BLUF
Disarmament, national or personal, is not a moral stance, but the abandonment of morality.

Gun controllers have had a field day with the inaction of the Uvalde cops, but it never occurs to them that’s who they are, standing around, wringing their hands and waiting for someone to tell them what the plan is, so they don’t have to make any difficult choices in the face of a crisis.

Gun control is the moral idiocy of the irresponsible blaming those who have taken responsibility.

The Moral Idiocy of Gun Control
Is it more moral to own a gun or to pay someone else to do it for you?

I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada.

“There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head.

We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month.

Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers.

Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous.

The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns.

The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was “puzzled”. “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, and they want to get a gun on Staten Island,” he argued. “That’s not rational, but some people really want guns.”

Perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer muggings in Staten Island is that more of the folks there can prevent them. Muggers, like most predators, prefer victims who don’t fight back.

Continue reading “”

Observation O’ The Day

Until the early 20th century ‘enlightened govt’ meant limited govt. Then the Bolshevik dream of a new Soviet man challenged the idea of God with a vision of man made socially engineered universal order, and at a stroke aristocracy became cool again.
The reason I think the new aristocracy will fail has nothing to do with conservatives or Republicans but rather the belief that no top down system of control has enough computing power and sufficiently low latency to deal with complex reality. –Richard Fernandez

Rep. David Cicilline: ‘Spare Me the *BS* About Constitutional Rights’

Democrat Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island said a bit of the anti-gun left’s quiet part out loud in a House hearing on Thursday when he went on a rant against the constitutionally protected rights of the American people.

Cicilline’s outburst came after concerns were raised that Democrat proposals for federal restrictions on firearms — such as red flag laws — would violate Americans’ right to keep and bear arms as well as infringe on their due process rights.

“You know who didn’t have due process?” Cicilline asked, growing heated. “You know who didn’t have their constitutional right to life respected? Kids at Parkland, and Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and Buffalo, and the list goes on and on,” he said. “So spare me the bullsh*t about constitutional rights.”

When asked to yield, Cicilline snapped back, “no I will not yield, and I will not yield for my entire five minutes so don’t ask again.”

Brushing aside the obvious irony that Cicilline and his party continually attempt to deprive unborn children of their right to life — he’s repeatedly insisted that abortion is “constitutionally protected” and the Susan B. Anthony List notes that Cicilline “has consistently voted to eliminate or prevent protections for the unborn including to force taxpayers to pay for abortion domestically or internationally.”

So, of course, if Cicilline and Democrats are committed to depriving Americans of any rights before they’re born, it’s no issue for him to try trampling on the rights of Americans once they’re born.

While it would seem that running with the “Americans’ constitutional rights mean nothing to us” line wouldn’t be smart politics for the party already set to get shellacked in November’s midterms, the increasingly radical Democrat Party seemed to embrace what Cicilline said.

Dems and leftists on Twitter amplified and cheered Cicilline’s outburst while MSNBC host and NBC News contributor Katie Phang tweeted a video of the rant, saying “This is EXACTLY the kind of messaging Democrats need.” We’ll see how that kind of messaging works in the days ahead in Congress as Dems try to force additional firearm restrictions through the House and Senate — and in November when voters determine who will represent them and which party will control the legislative branch.

It Took Two British Civil Wars to Plant the Seeds of American Liberty

In the previous installment of this series, I gave the historical and religious background of the English Civil War — which planted the seeds of every significant institution that would take root in American soil. As we noted before, there were many concrete issues at stake in the struggle between the Crown and Parliament.

Rural people, gentry, nobles, high-church Anglicans, and persecuted Catholics feared that the power of Parliament would benefit city-dwellers, merchants (including slave-traders), nouveau riche speculators, and radical Protestants. So they rallied behind the efforts of monarchs such as James I and his son Charles I to increase the king’s own power, independent of Parliament.

This led them to support a political theory which James I called “the Divine Right of Kings.” On this view, the king embodied the law itself, which was identical to his will. Obedience to God required obedience to His appointed ruler on earth, leaving no justification for resistance or revolt. As David Kopel notes in The Morality of Self-Defense and Military Action, James’ theory was new to Englishmen. It was quickly denounced both by Calvinists and Catholics.

Ancient Absolutism, Revived

The theory had ancient precedent. The absolute power of Roman emperors, oriental monarchs, and other pre-Christian rulers was still the norm outside of Europe even in the 17th century. It was only the collapse of the Western Roman empire that allowed for much more decentralized political institutions to emerge. The rediscovery of Roman law during the Renaissance gave monarchs a powerful, prestigious weapon in their quest to consolidate power.

Feudal barons would zealously guard their independence throughout the Middle Ages, yielding concessions from kings like the Magna Carta. The Church would assert her rights, and protect her vast institutional wealth and land-holdings, wielding moral authority over the people.

Continue reading “”

“Do Something” Is Not A Serious Policy And Will Not Prevent Mass Shootings

Just to point out that people who believe NICS and other ‘background checks’ actually check into a person’s background are misinformed at best. All that happens is a check is made to see if the person has been entered in the FBI’s list of prohibited people; felons, mentally defective, etc.
You want a real check into your background? Submit an SF-86 form when applying for a job that requires a security clearance.

Opinion: Put more guns in the hands of older people

In the aftermath of this most recent rash of crazed shooters killing innocent citizens and children while they are going about their normal lives, it is urgently incumbent upon all our lawmakers in Raleigh and Washington, to give North Carolina’s senior citizens a fighting chance to defend themselves against the increasing numbers of evil killers just itching to get into a crowd and open fire.

One thing our legislatures can do now is enact a law allowing seniors — 65 and above — to carry a concealed weapon without a license or other restrictions — in addition to “Open-Carry” laws already on the books in many states.

Here are a few common sense reasons to pass this law ASAP:

1. Very few crimes are committed by this age group and many — if not most — seniors are living on fixed incomes and can’t afford expensive classes, licenses, or other legal obstacles to carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense.

2. The same thorough background checks that apply to everyone else should also apply to seniors and anyone with a history of mental illness and convicted felons should not be allowed to carry a weapon.

3. All mandatory testing, training, fingerprinting, firearms safety and proficiency courses should be waived as most seniors have had many years of experience using a gun safely.

4. Since seniors are generally not any kind of threat and the least likely of all citizens to commit a crime, arming our seniors would enhance the public safety of all of America’s population.

DeKalb homeowner shoots, kills man trying to break into his apartment

Police say a homeowner shot and killed a man who was trying to break into his DeKalb County [Georgia] apartment.

Police said the shooting happened around 1:45 a.m. Thursday on the 2800 block of Panthersville Court.

When police got to the scene, they found a man shot to death. The homeowner said the man was trying to break in.

Police are not charging the homeowner and he has not been identified.

The man who was killed has also not been identified.

This looks like they want the proposed laws to be so ludicrous they know it will never pass in the Senate. Typical grandstanding.

Pelosi’s gun control package defines a high-capacity magazine as 10 rounds

The gun control package proposed by House Democrats identifies “high-capacity” magazines as holding 10 rounds or more.

The proposed new limit on ammunition clips is part of the six-piece gun-control package that the House Judiciary Committee is marking up Thursday during an emergency meeting……….

Because there are Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

As I posted back in March

Here’s the reason why we will retain our arms. Morons like this who either forgot, or never believed the oath of office they took. Now foresworn this one is.

As the former Commanding General of the Infantry Center at Fort Benning and Chief of Infantry, I know a bit about weapons. Let me state unequivocally — For all intents and purposes, the AR-15 and rifles like it are weapons of war. A thread:

Those opposed to assault weapon bans continue to play games with AR-15 semantics, pretending there’s some meaningful differences between it and the M4 carbine that the military carries. There really aren’t. 2/

The military began a transition from the M16 to the M4, an improved M16, some years ago. The AR-15 is essentially the civilian version of the M16. The M4 is really close to the M16, and the AR-15. 3/

So what’s the difference between the military’s M4 and the original AR-15? Barrel length and the ability to shoot three round bursts. M4s can shoot in three round bursts. AR-15s can only shoot single shot. 4/

But even now, you can buy AR-15s in variable barrel lengths with Weaver or Picatinny rails for better sights and aiming assists like lasers. Like the military, but w/o the bayonet. 5/

But our troops usually use single shot, not burst fire. You’re able to fire a much more accurate (deadly) shot, that way. Note: you can buy our Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight on Amazon. So troops usually select the same fire option available on AR-15. 6/

That is why the AR-15 is ACCURATELY CALLED a ‘weapon of war.’ It is a very deadly weapon with the same basic functionality that our troops use to kill the enemy. Don’t take the bait when anti-gun-safety folks argue about it. They know it’s true. Now you do too. 7/7

He apparently can’t even realize now that he contradicts himself in the same speech.

This is not about taking away anyone’s guns… Here’s what we have to do: ban assault rifles and high capacity magazines. –SloJoe

 

Chicago man shoots, kills another man who confronted him with knife

CHICAGO – A Chicago homeowner shot and killed another man who confronted him with a knife in his garage Wednesday afternoon, police said.

Around 2 p.m., police say a 36-year-old man was inside his Logan Square garage in the 2700 block of North Monticello when a 53-year-old man armed with a knife approached him.

The victim pulled out a gun and shot the offender in the head, police said.

The offender was pronounced dead at the scene. The victim did not sustain any injuries, police said.

Area Five detectives are investigating.

 

SO YOU WANT TO REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT

Jabba the Hutt Michael Moore thinks it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.

“Who will say on this network or any other network in the next few days, ‘It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment?’”

Bad idea, Lardo Calrissian.

You can’t repeal the Second Amendment, any more than you can repeal any of the other nine. It was a package deal, you see, an absolute prerequisite to ratifying the main body of the Constitution. Repeal one, you repeal them all. Do that, and you repeal the whole Constitution — and with it, any legal authority that the government has to exist (let alone repeal the Second Amendment).
— Alexander Hope

That comes from chapter five of Hope, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith. The style makes me think that particular passage was penned by Neil (and it seems like he had a stand-alone essay to the same effect), but I don’t believe Aaron would have let that go into their co-authored novel unless he agreed with it.

As a casual student of history, who has read much about the ratification of the Constitution, I also agree.

Lose one, lose them all. Lose it all.

I suspect that Moore, and most Dims currently in DC — and far too many Repugnicans, as well — would be happy to lose the few remaining Constitutional limits on their power. They don’t particularly care about “legal authority” just power.

The problem is… if our wanna-be tyrants are no longer restrained by that pesky Constitution, neither are the people.

The people pissed off at senseless bans, and illegal ballot drop boxes, might just decide that turning to constitutionally-enabled courts — who already defecate on individual rights at the slightest provocation — really isn’t necessary.

Voting out scumbags, and voting in new replacement scumbags who promise to use KY while screwing us? Why bother with that discarded constitutional process? Wouldn’t high-velocity lead be cheaper and faster? Not to mention proactively educating would-be replacements.

Court-blessed “constitutional” takings of property? Get rid of the Constitution and former property owners might resort to ex-constitutional re-takings, enforced with ropes and lamp posts.

Lose one, lose them all. Moore himself might want to consider the ramifications of chucking his First Amendment protections to defame folks for a buck. The people might decide, lacking that lost constitutional recourse, to go bowling for lying documentarians.

Get rid of the Constitution, and the people’s  pretend recourse… and they might stop pretending they do.

Maybe the tyrants will be counting on the out-numbered police to prop up their post-Constitution regime. How many officers would continue to be willing to do that once they’ve lost “constitutional” sovereign immunity, and the people know it?

Perhaps the Constitution has only been an illusory paper restraint on government. But it has been a potent symbolic restraint on the people, preventing them from eliminating abusive politicians and government agents out of hand. I do not truly comprehend the willingness — nay, the eagerness of the Left to go there, to surrender that protection, given the likely consequences.

We’d be starting from scratch, with new rules written by the survivors.

I know how to stop a looter and that looter still won’t spend a day in prison!

One Man’s Case Shows Why the Looting Isn’t Going To Stop Any Time Soon: Serial looter committed serious crimes, never spent a day in prison.

Two George Soros-backed prosecutors in suburban Washington, D.C., bounced a serial looter who committed multiple grand larcenies and assaulted a cop between their offices for years without a felony conviction.

Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.

The out-of-state offender, Ronald Thomas, spent virtually no time in jail after his arrests thanks to bail reform policies instituted by Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. At least five times he was charged for committing crimes in one jurisdiction while on pretrial release in another. He was twice charged for committing larcenies within a day of having similar larceny charges dropped—with one of those incidents happening in the same county.

The case exemplifies the degree to which lightened sentencing can embolden repeat offenders. Studies have shown that releasing defendants before their trial increases crime. A few years after Cook County, Ill., instituted bail reform, a 2020 study by the University of Utah found a 45 percent increase in the number of released defendants who were charged with committing new crimes and a 33 percent bump in released defendants charged with violent crimes. Continue reading “”

Remember, this is from the establishment that won’t show pictures of people jumping from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks because that would be ‘prejudicial and inflammatory’.

Comment O’ The Day

Lets do the same for the massive carnage taking place in Americas major cities every single day – the black on black death count is staggering

There were 13,654 black American victims of homicide in 2020 – that’s 37 a DAY

In 2020 those identifying or identified as Black or African American
made up 13.5% of the U.S. population, according to CDC estimates (that
for definitional and other reasons don’t quite match the results of the
2020 U.S. Census). They also made up 55.6% of the homicide victims, and
65.6% of the increase in homicides relative to 2019. To put it another
way, the homicide rate for Black Americans rose from 22.9 per 100,000 in
2019 to 30.7 in 2020. For all other Americans, the rate went from 3.2
to 3.8.

And to point out about the above; By the FBI’s own uniform crime report, most black Americans (88%+-) are killed by other black Americans

It’s time to show the real horror of mass shootings. In pictures.

****

I lack the moral standing to tell a parent to accept and approve, for the greater good, the public display of photos of his or her dead child. Only they can judge the additional weight that doing so would place on them, at a time when they are already struggling with unimaginable grief. Nor do I suggest the release of any images in particular. But something graphic is required to awaken the public to the real horror of these repeated tragedies. Robb Elementary School in Uvalde is a crime scene. If there were a case to go to trial, the prosecution would have to present publicly the shocking evidence of guilt. Put another way: Why must innocent schoolchildren, for the rest of their lives, carry the vivid memories of the executions of their teachers and classmates, while federal and state lawmakers (and the adult constituents who elect them) are spared?

When even the Washington Post calls you a liar…….

As a StunnedTater, SloJoe got away with his meandering windbag storytelling and lies because the caricature of the blowhard politician speechifying on the floor of Congress, who no one really pays attention to, is an accurate one.
He got used to it because there never were any consequences to it; He always got reelected, so why worry?
He’s now too far gone mentally to get out of the rut he dug for himself and also realize that the BS he spouts has a real effect, as people do pay attention to the President of the U.S….. even if he is a senile lying blowhard.

Biden: CEOs told me my plan would save $500 per household in utility costs. WaPo: Lie.

A Four Pinocchio lie, in fact, as Glenn Kessler reports this morning. Joe Biden has a very bad habit of exaggerating and confusing details, but this claim goes well beyond that into sheer fantasy. In his op-ed at the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Biden claimed that utility-company executives told him that his economic plan would save American households an average of $500 a year, starting immediately:

“A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.”

Not only do those numbers not add up, Kessler concludes, Biden’s flat-out lying about the conversation:

But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.

Biden’s also lying about the numbers. He pulled the $500 figure from a friendly analysis by the Rhodium Group that was prepared in October. That report predicted $500 annual savings in overall energy costs, not just utilities, and not until 2030. Most of that savings came from eliminating gasoline from family budgets as cars would go completely onto the grid. The actual projected utility savings would be, er …

Indeed, the report notes that, if the Biden climate plan were adopted, home electricity bills by 2030 would be between one dollar more and five dollars less than under current policy. That might pay for an extra ice cream cone over the summer.

This is fanciful for other reasons, too. Moving tens of millions of personal vehicles onto the electrical grid would create a vast spike in demand for electricity. We can’t keep up with current demand now, thanks to increasingly restrictive policies on sources for electrical generation. Several states right now are warning about plans for rolling brownouts and blackouts as a means to ration access to limited electricity, including car-happy California. Prices would go through the roof by 2030, as supply won’t match current demand without expanding the fossil fuels used for electrical generation. Expecting the transition to be cost-free to households ignores the large amount of kilowatt hours it will take to keep vehicles charged, too.

But even apart from that, the economic situation has changed since October. Much of the increase in energy costs for households has come with gasoline, but electricity costs are also rising — both in price and rationed access in a price-controlled environment. Energy costs money regardless of how it originates, and gas-powered vehicles at least allow consumers to operate independent of grid shortages.

Kessler drops four Pinocchios on Biden in his conclusion:

[H]e didn’t hear that from utility executives. And the report he is citing is not about household utility-bill savings. Most of the claimed savings comes from the reduced cost of driving. And the estimate is for 2030 — when he would no longer be president, even if he served a second term.

Is there any doubt the president earns Four Pinocchios?

No doubt at all. Four Pinocchios is the minimum allowance for Biden on a daily basis. And if Biden wants to keep the US from being dependent on “autocrats” for our energy needs, then he needs to work to expand exploration, extraction, and refining in the US, rather than doing the opposite over the last 17 months.

With Inflation at Historic Highs, Biden Stoops to New Low in Blame Game.

Polls show that inflation has become the top issue for Americans, and as it hit historic highs, it’s been absolutely killing approval ratings for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. In response, Biden has blamed COVID-19, Putin, Republicans, big oil — pretty much anyone whose name he can remember will get blamed for the 40-year-high inflation we’re experiencing.

However, Biden’s blame-everyone-else strategy hit a new low this week; The Washington Post reports that Biden is now blaming White House aides for the nation’s inflation woes.

“Biden has privately grumbled to top White House officials over the administration’s handling of inflation, expressing frustration over the past several months that aides were not doing enough to confront the problem directly,” the Post reported…………….

Lest we forget. Hypocrite SloJoe blames everyone but himself for his goobermint.

Grace 🌾 Profile picture
Here’s a thread of some of the people and things Biden has blamed. 🧵
Trump.
Afghans.
Americans.
Businesses.

Continue reading “”

Democrats are selective in which shootings matter

Before I get started, let me make it clear that I know there are some pro-gun Democrats. I don’t think there are any left in Congress these days, but among the voters, there are. In what follows, I’m not talking about them and they should be excluded from this.

However, for the rest, which happens to be something like 90 percent-plus of all Democrats, this all applies.

What applies, you ask? How about the fact that while anti-gun Democrats will scream to high heaven about a Uvalde or a Buffalo, they only seem to care about certain tragedies. Why is that?

Because only certain tragedies help advance their agenda:

Democrats are silent after more than 30 people lost their lives this weekend to violent crime waves that continually sweep through the nation’s cities.

Why hasn’t President Joe Biden, who recently visited Uvalde, Texas, after 19 children and two adults died in a school shooting, tweeted something or planned trips to Nebraska, Illinois, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania, where violence and shootings took the lives of dozens of people including children?

Why hasn’t Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke executed another political stunt at a local press conference somewhere to call attention to a rise in domestic altercations that escalate into shootings? Mostly because none of the violence was politically advantageous for them.

The violence that took the lives of dozens of Americans over Memorial Day weekend either did not involve firearms such as AR-15s, which the left has openly admitted they want to confiscate, or occurred under the wrong conditions for grandstanding. Democrats pick and choose which tragedies to milk for their anti-gun agenda based on how much political leverage firearm-related deaths grant them.

It’s not wrong, folks.

Think about how many people die every weekend in gun-controlled Chicago. The numbers tend to be staggering, and we hear relatively little in the mainstream national media about that. Why don’t we? Because it not only fails to advance their anti-gun agenda, it actually undermines it.

Illinois has many of the measures Democrats have pushed for at the federal level, and none of it has seemed to do a damn thing. While officials are quick to blame other states for their problems, the truth is that gun control simply doesn’t work.

So what happens is that Democrats become selective in their outrage. They lash out when it’s convenient and stick their heads in the sand when the incident isn’t.

Think about how quickly Sacramento dropped from the headlines. A couple of criminals who had guns illegally, one of which had a full-auto switch which is even more illegal. Everything about it proved that criminals will keep getting guns no matter what you do.

It was a big story before we knew it was one of gun control failing. Now, Democrats and their allies in the media like to pretend it never happened.
But Buffalo and Uvalde? Those aren’t going anywhere because they get to demonize the AR-15.

See, all tragedies are awful, but for anti-gun Democrats, it’s only awful enough to talk about when it advances the narrative.