of his rights forfeited by the conviction and removed any legal disqualification, disadvantage, or impediment, Missouri law is unequivocal that a gubernatorial pardon obliterates the fact of the conviction, not the fact of guilt. Thus, McCloskey’s guilty plea, for which he obtained the benefit of the State dismissing a felony charge punishable by jail time, survived the pardon and importantly, with respect to the issue at hand in this replevin action, triggered the guns’ forfeiture. Therefore, since McCloskey’s guilt remains, it follows that he is not entitled to the return of the weapons….

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With One Week Remaining, 99.4% of Illinois Gun Owners Have Said ‘No Thanks’ To Gun Registration

The Democrats who run Illinois decided long ago to blame gun owners for the results of the woke, soft-on-crime policies that have led to proliferating crime in the state. Instead of targeting the relatively small number of violent gang members who make Chicago live up to its Murder City USA moniker, politicians have instead targeted law-abiding gun owners with gun bans and a new gun registration scheme.

The so-called Protect Illinois Communities Act demanded existing owners of particularly frightening firearms register their magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifles. These include guns best-suited to self-defense including America’s favorite rifle, the AR-15.  The law also bans many semi-auto shotguns and handguns. Then there are the accessories and .50 BMG ammunition that must be registered as well.

With a December 31 deadline fast approaching, the Illinois State Police released their Week 11 compliance update on Wednesday and it’s a doozy. While thousands of Illinois gun owners have dutifully complied, millions have not. Holders of 15,164 Firearms Owner ID cardholders have registered an average of about 3.5 covered items each.

Put another way, 2,400,317 FOID holders have registered…nothing. Running that through some public school math, that yields a 99.4% non-compliance rate.

Why are so few Illinois citizens complying? Aside from the fundamental 2A conflicts, there’s also the leak from the Governor’s inner circle to “close the existing owner loophole” as reported by Guns Save Life.

So what is next?  Following a mass-casualty incident, especially if it happens in the Land of Lincoln, the Governor will announce a plan to “close the existing owner loophole.” Their words, not ours.

Governor Pritzker will back legislation to call for those who have registered guns and accessories to surrender those registered items to the police after 90 days or so.  Failure to do so would result in felony charges.

By mandating the surrender of those registered items, they can determine who has complied and who has not. Those who have not can expect ISP-led “firearm compliance teams” to knock on their doors.

That should surprise no one. Firearm registration has always had only one real purpose…to facilitate confiscation when politicians finally get up the testicular fortitude to press their anti-gun antipathy to that extent. That’s always been clear and it’s why there’s a law prohibiting federal firearm registration.

While achieving a compliance rate of more than one percent might be seen as some kind of psychological milestone of “success” by Governor Pritzker, it’s actually a humiliating public repudiation of Pritzker’s radical left anti-gun politics.

The little people have made it perfectly clear that they have no intention of complying with Illinois politicians’ gun-grabbing schemes. Don’t expect their attitude toward “closing the existing owner loophole” to be any more enthusiastic.

December 28

1612- Galileo observes and records a “fixed star” without realizing it is planet Neptune

1732 – Benjamin Franklin under the pseudonym Richard Saunders begins publication of “Poor Richard’s Almanack”

1832 – After being elected Senator from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun becomes the 1st Vice President of the United States to resign.

1835 – Osceola leads the Seminoles into the 2nd Seminole War against the United States.

1846 – Iowa is admitted as the 29th U.S. state.

1895 – Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper in the journal of the Würzburg Physical Medical Society, about his discovery in November of a new type of radiation. Since it was of a type unknown to him, he refers to it as X radiation, which radiated X-rays.

1902 – The Syracuse Athletic Club defeat the New York Philadelphians, 5–0, in the first indoor professional football game, held at Madison Square Garden.

1912 – San Francisco starts the first municipal owned streetcar service

1967 – American businesswoman Muriel Siebert becomes the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

1948 – The Airborne Transport Airlines DC-3 NC16002 enroute from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Miami, Florida, with 32 passengers and crew aboard disappears after the pilot’s last radio contact, some 50 mi south of Miami within the ‘Bermuda Triangle’

1973 – The Endangered Species Act is signed into law by President Nixon.

1978 – United Airlines Flight 173, a McDonnell Douglas DC, runs out of fuel on final approach to landing and crashes in a residential neighborhood near Portland International Airport, killing 10 of the 189 passengers and crew aboard.

1987 – After earlier shooting, strangling and drowning 14 relatives at his home near Dover, Arkansas, Ronald Gene Simmons, shoots and kills 2 and wounds 4 more people at former places of employment before surrendering to police. Later he is sentenced to death and executed in 1990.

1999 – Clayton “The Lone Ranger” Moore, dies, age 85 at West Hills Hospital, California.

2021 – Former Senator Harry Reid, dies, age 82, at his home in Henderson, Nevada.

MICHIGAN SUPREME COURT PUNTS ON TRUMP

Michigan is one of a number of states in which anti-Trump forces have argued that he is barred from running for the presidency by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That claim was rejected earlier this month by the Michigan Court of Appeals. Earlier today, Michigan’s Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion, denied plaintiffs’ application for leave to appeal the Court of Appeals’ ruling. The Supreme Court stated its rationale briefly:

The application for leave to appeal the December 14, 2023 judgment of the Court of Appeals is considered, and it is DENIED, because we are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this Court.

One judge dissented, arguing that the Court should have taken the appeal and ruled that Trump is, at a minimum, entitled to run in Michigan’s GOP primary.

Man shot, killed while attempting to rob two people in south St. Louis

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (First Alert 4) – A man was shot and killed while trying to rob two others in south St. Louis Sunday morning, police say.

According to St. Louis Metropolitan Police, the shooting took place in the 3500 block of Minnesota Ave. around 3 a.m. Two men with a firearm approached two other people while they were sitting in their car, saying it was a robbery. One of the victims grabbed a firearm inside the car and shot one of the suspects. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. The man was later identified as Donta Stone, 34, of Jennings Station Road.

The two victims fled in their car and contacted police shortly after the incident.

The Homicide Division responded and assumed the ongoing investigation.

RIP
Tommy Smothers
Tom Smothers, half of the Smothers Brothers and the co-host of one of the most socially conscious and groundbreaking television shows in the history of the medium, has died at 86.

The National Comedy Center, on behalf of his family, said in a statement Wednesday that Smothers died Tuesday at home in Santa Rosa, California, following a cancer battle.

Gaston Glock
Gaston Glock, the reclusive engineer and tycoon who developed one of the world’s best-selling handguns, died on Wednesday aged 94, Austrian news agency APA said.

The Austrian won loyal followings among police and military across the world with the weapons that bore his name. Forbes estimated his and his family’s fortune at $1.1 billion in 2021.

How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.

There was a book a few years ago entitled “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” explaining how Irish monks preserved ancient manuscripts that became the basis for much of Western thought. To give credit where credit is due, however, it must also be acknowledged that when the classic works of ancient Greek thought that form the basis of Western philosophy, political thought, and even literature had vanished almost completely from Western Europe, they were brought there not just from Ireland, but from a place that many assume had vanished from the earth long before: the Roman Empire.

If schoolchildren today pause from their lessons in Critical Race Theory and gender fantasies to learn anything about history at all, they likely learn that the Roman Empire, which at its height comprised much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, fell in the year 476 AD, when the Gothic chieftain Odoacer deposed the figurehead child emperor Romulus Augustulus. In fact, however, Odoacer immediately pledged his fealty to the Roman Emperor Zeno in Constantinople.

Two Roman emperors? Yes. Zeno was just as much emperor of the Romans as Romulus. The empire had in the third century been considered too large to be governed by one man, and so two capitals were established, Rome and Constantinople (“New Rome”), with two emperors. The empire centered in Constantinople considered itself, and was thought of by the world, as the Roman Empire just as much as the empire centered in Rome. It only came to be called the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire after it had fallen altogether; throughout its lifetime, its people thought of themselves solely as Romans

That lifetime was a long one. The Roman Empire in Constantinople lasted until 1453, when it finally succumbed to the Islamic jihadis who had been trying to destroy it for nearly eight hundred years. Besides bringing Plato and Socrates and others West, that is a second way in which the Romans (that is, the Byzantines, but if you’re confused on this point, go back and read the previous paragraph again) saved civilization. If they had not stood as a bulwark between Western Europe and Islam for all those centuries, the jihadis would certainly have swept over all of Europe, and the civilization that gave the world ideas that are now widely considered to be universal truths, such as the dignity of the human person, the equality of rights of all people before the law, the freedom of speech and more, would never have arisen.

The Byzantines, that is, Romans, saved civilization in numerous other ways as well. The jihadis against whom they were standing firm thought of representational art as idolatrous and blasphemous. In Constantinople and its empire, however, representational art, that is, art depicting actual people, in the form of religious icons was central to the practice of Christianity, the official religion of the empire. Some, however, under the influence of Islam that pressed against the empire so persistently, began to insist that the icons were indeed idolatrous, and had to be destroyed in order to turn away the divine wrath. The assumption was that God was blessing the warriors of Islam, and turning away from the Byzantines, because of his divine anger over representational art.

It took an ecumenical council of the Church (the Second Council of Nicaea in 787) and decades of controversy to settle the issue, but ultimately art depicting human beings was approved. This became the basis for a flowering of representational art in Western Europe, culminating in the magnificent works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and so very many others. Had the council ruled the other way, those works would never have been commissioned, and the awe-inspiring artistic patrimony of the Western world would never have been known.

There is a great deal of more, all of it detailed in “Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.” John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were much influenced by the Byzantine legal code when they were helping to formulate the Constitution and basic laws of the United States. The architectural marvel of the great cathedral in Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, had enormous influence over the construction of buildings of breathtaking beauty (as opposed to today’s Brutalist monstrosities) all over the Islamic and Christian worlds. If the Roman Empire in Constantinople had never existed, or had fallen at the same time that its counterpart in Rome succumbed, our lives would be immeasurably poorer in ways that are so numerous as to defy listing.

In these days when our history and heritage are being aggressively stripped from us for malevolent ends, it is all the more important that we recover a healthy appreciation for those on whose broad shoulders we stand.

California Pizza Hut Franchises Announce Layoffs of Delivery Drivers Before New $20 Minimum Wage: Report

Multiple Pizza Hut franchises in California are planning to lay off delivery drivers as the restaurant chain braces for an increase in the minimum wage for fast food workers next year.

Several Pizza Hut operators filed notices to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act saying they were discontinuing their delivery services.

“PacPizza, LLC, operating as Pizza Hut, has made a business decision to eliminate first-party delivery services and, as a result, the elimination of all delivery driver positions,” a federal WARN Act notice filed by the fast-food operator with the state’s Employment Development Department said, Business Insider reported.

Another operator, Southern California Pizza Co. also announced layoffs of around 841 drivers across the state. The moves impact Pizza Hut locations in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties.

Many of the franchises will rely on third-party delivery apps like Uber Eats, GrubHub and DoorDash.

The layoffs announcements came months before most fast food workers in California will begin earning a minimum wage of $20 per hour, beginning in April. The increase was proposed as a way to offset the increasing cost of living for Californians.

Seattle Homeowner Uses Rifle to Fend Off 4 Home Invaders in Early Morning Home Invasion Attempt

Remember, no one needs more than ten rounds of ammunition to protect themselves. If you think you do, you’re doing it wrong. We’ve been reliably informed of that fact by the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex and all of the smartest people for years now on a regular basis. Magazine capacity limits are dubious in their effectiveness at best and are in the process of being swept into the ash heap of gun control history.

Still, though, they remain one of the primary footings on which the argument for civilian disarmament is based. And then things like this happen which, for some reason, don’t get quite as much coverage as the braying jackasses who know everything about “common sense gun safety.” Or something.

Let’s go now to the perpetually peaceful neighborhood of Beacon Hill Seattle which, we’re told, has been the location of a number of home invasions recently including one home that was the target of multiple attempts at illegal entry.

Shortly after 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, officers responded to the location for a report of an attempted home invasion robbery. Police spoke to the homeowner, who said three men tried to break down his door but were unsuccessful and fled the scene.

The SPD says the suspects tried a second time at around 12:25 a.m. the next morning. 

Authorities say four men returned to the house to try breaking the door down with a sledgehammer.

The homeowner told police he was sleeping and woke up to loud banging at the door. He armed himself with a rifle, and when the suspects tried getting inside, he shot at them. 

It isn’t clear from the report, but we’d guess the un-named rifle the homeowner armed himself with was an AR pattern rifle of some sort. Fending off four men takes a good amount of ammo, more than any 10-round capacity limit would confine you to.

Authorities say the suspects fired back at the homeowner before speeding off in a vehicle. It remains unknown whether the homeowner shot any of the suspects during the incident.

Detectives processing the scene say they located bullet damage in the living room and bedroom windows.

Never mind the obvious utility of having a 15- or 17- round mag in your handgun, or a full-30 compliment in your rifle when facing multiple attackers as the Seattle homeowner did. The state of Washington has a “high capacity” magazine ban, but if the homeowner was using an AR as we suspect, any 30-round magazines he may have had or used were likely grandfathered in.

If you want to get really nit-picky about it, there’s also the fact that objective examinations of “high capacity” magazine bans have shown they do little if anything about limiting “gun violence.”

Magazine restrictions do not have appreciable effects on crime or violence. In an oft‐​cited study, Christopher Koper analyzed the effects of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which banned new magazines of more than 10 rounds but did little more than drive up the price of already‐​existing magazines.

While presenting his findings at a Johns Hopkins summit on reducing gun violence in America, Koper was decidedly noncommittal on the ban’s utility.

In general, we found, really, very, very little evidence, almost none, that gun violence was becoming any less lethal or any less injurious during [the course of the Assault Weapon and Large Capacity Magazine (LCM) ban]. So on balance, we concluded that the ban had not had a discernible impact on gun crime during the years it was in effect.

But save your breath. Gun control zealots never waste their time with or allow themselves to be confused by facts. In the mean time, make sure you have the means and ability to defend yourself and your family against multiple attackers, just as this home owner did last week.

‘Christianity Today’ Has a New Take on Jesus’ Ethnicity, and Internet Erupts

We’re suddenly seeing a lot of hot takes about Jesus for Christmas, with many of those takes seemingly trying to make him “Palestinian.” This seems in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war and mostly coming from the left to try to culturally appropriate Jesus to fit their political agenda. You even had people who were clergy spouting this stuff, along with a bunch of other things showing they lacked understanding around the Christmas story of Jesus.

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You even had a priest claiming Jesus was a “Palestinian Jew.”

But the take from Christianity Today posted to X on Christmas Eve had a lot of people reacting as again there seemed to be another take trying to make Jesus something other than what he was — a Jew from Judea.

“Jesus was born in Asia. He was Asian. The artists in this photo essay bring him back to Asia—but not to ancient Israel. These nine artworks “proclaim the expansiveness of Christ’s kingdom,’” the outlet shared.

The author Victoria Emily Jones said in the article that “by representing Jesus as Japanese, Indonesian, or Indian,” artists wanted to convey the universality of Jesus for their own communities.

I get the artistic interpretation and the universality point of the artists. And also geographically, yes technically, the continent is Asia, although we generally don’t think about it like that today, we think of the Middle East as a distinct area. But that’s different from suggesting he was, in fact, Asian in the sense of being Japanese, Indonesian, or Indian.

Once again seems to be trying to move him away from being a Middle Eastern Jew.

The claim that he was Asian got a lot of reaction from people. Some noted mockingly that perhaps we should call him “Roman” or Italian since he was born in the Roman Empire.

Senior pastor of Western Ave Baptist Church Ekkie Tepsupornchai also responded to the article writing, “I am Asian. Jesus was not. Nevertheless, Jesus is my Lord. And His sacrifice granted me the right to become a child of God. That is all that matters to me.”

That’s also a great point to make in today’s game of identity politics. It’s important to acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew and where he was born was important because he was born into the House of David. But, regardless of origin, he was born for and died for everyone.

December 27

537 – The construction of the second Hagia Sophia Church, the first being destroyed 5 years earlier, in Constantinople is completed.

1512 – The Spanish Crown issues the Laws of Burgos, governing the conduct of settlers with regard to native Indians in the New World.

1657 – The residents (none of them Quakers but conscientious of tolerance) of the small settlement of Flushing, (now the Flushing neighborhood in Queens, New York) petition Director-General of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, for an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship, which is considered as the first time in North American history that freedom of religion is put forth as a fundamental right.

1845 – Ether anesthetic is used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia.
Journalist John L. O’Sullivan, writing in his newspaper the New York Morning News, argues that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon Country “by the right of our manifest destiny”.

1929 – Soviet General Secretary Stalin orders the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” in Russia, and beginning the ‘Holodomor‘ in Ukraine.

1932 – Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City.

1968 – Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital manned mission to the Moon.

1979 – The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Interesting that the cost of the invasion and occupation and later retreat is considered a prime cause of the Soviet collapse a decade later.

1985 – Moslem terrorists kill 18 people inside the airports of Rome and Vienna.

2004 – Radiation from an explosion on the magnetar neutron star SGR 1806-20 in the constellation of Sagittarius, reaches Earth. It is the brightest extrasolar event known to have been witnessed on the planet.

2012 – General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. dies, age 78, at Tampa, Florida.

2016 – Actress Carrie Fishe dies, age 60, at the UCLA Medical Center, after suffering from a cardiac arrest while flying from London to Los Angeles, 4 days earlier.

Analysis: A New Twist on the ‘Dangerous and Unusual’ Standard for Gun Bans

A Massachusetts federal judge upheld the commonwealth’s ban on AR-15s and similar rifles this week. His rationale for doing so relied on an idiosyncratic understanding of the rifle’s purported lethality and defensive utility.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied a motion for preliminary injunction against Massachusetts’ ban on “assault weapons” and ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. He did so by putting a new twist on an old argument. He determined that modern laws banning AR-15s fit within the country’s historical tradition of regulating “dangerous and unusual” weapons.

“The banned weapons are ‘dangerous,’ because they are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Saylor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in Capen v. Campbell, “and they are ‘unusual,’ because it would be unusual for an ordinary citizen to carry such a weapon on his person on the street for self-defense, or to use it in the home to confront invaders or to protect against personal violence.”

While Saylor is certainly not the first to uphold a hardware ban since the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, his analytical framework for doing so stands out among the rest for its emphasis on the “dangerous and unusual” standard and his understanding of how AR-15s fit in.

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Gun deaths rise along with gun control grade

Gun control advocates should have reason to celebrate. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence upgraded Colorado’s grade on the “annual gun law scorecard” from a C+ in 2021, to a B in 2022 and an A- this year.

As reported in Gazette sister publication Colorado Politics, Colorado earned its A- for imposing waiting periods, banning “ghost” guns, enacting legislation on victims’ legal access, increasing the minimum age to purchase firearms and investing $1 million in community violence intervention.

The grade would deserve accolades — if it correlated with a decrease in gun violence. It does not. The year Colorado moved from a C to a B was the year Colorado’s rate of gun deaths reached a 40-year high. It is also the year Colorado set a record for the most people injured in mass shootings in a single year.

Since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, Colorado has understandably pursued more gun regulation. The state enacted background checks at gun shows in 2000. It later passed a 15-round limit on bullet magazines. In 2013, Colorado required universal background checks.

From there, the state passed a red flag law in 2019. The next year, it enacted mandatory reporting for lost or stolen firearms and a safe firearm storage law.

Despite a 23-year gun-control effort, gun sales and gun crimes have risen.

Colorado’s gun sales in 2022 were 26% higher than in 2019. Early indicators suggest this year’s Colorado holiday gun sales will set a record.

An A- for gun control — after a significant rise in gun crimes — amounts to accolades for policies that don’t work.

It frustrates Colorado’s political leaders. Gov. Jared Polis and state’s Attorney Gen. Phil Weiser want to spend $600,000 to hire outside lawyers. They would lend the attorneys to the federal government to prosecute gun crimes.

If federal enforcement saves lives, this proposal could pay off. Properly written and enforced, gun regulations should allow guns in the hands of stable, sober, law-abiding adults.

It should keep guns from substance abusers, criminals, domestic abusers, severe mental illness patients, and others given due process and deemed likely to misuse them.

If Colorado subsidizes enforcement of federal gun laws, Polis and Weiser should take similar action regarding federal drug laws.

Colorado has undermined federal drug laws and enforcement for years, even as fentanyl became the number 1 killer of young adults. We legalized recreational pot in 2012. More recently, our state decriminalized fentanyl, heroin, crack cocaine and other deadly street drugs.

Likewise, Colorado has consistently undermined federal immigration laws. The combined chaos of immigration, rising crime, drug deaths, homelessness and needles in parks probably led to escalating gun ownership in Colorado and the rest of the country.

“There are many communities with sustained levels of crime that have not abated,” said National Shooting Sports Foundation spokesperson Mark Oliva, as quoted in Gazette sister publication The National Examiner.

“Those concerns, along with the punishing anti-gun measures by the Biden administration and threats of more gun control promised by the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, cannot be discounted as contributing factors (to rising gun sales).

“Americans have demonstrated month after month and year after year, (that) Second Amendment rights matter, and they are investing their hard-earned dollars to exercise their right to lawfully possess firearms before the right can be further infringed (upon).”

Reducing gun violence means more and better mental health care. It means restoring harsh penalties for crimes. It means controlling the border. It means enforcing drug laws and offering help for addiction. It means more looking out for those who suffer.

Sadly, it seems we don’t save lives by simply churning out gun laws — even if handed a medal for doing so.

The Gazette Editorial Board

Israeli Strike In Damascus Takes Out Top Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander Reza Mousavi.

Close friend and confidant to Qassem Soleimani, eliminated almost 4 years ago to the day in a U.S. strike. Mousavi was “the central figure in everything related to the Iranian weapons corridor to Syria and Lebanon.”

On January 3, 2020 (local time), a U.S. airstrike took out Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani was the leader of the the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and the architect of Iran’s war on the West and Israel.

The assassination shook the world, and Iran threatened (and is still threatening) retaliation. Trump was not impressed with the threats: If Iran attacks, we will hit 52 Iranian sites “representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago”.

As we approached the anniversary of Soleimani’s demise, Israeli just took out one of his key aides, Reza Mousavi.

 

Mousavi reportedly was “a senior commander in IRGC Quds Force, he was responsible for IRGC logistical & financial channels in Syria,” which explains his presence in Damascus, and “a long time and close friend of Qassem Soleimani.”

Mousavi was a key Iranian figure:

He served as Iran’s logistical liaison (Revolutionary Guards/Quds Force) in Syria and was active in Syria for many years, possibly since the 1990s. Mousavi was actually the central figure in everything related to the Iranian weapons corridor to Syria and Lebanon, which includes the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shiite militias in Syria. It is also possible that he was involved in arms smuggling (with an emphasis on “status violating” arms) from Syria, through Jordan towards the terrorist organizations in Judea and Samaria.

 

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No tax on bullets? Why one SC lawmaker wants to eliminate sales tax for some ammunition

If you’re a South Carolina gun owner, there’s a chance you could be able to buy ammunition without a sales tax in the future, if a new proposal becomes a law.

State Rep. Ashley Trantham, R-Greenville, filed a bill ahead of the legislative session that begins in January that would eliminate the sales tax on small arms ammunition. This would include ammunition for any “portable firearm,” which could include “rifles, shotguns, pistols and revolvers with no barrel greater than an internal diameter of .50 caliber or a shotgun of ten gauge or smaller,” the bill reads.

Small arms ammunition is normally what gun owners keep in a purse, by their bedside or in their vehicle, Trantham said. These weapons are used for personal protection, she added, which is why she is pushing to eliminate the sales tax only for for small arms ammunition and not bigger guns used for hunting or other uses.

“We have open borders, and more than ever, we just don’t know who we’re going to come across,” Trantham said. “When we’re out shopping, when we’re even in our homes. I’m seeing cases where there’s home invasions, things like that happening, more rapid than I can remember in the past ever seeing it.”

Trantham said she filed the bill based on a request from a constituent. South Carolina, Trantham said, should “definitely” not pursue gun control laws that she said would make it harder for people to protect themselves.

“This was specifically just to make sure that people that obviously can legally own a firearm have access to it, and it can be a little bit more affordable,” Trantham said. “I honestly don’t believe that we should be taxing a constitutional right.”

The South Carolina state sales tax rate is 6%. Dozens of items are exempted from sales tax in the state, from hearing aids to erectile dysfunction medication to materials used to assemble missiles.

In the past year, another state sales tax exemption was proposed: feminine hygiene products, including menstrual pads and tampons. Advocates for that proposal argued that those items are medical necessities and should not be taxed in South Carolina. That bill passed the House and remains sitting in the hands of the Senate finance committee.

Trantham, who is a S.C. House Freedom Caucus member, said she believes eliminating the tax on small arms ammunition is a “no-brainer,” but it’s not yet clear whether the General Assembly will choose to make the bill a priority.

“I would think that it would be easy,” Trantham said. “But then again, when you have people in Columbia that campaign one way and then vote another, it’s hard to say what they’ll grab a hold on. If the people decide it’s priority, they have the power, which is beautiful. That’s that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”