They’re ‘Doing Something’ to Our Kids

What happens when you can no longer trust the people responsible for keeping your kids safe? What happens when the “Do Something” crowd only does the wrong thing?

In news that probably sounds familiar to you wherever you live, Salem-Keizer (OR) Public Schools has approved a resolution that further prohibits firearms on school grounds – at all times. Passing in a 4-3 vote, which seems like a very small decision-making group for a district of 65 schools and over 42,000 students.

As reported by the Statesman Journal:

“Salem-Keizer school board members Tuesday approved a resolution further prohibiting weapons on campus, including concealed guns. The vote directs Superintendent Christy Perry to develop and enact administrative policy to implement this…

Staff and students were already not allowed to have concealed weapons in Salem-Keizer schools. The new resolution expands restrictions to include all concealed firearms carried by campus visitors, including parents, guardians, volunteers, guest speakers, organizations renting facilities and other community members.”

But school resource officers? Gone.

But private armed security? Unarmed.

But armed teachers? Nope.

What about local law enforcement? In one of those, do-you-really-need-to-say-this moments, Perry clarified that law enforcement will still be ALLOWED to open carry their firearms onto campus in the event of an emergency. Wow. Thanks.

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ONCE AGAIN FOR THE GUN CONTROLLERS IN THE BACK:
IT’S THE CRIMINALS

New York’s gun laws are a mess. Antigun politicians passing them don’t have a clue. Worse yet, the people facing consequences are law-abiding New Yorkers.

They’re also the ones facing danger. Case in point – New York City’s Democratic Mayor Eric Adams recent reveal. The mayor told media, “When it comes to guns, this year, 2,386 people were arrested with a gun. Of those, approximately 1,921 are out on the street.

“This year, 165 people were arrested with a second gun charge,” Mayor Adams added. “Of those, 82 — out on the street. Not one arrest but two gun arrests — back out on the street.”

Does He Listen?

Mayor Adams won election on a “tough on crime” message. He said he would carry his own firearm and forego using the mayor’s personal security detail. “We cannot have a city where people are afraid to walk the streets,” he proclaimed early in his tenure.

He’s now singing a different tune. “How do you take a gun law seriously when the overwhelming numbers are back on the streets after carrying a gun?” he unironically asked media.

New Yorkers know criminals don’t take laws seriously. That’s why law-abiding New Yorkers have been screaming for years as gun control politicians in Albany impose stricter gun control laws on them, not criminals.

New Yorkers rejected restrictions and legally purchased firearms in record numbers, despite the state’s restrictive and burdensome process to obtain a handgun permit. Since 2020, nearly 1 million New Yorker’s have passed an FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verification to buy a firearm. Industry research continues to show “self-defense” is the number one reason buyers walk out of a retailer with a new purchase. That’s especially true of African American women, in New York City and across the country.

Soft on Criminals, Hard on Industry

New York’s backwards gun control laws are only half the problem. Soft-on-criminal prosecutors refusing to hold criminals accountable allow the cycle to continue. Notorious criminal sympathizer Chesa Boudin was given the boot and recalled as San Francisco’s District Attorney. Nearby Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon possibly faces a similar fate.

Manhattan’s District Attorney Alvin Bragg is cut of the same cloth. His office refuses to bring charges against repeat criminals, allowing them to walk back out on the streets and terrorize victims.

In New York, it’s not just about Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Adams and DA Bragg’s collective failure to address crime and keep New Yorkers safe. Democratic Attorney General Leticia James joined to do her part to crush New Yorkers’ Second Amendment rights by suing gun companies for the crimes unrelated to the lawful sale of the firearm.

“There should be no more immunity for gun distributors bringing harm and havoc to New York,” AG James said.

Her premise is a lie, of course, exactly like those repeated ad nauseum by President Joe Biden and gun control pundits. They prefer deflecting blame on a lawful and Constitutionally-protected industry from those actually responsible for gun crimes. It’s the reason for the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). President Biden and others have repeatedly been fact-checked about their false claims.

New Yorkers wanting safer communities must feel like they’re in a madhouse. Their state’s highest elected officeholders dismiss criminals as the root of the problem. They then pass more flawed and unconstitutional laws, while refusing to hold criminals to account. The result is a circular blame game.

One thing New Yorkers can do to change the game in their favor is #GUNVOTE® this November. They can send a clear message to the antigun politicians in New York their rights – and their safety – aren’t a game.

The Post-Bruen New York and California Punitive Gun Control Laws are Clearly Unconstitutional

After Bruen, a notable noncomplier is New York Governor Kathy Hochul. She also follows in the footsteps of her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. Both passed their big gun control bills by sending a “message of necessity”—a maneuver to prevent legislative hearings and to deprive legislators of time to read a bill before they vote on it. As the New York State Sheriffs’ Association explained:

The new firearms law language first saw the light of day on a Friday morning and was signed into law Friday afternoon. A parliamentary ruse was used to circumvent the requirement in our State Constitution that Legislators—and the public—must have three days to study and discuss proposed legislation before it can be taken up for a vote. The Legislature’s leadership claimed, and the Governor agreed, that it was a “necessity” to pass the Bill immediately, without waiting the Constitutionally required three days, even though the law would not take effect for two full months.

The Sheriffs’ Association criticized “thoughtless, reactionary action, just to make a political statement,” and “the burdensome, costly, and unworkable nature of many of the new laws’ provisions.” “We do not support punitive licensing requirements that aim only to restrain and punish law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”

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We cannot compromise or negotiate the Second Amendment

In the more than two decades I’ve been involved in the Second Amendment community one thing has been constant. The public conversation around guns has always focused on the unkindest stereotypes of gun owners and the left’s self-serving caricature of those of us who defend the basic human right to security.

Because of the overall trajectory of the culture war, the debate surrounding guns and gun rights is now at a critical impasse and it’s no longer productive or genuine to approach the issue as if in a vacuum with no larger context.

Many people seem to struggle with objective facts and absolute reality. Postmodern thinking prevents some from accepting the fact that reality is something independent of the individual, and instead choose to believe reality is mercurial and optional. This fundamental fallacy is largely responsible for the widespread belief that there is actually a debate on the validity and scope of gun rights.

Regardless of our personal feelings or historical contempt for the law by elected officials, in the United States an individual’s right to be armed as they see fit is not actually in question. The issue was settled when the constitution was ratified, all subsequent federal restrictions are illegal and well outside the scope of legitimate political authority.

What we’re actually debating when discussing the gun issue is whether or not we should follow the constitution, ignore it, or manipulate it to meet the political needs of a given moment. The reason the founders included the Bill of Rights in the constitution was so that we wouldn’t be controlled by the beliefs and opinions of other people. They understood human nature and its flaws, and they knew basic human rights would suffer at the hands of neurotic people with a warped view of their own enlightenment and judgment.

Ignorant or sociopaths

The necessary pivot point in the public discourse on guns and gun rights is a sober recognition of the people involved. Gun control advocates vary from well-meaning people who are simply ignorant, to sociopaths with an unhealthy drive to make choices for other people and control the behavior of those around them.

The well-meaning but ignorant person may be swayed by well-crafted arguments, but sociopaths only incorporate outside information at their convenience and facts don’t intrude on their personal desires.

Individuals from any walk of life who led the proverbial charge on gun control are very problematic. They take the form of legislators introducing gun control bills, advocates who apply social pressure to manipulate government officials, or media and entertainment personalities who use their public influence to promote the restriction of personal freedom. In recent years we’ve seen these phenomena spread beyond controlling other’s guns to controlling speech, associations and even their personal health preferences.

An often-overlooked fact about social-control sociopaths is how progressively unsatisfied they are with compromise. People have falsely believed working and compromising with them would create peace, but feeding their negative impulses only strengthens their drive for more control.

The pro-gun culture needs to evolve to recognize supporters and authors of gun control for who they really are, the unstable element of humanity our society was constructed to contain and protect us from.

Collective controls

The belief that basic rights inherent to your humanity should be subject to collective or authoritarian controls is the nucleus all human evil is built around. The unabridged freedom to justly acquire sustenance, shelter and security is the primary criteria of a civilized society.

Controlling guns is not the path to peace and civility, a commitment to freedom and refusing to entertain the darkest impulses of human nature is. There is a direct relationship between the amount of contempt someone has for you and their perceived need to control you.

All gun control is always wrong under all circumstances, and the people working to implement it don’t simply represent different opinions. They’re bad faith actors with the objective of grooming our society for even greater levels of authoritarianism.

The people who advocate for your disarmament are your enemies, not your negotiating partners.

And she scolds the interviewer right back

NPR Scolds Mother Who Bought Gun for Protection in High-Crime City: ‘Why Not Just Call the Police?’

NPR reporter Scott Simon spoke with a mother who said she bought a gun for protection in Aurora, Colorado, and he asked her, “Why not just call the police?”

The mother, Misheika Gaddis, told Simon she bought a 9mm pistol because she is a single mom home alone at night with her eight-year-old son, and she is pregnant with another child as well.

Gaddis explained that she decided to buy the pistol–her first gun–because of the crime near her apartment and her experience of coming home from work to find people congregating near her door whom she did not know.

She said:

So there was a couple of nights where I’d come home, and there would be people in the hallway, like, really close to my door. And the way my apartment building is set up is if you don’t know anybody up there, you shouldn’t be upstairs. There were a couple of nights I felt like I probably needed some protection or probably should have let somebody know I was going in late. But I didn’t think about it until there were people standing way too close to my door.

Later in the interview, Gaddis noted: “I stay pretty close to a high school that actually had a shooting sometime this year. Then there’s someone that, like, rides through the neighborhood, and they just let off shots. You can hear gunshots every night.”

Simon asked her what would have to happen in order to spur her to grab the gun and use it in defense of herself and her son.

Gaddis responded by suggesting she would grab the gun if someone was kicking in her door or if she heard the little bell on the back of her apartment door ring.

Simon responded by asking, “Why not just call the police?”

Gaddis noted that she has had to call the police in the past and the dispatcher asked her so many questions that the time it took to answer the questions, in addition to the time it took police to arrive, was just too great. She stressed that the moments she spent waiting were time in which she was vulnerable.

Bystander shoots, kills person who threatened to ‘shoot the crowd up’

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (WPEC) — The tables turned on an armed person who was shot and killed after announcing plans to “shoot up the crowd” on Sunday night.

The West Palm Beach Police were dispatched to a family gathering after reports of gunshots were heard at 10:42 p.m. on Aug. 7.

According to officers, a 911 call came in saying someone had been shot, the caller also said he shot the person who took a short-barreled shotgun out of a car, threatening to “shoot the crowd up”.

After an investigation, detectives say a fight broke out between two women, which turned into a brawl of around 20 people. The suspected gunman was 22 years old and from West Palm Beach, but the name and gender have not been released.

According to officers, a 911 call came in saying someone had been shot, the caller also said he shot the person who took a short-barreled shotgun out of their car as they threatened to “shoot the crowd up”. (WPEC)

The police department says the 22-year-old refused to drop the weapon after multiple people confronted the suspect.

That’s when a 32-year-old man fired his weapon, hitting the armed suspect. The man had a concealed weapon license and remained on the scene with police to cooperate with the investigation.

Detectives say the 22-year-old was pronounced dead on the scene and they are treating this as an isolated incident and are not seeking any other suspects. No charges are pending at this time.

The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner will determine the official cause of death.

BLUF
This isn’t searching for common ground to arrive at real solutions. This rhetoric is dangerous and reveals the hostility these gun control groups, and the politicians they support, have for the Constitution and those who exercise the rights protected by it.

GUN CONTROL GROUP REPEATS PRESIDENT BIDEN’S WAR THREATS AGAINST GUN OWNERS

The problem with outlandish threats against law-abiding gun owners is they get repeated. That’s especially true when gun control groups seize upon careless remarks by President Joe Biden that the U.S. government would consider using actual weapons of war against those who dare to believe the Second Amendment protects the nation against a tyrannical government.

Newtown Action Alliance’s Po Murray tweeted, “A gun rights activist from Newtown told me he needs an AR15 to defend himself from a tyrannical government. I told him the CIA has drones with missiles. Hellfire R9X/“knife bomb”/“flying Ginsu” was used to kill al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.”

The irony here is rich. An antigun activist that wants to disarm law-abiding citizens for exercising their right to keep and bear arms is repeating a threat of lethal force – and – comparing those gun owners to international radical terrorists.

She attempted to clarify her tweet with another three days later tweeting, “Let me be clear. The government is not coming for you with a drone.”

Ramping Rhetoric

Newtown Action Alliance’s Murray isn’t a stranger to inflammatory and hyperbolic language. She labeled Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis “a racist homophobic misogynistic power hungry fascist,” and tweeted that NSSF is a “Trumpian right wing gun lobby.”

For the record, NSSF works with elected officials on both sides of the aisle. That’s harder these days, as most Democrats adopted a radical antigun agenda that would violate the U.S. Constitution and deny law-abiding gun owners their rights.

Murray, though, thinks it is perfectly fine to threaten those gun owners with lethal force from Hellfire-equipped drones. In her estimation, those gun owners exercising their God-given rights that won’t consider surrendering to her radical gun control agenda are no better than terrorists.

If the line of using U.S. government-owned actual “weapons of war” sounds familiar, it’s because that was a line repeated again and again by the Commander-in-Chief himself. President Biden said in 2021, “If you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

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Homeowner Shoots Knife Wielding 19-Year-Old Transient

On Sunday, Bullhead City Police arrested Elijah Christian Cole Abel, age 19, on two counts each of attempted aggravated assault and criminal trespassing.

According to the Bullhead City Police Department, at about 4:30 a.m., police received a call of a shooting at the Marina Villas Riverfront Condos, 1800 Clubhouse Drive, where an unknown man was shot and had fled the scene.

It was reported to police that an unknown man, who was dressed in a black sweatshirt with the hood on and mask covering his face, was inside the condominiums. One of the residents confronted the suspicious male who was looking inside parked cars and told him he needed to leave the complex. The male suspect said he was looking for cigarettes. The resident, who was carrying a baseball bat by his side, followed the suspicious male for several minutes telling him again that he needed to leave the property. The man refused to leave and threw a rock at the resident and then came at the resident with a knife. The resident struck the man with a baseball bat. As the resident started to back away, the male suspect reportedly continued to walk towards the resident with a knife.

Another resident saw the altercation and told the man to leave. It was reported that the suspect continued to walk toward the first resident with a knife held up in his hand. The second resident then fired several rounds at the suspect. The suspect jumped over the wall that surrounds the complex and fled on foot.

About two hours later, police were notified that a man was at Western Arizona Regional Medical Center being treated for a gun shot wound. He was shot once in his leg. The suspect was identified as Abel, who is from the Washington area and had been living in Bullhead City as a transient for approximately three months. He was additionally arrested for an outstanding felony warrant out of Washington State for failure to follow conditions of parole. He was later released from the hospital and booked into the Mohave County Jail in Kingman.

The two residents of the condominium complex did not report any injuries. The condominium complex is surrounded by 5-6 feet high block walls with locked gates. No trespass signs are also posted around the property.

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing. Acts 17:21-31

BLUF
None of this is to say that whatever the Current Thing happens to be is trivial or unimportant; it’s only to say that Current Thingism is a sign of democratic decay that erodes the vital role of deliberation that is essential for our system of government. With all this in view, the fact that so many of the self-professed defenders of Our Democracy are so adamantly devoted to the Current Thing calls their motives into question. The next time you see an American flying a Ukrainian flag, ask yourself: could they find the nation on a map?

The Tyranny of the ‘Current Thing’

There is no better evidence of the managed nature of what passes as “democratic deliberation” than the recent development of “Current Thingism.” Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you know the phenomenon well. There are many crises unfolding in contemporary America, and the “Current Thing” is whichever one our elites insist should be the focus of our attention at the present moment.

For a while, the Current Thing was #MeToo. From 2016 until 2018, the Current Thing was Russian collusion. After that scheme unraveled, we moved through a series of Current Things, each of which was said to compound the grave threat Trump supposedly posed to Our Democracy: in March 2020, it was Covid-19; for a few months that summer, it was systemic racism; then, it was the Delta variant; finally, for a stretch of early 2021, it was the January 6th “insurrection.” And when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine became the Current Thing. You knew it was the new Current Thing because all the smart people suddenly changed how they spelled and pronounced “Kiev.”

So, you know what the Current Thing is. What, then, is “Current Thingism”? Current Thingism is the default mindset of a certain segment of the American population: typically, the professional, liberal, educated, urban caste of society. Current Thingism is an enduring assumption that whatever the Current Thing happens to be, it should, in fact, be the Current Thing—the issue among issues.

Current Thingism also enables some judgment on the part of the Current Thingist. Because the Current Thing deserves our total attention and deference, anyone who disputes the existence or the urgency of the Current Thing is a problem. The person who does not concede the urgency of the Current Thing is dumb, dangerous, or both. Remember the treatment of those who doubted the efficacy of masks? Those who were reluctant about mRNA vaccines? Those who doubted the wisdom of sending billions of dollars to fund Ukraine’s defense? Such is the fate of those who don’t get in line with the Current Thing.

Although America has many pressing problems, Current Thingism itself is a threat to the nation. To some degree, it is a threat because America is facing so many crises. Current Thingism artificially elevates one political concern over all the others, which justifies inaction on other matters that may, in fact, be more urgent. Some will argue that while the term “Current Thing” is new, the phenomenon is not: they might say that certain issues have always been prioritized over other issues. They’re right and wrong.

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In the course of 5 seconds Biden forgets that he already shook hands with Chuck Schumer

Schumer shakes Biden’s hand. Turns and shakes other hands, then Biden just sticks his hand out again as if he didn’t just shake hands with Chuck.

Or maybe he’s shaking hands with the invisible man again.

What is going on in this man’s brain? He is not well.