So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following:

1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);
2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;
3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);
4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);
5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);
6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);
7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);
8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);
9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;
10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

Those of us in reality have been saying all this for months and most of it since May 2020. But your political priors were more important than the data. You had to have your demonization narrative.
So welcome to reality. And f*** all y’all for pretending you didn’t know this so you could have fun crapping on Trump and DeSantis and all your red state relatives.
And btw, AOC and all you Leftist covid fanatics — those whose virtue signaling authoritarian lockdown nonsense that has resulted in millions of lives destroyed — stay in your states and leave mine alone.
We chose data and freedom. You chose alarmism and unearned moral superiority. Stay in NY, NJ, CA, and the rest — and enjoy the actual paranoid nanny state you created among your friends who reward you for telling them they will kill their kids and grandma if they don’t panic.
Oh yes, and Happy New Year to all.

New laws aren’t about gun owner’s responsibilities

It’s been said that all rights come with responsibilities, and it’s something I thoroughly agree with. You have a right to free speech, but a responsibility to use that responsibly. For gun owners, you have the right to keep and bear arms, but you have an obligation to exercise that responsibility.

This isn’t a controversial point of view, all things considered. Oh, we might debate what one’s responsibilities are as a firearm owner, but I think just about everyone agrees that they exist.

So when the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote a headline saying, “The right to bear arms comes with responsibilities, the Editorial Board writes,” I didn’t worry too much.

Then I read it and realized they have a different view of responsibilities than I do.

There are no rights that do not come with responsibilities.

It is no threat to the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to expect people who own firearms to keep their weapons in such a way that they are not likely to fall into the hands of criminals, children or others who have no business bearing them.

As reported recently by The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah is seeing a troublesome surge in both the number of guns stolen and the number of homicides committed with guns. The former statistic jumped 48% from 2011 to 2020, while the latter number tripled. Gun sales are also up sharply and, while that’s not a crime, connecting the dots strongly suggests that many of the people who legally own firearms are not living up to the responsibility of keeping the community safe from their misuse.

There have been attempts in the Utah Legislature to make responsible gun ownership not just a civic responsibility but also a legal obligation. Sadly, but not surprisingly, every attempt to mandate that gun owners secure their arms, or to make giving or lending a gun to someone who later uses in it the commission of a crime something that a person can be sued for, is rejected on the flawed argument that it would impinge on the rights of gun owners.

Of course, the Tribune editorial board doesn’t see an issue with turning a responsibility into a legal obligation. I sure as hell do.

You see, for one thing, we don’t always agree on what’s a responsibility and what isn’t. For another, what makes sense for one person doesn’t make sense for another.

Firearm thefts are up, but how many of those thefts included guns with some kind of gun lock on them? Many gun owners use those simply because gun safes are big, heavy, and expensive. They’re not an option for a lot of people.

Besides, most mandatory storage laws actually accept the locks as being safely stored.

Yet those locks are relatively easy to defeat if one is given enough time.

See, it’s easy to blame gun owners for the problem and to try to push for some law to make them do what you think is right, but what none of those people ever bother to ask is why are you trying to punish the victims of these thefts, anyway?

Honestly, this idea that gun owners are responsible for gun thefts in some way just sounds an awful lot like telling a woman if she hadn’t been in that part of town dressed that way, she wouldn’t have been raped.

Now, I’m a proponent of securing your weapons when not in use. I actually do think it’s the responsible thing to do. But when it gets mandated, it no longer becomes something you can adjust due to your circumstances. You can’t leave a gun available for your responsible teenager to use to defend themselves from a home invasion. You can no longer keep them in various parts of your home in case you need one and can’t make it to where your weapon is secured.

It removes all ability of the gun owner to determine their own needs.

The truth of the matter is that this isn’t about responsibilities. That’s just a frame the Tribune thought to use in order to make their screed less objectionable. The problem for them is that we see through that kind of thing.

For them, our responsibilities are whatever they say they are and we either do it their way or we’re scum.

I’d say the scum are the people who think they get a say in what we do in our own homes.

Comment O’ The Day
Taibbi has a point. Politicians can falsely claim to be a climate, crime, or economics expert and the average voter isn’t going to offer stiff resistance to that claim. But if a politician claims high school graduation shouldn’t depend upon proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic you are going to get their attention. It’s something everyone capable of reading is going to have a fair amount of expertise in. And the ruination of our education system has reached the point where it’s impossible to ignore.
The remarkable thing is that when called out on this the politicians don’t admit they were wrong. They double down.

The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump
Terry McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor’s race by saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.” If that was no gaffe, Democrats have a lot more significant losing ahead.

(it was no gaffe. It was a ‘freudian slip’ where you inadvertently tell a truth about yourself you wanted kept concealed)

On Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.”
This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

I’m against bills like the proposed Oklahoma measure that would ban the teaching of Jones’s work at all state-sponsored educational institutions. I think bans are counter-productive and politically a terrible move by Republicans, who undercut their own arguments against authoritarianism and in favor of “local control” with such sweeping statewide measures. Still, it was pretty rich hearing the author of The 1619 Project say she lacked the expertise to teach, given that a) many historians agree with her there, yet b) she’s been advocating for schools to teach her dubious work to students all over the country.

Even odder were her next comments, regarding McAuliffe’s infamous line about parents. About this, Hannah-Jones said:

We send our kids to school because we want our kids to be taught by people with expertise in the subject area… When the governor, or the candidate, said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just a fact.

In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

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The Times May Be A-Changin’

Over time, we’ve seen changes in focus by the hoplophobic elements of society. Originally, it was all about banning handguns or at least “Handgun Control Inc.” The “assault weapon”, that is, the AR ban of 1994-2004 followed, with no discernible effect on crime, homicide, etc. Movement mutation continued, with groups dropping wording advocating bans, moving to claims of fighting pure “violence” and promoting gun “safety”.

Now they want to address “root causes” of violence instead of just restricting legal gun ownership, though still advocating extending background checks while “not taking anyone’s guns”. Intervening within high-crime communities, and with those at high risk of committing and becoming victims of violence, is appropriate, though far more difficult than they may imagine.

Throughout, we’ve had no reason to believe that these anti-gun activists have had any real change of heart. Their “conversation” always comes around to the desirability of somehow limiting the rights of law-abiding American gun owners in some way, even if in “just” creating more hoops to jump through in order to purchase, keep or bear our arms.

However, there is a fundamental factor that will trump all their intentions, both open and disguised. That is us, the people (and voters) of democracies. As Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics follows culture” and culture is changing. Much of this is due to the past 2 years of violence approved and applauded by “progressive” politicians who thought this would garner minority votes. Their groupthink about ethnicity blinded them to the reality that people of all ethnicities, communities and societies want crime stopped lest it hit them.

People are simultaneously realizing that they can’t count on being protected and must plan to do that for themselves. Thus the huge rise in gun purchases by more diverse buyers than ever, including women, minorities (especially African-American women) and self-described liberals. It’s been speculated that this increase in valuing self-protection with firearms may transfer to an increase in valuing Second Amendment rights—and now, that’s no longer speculation.

The Trafalgar Group, a non-partisan polling operation, just released a poll in which over 84% of respondents believed that “strict gun laws” either make no difference in or worsen the current surge in retail thefts. Less than 16% believed such laws can make this better.

In November, Quinnipiac found that 48% of those surveyed opposed stricter gun laws versus 47% who support them—following a trend beginning in 2015, now over the tipping point to plurality opposition. Gallup’s polling in November correlates, with a new low of only 52% of Americans caring that “laws covering the sale of firearms” should be stricter (down from a high of 64% in 2019, falling through 57% in 2020).

Meanwhile, ABC/Ipsos found that 66% of Americans disapprove of how President Biden is addressing gun violence (which could imply wanting more or less strict laws). Republicans’ opposition to more gun laws has strengthened, Democrats’ preference for more strict gun laws is lessening, predictably. But the most important political demographic—independents—have shifted dramatically in favor of, shall we say, individual independence on this issue.

In the latest National Firearms Survey published in July 2021, nearly 1/3 of respondents acknowledged owning guns, more than half of those carry them and almost 1/3 of them reported having to use them defensively in one or more of the estimated nearly 1.7 million episodes of self-defense. In 82% of these DGUs, it wasn’t necessary to fire. Almost 80% of these incidents occurred in the defender’s home or on their property, with the rest mostly occurring in public or at work, still a very substantial number.

NSSF also found that 49% more Hispanic Americans (no, none use “Latinx”) purchased firearms in 2020 than in 2019. With 40% of all gun purchases during the past 2 years coming from new gun owners, it’s no surprise that Hispanics (as well as African-Americans) are increasingly voting more for individual rights than for government “protection”.  In Berkeley, California, of all places, the Latino Rifle Association has grown by hundreds of members since 2020. Its “leftists . . . socialists, progressives” members realize that “The police and the government aren’t taking care of me, so I have to do things on my own.”

Funny thing, that’s what conservatives have recognized for generations. And a much bigger organization, the National African-American Gun Association, has added tens of thousands of new members since 2016, accelerating (along with many local gun clubs oriented toward minorities) during the past 2 years.

Even our less demonstrative Anglophone cousins, Canadians and Kiwis, aren’t cooperating any more with government orders to turn in their newly banned guns than Americans have. Neither are turning in their formerly legal, acceptable firearms—only 160 of an estimated 100,000 affected firearms have been surrendered in Canada in a year and a half. In New Zealand, the 2019 ban of most repeating arms “has had no impact on a rise in gun crime and violence”, except for a steadily increasing rate of the offense of still possessing such firearms.

This is precisely the cultural change that precedes and triggers political change. Most Americans already knew that protecting individual rights is the uncompromisable basis of the success of American society and polity. Many others know that now and more are learning. While Donald Trump improved the Republican share of the Black and Hispanic votes (especially among men), this wasn’t about him or the party. It is about the importance of each person’s rights as an American.

Most expect that the Supreme Court will affirm the Second Amendment with a ruling in Bruen voiding New York City’s may- (= non-) issue handgun carry permitting, along with the 8 other states that persist in that tyranny. The “progressive” left will keep caterwauling if they don’t get their way. But should the decision go otherwise, their wailing would be nothing compared to the anger of the majority who are now convinced that individual rights are more important than political correctness. And that would assuredly lead to even greater political change in favor of ensuring those rights.

To paraphrase St. George Tucker, “the true palladium of liberty” isn’t just “the right of self-defence.” The right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense and opposing tyranny is necessary to a free people in a free state. But it is a means to the goal, along with representative democracy lustily embraced, which is “to keep our republic” (h/t B. Franklin). The ultimate mark of liberty is individual autonomy, where the rights of the individual are placed above government’s privileges, which are only bestowed by us individuals.

Almost like a naturally occurring vaccine?

Study shows people infected with Omicron may be less susceptible to Delta variant

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in South Africa has found evidence that suggests people who have been infected with the COVID-19 Omicron variant may be less susceptible to infection from the Delta variant. The team has written a paper describing their work.

As the global pandemic has progressed, variants have emerged—some more resilient than others. Thus far, the Delta variant has proven to be the hardiest and because of that has overtaken the original virus as the most widespread of the variants infecting people around the world. More recently, the Omicron variant has emerged, first in South Africa, then all around the world. Initial reports indicate that the new variant is much more easily spread than Delta but is less harmful to those infected—also, there has been some evidence that the booster shots given for the original and Delta variants may last for as little as ten weeks against Omicron. In this new effort, the researchers in South Africa have found some evidence of Omicron infections giving people some degree of immunity from Delta infections.

The work by the  in South Africa involved testing 15 people who had been infected with the Omicron variant—some of whom had been vaccinated and some of whom had not—to see how well their immune systems would respond to a Delta infection. They found they had all developed some degree of enhanced immunity to the Delta variant. The researchers then tested the  from the same 15 people two weeks later to see how well they put up a fight against both Omicron and Delta. In so doing, they saw a 14-fold increase in ability to overcome Omicron and a 4.4-fold increase in an ability to overcome Delta.

The researchers note that 11 of the patients had been vaccinated (and two were excluded) and that there was a good chance that most or all of them had been infected with either the original version of the virus or the Delta variant—thus it is not clear what was behind the increased resistance to Delta. They note that much more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be drawn about the impact of Omicron on resistance to Delta.

Prospects for Constitutional Carry in 2022

At the start of 2021 there were 16 members of the Constitutional Carry club in the United States of America. They were:

  • Alaska
  • Arizona
  • Arkansas
  • Idaho
  • Kansas
  • Kentucky
  • Maine
  • Mississippi
  • Missouri
  • New Hampshire
  • North Dakota
  • Oklahoma
  • South Dakota
  • Vermont
  • West Virginia
  • Wyoming

2021 was a record year for Constitutional Carry. In 2021, five states joined the Constitutional Carry club, increasing membership from 16 to 21. The last and largest state to join the club was Texas. The four other states to join the club in 2021 were Tennessee, Iowa, Montana, and Utah.

Several other states are working to pass Constitutional Carry bills. Here are states and possibilities for Constitutional Carry in 2022.

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The Establishment Wants to Crush You Uppity Peasants

Some guy named Jared Schmeck recently mocked the senile old pervert who is masquerading as our president by getting His Crustiness to affirm “Let’s go, Brandon!” This humiliation of the regime figurehead, piled upon the myriad other humiliations he has brought upon himself – failing to pass infrastructure, Afghanistan, putting the “can” in “Vatican” – is intolerable to the establishment. This uppitiness must be stopped.

And it’s even less tolerable because “Let’s Go, Brandon” is a manifestation of the class warfare that increasingly characterizes American society. It’s the cry of the working class, bold and joyous, utterly uncontrollable. It has energy and cheer, while the pathetic moaning of the ruling caste’s spokescreatures is rote, boring, and bereft of any power. The regime-approved memes our elite’s minions repeat on cable and in social media are the chant of serfs.

So, the garbage regime and it’s ridiculous legacy media minions must try to stifle this rebellion. They especially hate that this in no Astroturf meme passed around on some media server list after being decreed from on high. LGB is infinitely more dangerous. It’s an organic response that is not pushed or guided, but that evolved totally outside the approved channels. They hate it because it is not theirs, and because they cannot direct it or tame it. So they try to squelch it. But it will come back even stronger. And worse, we’ll be laughing at them as we repeat it.

The most hilarious part is when the ruling caste’s Renfields leverage “rules” and “norms” against disrespecting the dementite-in-chief, expressing shock and horror that Jared the Pleb did not abase himself before Hunter’s daddy sufficiently. You might wonder when the respect the president rule came into effect, but that glaring hypocrisy is intentional. They want you to know that you must play by rules that they are free to ignore. It solidifies your status as second-class citizens.

You must know your place, and they intend to teach it to you. First, they reported that Jared says his crack was “a joke,” as if to paint him as backtracking and trying to excuse what he should be proud of. They want to paint him as broken and repentant, as if participating in some Red Guard self-criticism session or a modern university race/gender seminar. But it’s an obvious lie. Yeah, smart media people, he literally meant Biden was to perform a challenging act of love upon himself. The thing we need to understand is that our enemies are just not very good at their jobs. And you can make it even more difficult for them. Here’s a rule, people – the media will bend whatever you say to serve their narrative so, if you choose to speak to the legacy media at all, it should be a nonstop string of profanity that is utterly exploitable.

Second, we get the blue checks announcing that “free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.” That’s precisely what it means, though. They are against free speech, and you must squash their fascism into their faces at every opportunity. They will still try to get this guy fired or arrested or whatever. Remember, they are communists. They would murder him if they could – luckily, their lack of guns and upper body strength prevents that.

“Kurt, that is crazy talk! You are crazy.”

Those who doubt the drooling, fussy fury of our enemies and their desire to see us enslaved or dead should spend a little time on social media. Besides their hatred for Jared, look at their COVID death wishes for those refusing to wear a face thong or take the medicine that does not work as advertised. If they find out this Jared guy is unvaccinated, they may literally explode and splash those around them with pus and bile.

Remember, this is all part of their plan for soft tyranny. At the moment, they do not have the power to make you do anything. They must instead convince you to make yourself comply. By showing Jared Schmeck being harassed and harangued by the sex pest enablers at CNN and elsewhere, they hope to scare you into silence. They hope to make you choose to conform and obey.

Here’s the other tiresome part – the Conservative, Inc., crew decrying Jared Schmeck’s disrespect to a buffoon who deserves none. This is all class solidarity, folks. LGB did not spring up among the supine sissies who make up the GOP establishment. It came from the base, and they hate the base. Like the Tea Party, like Trump, they did not create it and they cannot control it, so they hate it. LGB demonstrates a contempt for the institutions, institutions that these people hope to run themselves. They like the system, people. “Brandon” is about burning the whole sorry system down; the pseudo-conservative timeservers are just about changing the management to put themselves in charge.

So, we get lots of pearl clutching about how those uncouth rubes shockingly refuse to observe the rules and norms that apply only to those uncouth rubes. They need to know their place, which is holding trays in the background wearing masks as their betters dine and sip ungagged.

Let’s go, Brandon!

Boy, Criminal 16, dead after robbery, shooting at Tampa’s Takomah Trail Park

TAMPA — A 16-year-old boy was shot and killed at Takomah Trail Park Tuesday after a group of people, including the teen, shot and robbed another person, according to the Tampa Police Department.

Tampa police received a call just before 4 p.m. Tuesday that a person was shot in the park at 10099 Takomah Trail. Officers arrived and found 16-year-old Ian Thomas with a gunshot wound. Thomas died at the scene.

Detectives later learned that a group of people, including Thomas, robbed and shot a 32-year-old man at the park. The 32-year-old fired a weapon in response, hitting Thomas.

The 32-year-old had a concealed weapons permit and legally owned his gun, according to police.

The robbery victim and the remaining suspects had fled the park by the time officers arrived. The 32-year-old was found in another, unspecified location. He was taken to the hospital with injuries not believed to be life threatening. The man is cooperating with detectives, police said.

No other information was released and the investigation is ongoing.

Washington State Democrats  demoncraps! Push Bill Reducing Penalties for Drive-By Shootings

Washington state Reps. Tarra Simmons (D) and David Hackney (D) are pushing legislation to remove drive-by shootings from the list of crimes that elevate first degree to murder to a higher degree of murder carrying a mandatory life sentence.

FOX News reports that “drive-by shootings were added to the list of aggravating factors for murder charges in 1995.” At the time, drive-by shootings were one of a number of crimes that would elevate charges and Simmons and Hackney are now working to remove such shootings from the list.

The 1995 language that Simmons and Hackney want to specifically strike from the aggravating factors list says: “The murder was committed during the course of or as a result of a shooting where the discharge of the firearm… is either from a motor vehicle or from the immediate area of a motor vehicle that was used to transport the shooter or the firearm.”

Simmons says she believes the language surrounding drive-by shootings “was targeted at gangs that were predominantly young and Black.”

She added, “I believe in a society that believes in the power of redemption. Murder is murder no matter where the bullet comes from but locking young people up and throwing away the key is not the answer.”

Simmons points to Kimonti Carter as a example of why she wants to remove drive-by shootings from the aggravating factors list. Carter was convicted in a drive-by shooting that left two people dead in 1997. He received a 777-year sentence and Simmons said, “If he had been standing outside of the vehicle at the time, he would’ve faced 240-320 months in prison. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison with no opportunity for parole because of this law.”

770 KTTH points out that Simmons and Hackney’s pushed to strike drive-by shootings from the aggravating factors list is posited as a pursuit of “racial equity in the criminal legal system.”

On July 22, 2021, KIRO 7 noted a surge of gun violence in Seattle and quoted Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diazwas saying, “We’ve seen more than a 100% increase in drive-by shootings this year alone.”

Biden’s voodoo crime control: Americans have more reason to own a gun than ever before

President Biden has returned to an old standby for liberal crime fighters — more gun control.

This month, the president used the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings to push gun-control legislation that included expanded background checks and $5 billion for community “anti-violence programs.” He assured us that all were “commonsense” measures.

Funny how new gun control proposals are always commonsensical. Whatever background checks we have, they always need to be expanded. Giving money to community programs (read: social spending) is one of the left’s favorite anti-crime measures.

Crime has reached epidemic proportions, and not just crimes committed with guns. Property theft is up. (A new expression has been added to the vocabulary — “snatch and grab.”) The elderly are assaulted on city streets. Women are raped on train cars. The murder of police officers has become routine.

In 2021, 12 major cities, all with Democratic mayors, had record-breaking homicides.

As of Dec. 17, there were 535 murders in Philadelphia, exceeding the previous record of 500 in 1990. Portland, St. Paul and Chicago were among the other winners of the homicide sweepstakes.

To all of this, the Democrats have a set of standard responses — deny, deflect and play dumb.

Earlier this month, Larry Krasner (“Let ‘em Loose Larry”), Philly’s radical district attorney, said there wasn’t an overall crisis of crime in the City of Brotherly Love. (“Basically, we don’t have a crisis of lawlessness. We don’t have a crisis of crime. We don’t have a crisis of violence.”) Mr. Krasner later tried to walk it back, to still the uproarious laughter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confessed, “The fact is there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where.”

Her feigned ignorance is understandable.

The crime wave washing over our cities is due to policies and causes championed by her party and her “just perfect” president — including defunding and demonizing the police, ending cash bail, reducing felonies to misdemeanors, loosening borders and allowing the mob free-rein during last year’s riots.

As business districts went up in flames, police were attacked and stores were looted, Democratic officeholders either ignored the mob or cheered it on. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey helpfully observed: “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.” Chaos in the streets is also how totalitarian movements grow, like the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the Nazis in 1933.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden avoided commenting on the orgy of violence until polls showed him losing on the issue. Even then, he repudiated it only in the most general terms, never mentioning BLM or antifa.

The president’s open-borders debacle — stopping construction of the wall, ending remain-in-Mexico (recently reinstated by the courts), and bringing back catch and release — also contributed to the crime wave.

In the past fiscal year, the number of border encounters quadrupled over 2020. We’re not just importing poverty and disease, but gang members, drugs and human trafficking.

But the president says we can end the crime explosion with expanded background checks and midnight basketball.

Background checks are useless. The Sandy Hook shooter used his mother’s legally registered gun. The San Bernardino terrorists used a straw-man purchase to get their weapons. The 15-year-old arrested for the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, used his parents’ legal handgun. According to the Department of Justice, 1.4 million guns are stolen in this country each year. Perhaps we could do background checks on the thieves.

Gun control is voodoo crime control. It won’t keep guns out of the hands of determined criminals or psychopaths.

We are a nation of gun owners and have been from the beginning. The American Revolution started when the British tried to impose commonsense gun control at Lexington and Concord.

In a September Pew Research Poll, 4 in 10 Americans said they live in a household with a gun, including 30% who said they personally own one. The percentage used in a crime each year is infinitesimal (.004%).

Thank God for guns. Widespread gun ownership is one reason we’ve never had a Stalin, a Hitler or a Castro.

Ironically, Mr. Biden seeks to impose more gun control at a time when his policies give Americans more of a reason to own guns than ever before.

CCRKBA: BIDEN’S YEAR-END POLL NUMBERS EXPLAIN STRONG GUN SALES IN 2021

BELLEVUE, WA – A new Rasmussen poll showing Joe Biden has lost ground among likely U.S. voters for his handling of crime and law enforcement issues helps explain the continued interest in private gun ownership, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

According to Rasmussen’s survey, 51 percent of likely voters give Biden a poor rating for his ability to handle rising crime. Back in July, 48 percent of poll respondents gave the president bad marks on this subject. Rasmussen revealed 77 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Independents rate the president’s handling of crime and law enforcement issues to be poor.

According to the FBI National Instant Check System (NICS), more than 35.7 million background checks have been initiated so far this year, and while that number does not reflect actual gun sales, it does indicate a strong continuing interest in gun ownership.

“Since Joe Biden took office,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “millions of Americans who had never before owned a firearm bought one. During the week leading up to ‘Black Friday’ in November, there were more than 687,000 NICS checks initiated, and we anticipate strong numbers for December when the final tally is available.

“Since Biden took office,” he continued, “police agencies have continued to lose personnel, crime has spiked upward and increasing numbers of Americans have taken more responsibility for their personal safety and that of their families. For a guy who came into office promising more restrictions on legal firearms ownership, Joe Biden has only stoked gun sales because his policies are making Americans feel less safe, because, in fact, they are .

“Joe Biden and his handlers need to face reality,” Gottlieb observed. “Their policies and performance do not resonate with the majority of citizens. When you throw in Rasmussen’s revelation that 67 percent of likely voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, you have a disaster on your hands, people have lost faith in their ability to lead, and they are preparing for the worst. It’s a signal that Biden should leave gun rights alone for the remainder of his time in office.”

Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

“Skynet smiles”
Now, what other dangerous things are hidden within this program, and Amazon ‘isn’t aware of’?

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny

Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it “challenged” a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”.

“Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs,” the smart speaker said.

Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

The girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.

She said: “We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one.”

That’s when the Echo speaker suggested partaking in the challenge that it had “found on the web”.

The dangerous activity, known as “the penny challenge”, began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago.

Metals conduct electricity and inserting them into live electrical sockets can cause electric shocks, fires and other damage.

“I know you can lose fingers, hands, arms,” Michael Clusker, station manager at Carlisle East fire station, told The Press newspaper in Yorkshire in 2020.

“The outcome from this is that someone will get seriously hurt.”

Fire officials in the US have also spoken out against the so-called challenge.

Ms Livdahl tweeted that she intervened, yelling: “No, Alexa, no!”

However, she said her daughter was “too smart to do something like that”.

Amazon told the BBC in a statement that it had updated Alexa to prevent the assistant recommending such activity in the future.

“Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers,” said Amazon in a statement.

“As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it.”

It’s called ‘sowing to the wind’, as in reaping exactly what you asked for, good and hard.

How Defund the Police backfired.

Over the last two decades, progressives have established a new consensus on crime. Nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession should be reclassified as misdemeanours. Cities should defund the police and spend the money on nurses, psychologists and social workers instead. Offenders should have minimal involvement with the justice system — and be kept out of jail wherever possible.

But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, a man who had run over the mother of his child with his SUV was released on $1,000 bail. Neither he nor his SUV were put under electronic surveillance. Soon after, he killed six people and injured another three dozen — by running them over with his SUV.

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Polls Show More Hispanics Turning Their Backs on Gun Control, Civilian Disarmament Advocates

An Axios/Ipsos poll showed Hispanic swing voters are concerned about crime, criminal violence and personal safety. That finding wasn’t a surprise to NSSF. Hispanic-Americans, along with nearly every other demographic group, are embracing their right to lawfully purchase and own a firearm. Firearm industry retail survey data revealed this growing trend a year ago. That’s when law-abiding Latinos purchased firearms in big numbers and the demographics of America’s gun owners continued to show growth.

Hispanic-Americans aren’t an outlier community and examples are plenty. Suburban swing voters and other minority groups demonstrated similar patterns as they saw policy failures affecting their safety, fully embraced lawful gun ownership and exercised their Second Amendment right.

The Axios/Ipsos poll asked Hispanic-Americans about their top concerns and crime and violence came in at the number two spot at 30 percent – behind only COVID worries at 37 percent. Per Axios, “The finding is a warning for President Biden ahead of next year’s midterms.” A similar Wall Street Journal poll from a week earlier showed Hispanic voters are turning away from Democrats, typically supportive of more gun control, and are now nearly evenly split between their party preference.

The 2022 elections mark the first regular national Election Day since the 2020 election over which time Americans have seen rampant violent crime in cities across the country, calls to defund the police and for prosecutors to go easy on convicted criminals. It also witnessed historic firearm sales.

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Nebraska state senator to try again to allow ‘constitutional carry’ of handguns

Sen. Tom Brewer, a decorated veteran who knows something about overcoming adversity, is loading up another effort to obtain a victory that has eluded gun-rights advocates in Nebraska.

Brewer said he will introduce a proposal during the upcoming legislative session to allow Nebraskans to carry a concealed handgun without meeting the current requirements of a criminal background check, a $100 fee and an eight- to 16-hour class on safe gun handling.

Constitutional carry — which refers to the belief that the U.S. Constitution already gives people the right to carry concealed guns — is a hot-button issue that has previously failed in the Nebraska Legislature. But it’s the law in 21 states, including every state surrounding Nebraska except Colorado.

As of Nov. 1, there were more than 85,671 Nebraskans licensed to carry concealed weapons.

Earlier this year, Brewer abandoned a proposal that would have allowed Nebraska counties, with the exception of the three largest — Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy — to decide whether to allow permit-less carry of concealed handguns. Brewer’s decision came after a Nebraska attorney general’s opinion raised serious constitutional concerns about delegating a state matter to county boards.

But Brewer, who represents Nebraska’s traditionally conservative Sandhills, got a boost recently from Gov. Pete Ricketts.

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Nation of Cowards is now back in print

Nation of Cowards is a collection of amazingly well thought out essays. Jeff Snyder is clearly among the most knowledgeable, well-read scholars writing about guns today. He clearly shows gun control advocates for what they really are. Most importantly, he makes a passionate, intellectual argument on the ethical aspects of gun ownership. He argues convincingly that aside from being unconstitutional and elitist, gun control is also deeply unethical. This book belongs in the library of anyone who believes that people have a right to defend themselves.

A must read for those with an interest in not only the 2nd Amendment, but all of the rights we are possess. The author effectively opens your mind to strong thinking about the ideas associated with gun control.

Boo Hoo – Boo Hoo

Gun control advocates express disappointment with Biden

Gun violence prevention advocates were hopeful a year ago that the Biden presidency would make progress on gun control. Instead, as his first year in office draws to an end, they are feeling disappointed.

Advocates say Biden’s response to the recent school shooting in Michigan, when a sophomore opened fire at school and killed four students, fell short, and they are disheartened that the administration’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) withdrew.

Like his predecessors, Biden has issued executive orders on gun violence prevention while legislation to expand background checks has failed in the Senate.

“I think the biggest thing to highlight here is that the president has been a friend to the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement this year and we’re thankful, but frankly, he hasn’t really been a leader,” said Zeenat Yahya, deputy policy director at March for Our Lives.

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Joe Biden Just Absolved Himself of Responsibility for Ending COVID Like He Promised

As the omicron variant of COVID-19 spreads rapidly throughout the country, Joe Biden met with several of our nation’s governors, whom he says need to take the lead in ending the pandemic.

“There is no federal solution [to COVID],” Biden said before the meeting. “This gets solved at a state level.”

Umm, what?

I’m sorry, did I miss something? Joe Biden literally campaigned for an entire year, not only blaming Trump for COVID but also for the deaths caused by it.

“It is what it is because you are who you are,” Biden told Trump during their first debate regarding the COVID death toll.

“A lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot quicker,” he insisted.

“We’re eight months into this pandemic,” Biden said weeks before the presidential election, “and Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control, I do.”

Biden also promised multiple times that he would “shut down” the virus. “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.”

 

Biden spent a year claiming he was the silver bullet who would end the COVID-19 pandemic. But now that cases are surging (again) Biden is now shifting responsibility for getting the pandemic under control to our nation’s governors. This change in rhetoric effectively absolves himself of any responsibility for the state of the pandemic—a very convenient position after blaming Trump for the trajectory the pandemic took on his watch.

 

Does Joe Biden really believe we’ll forget that he promised things would get better on his watch, yet they haven’t? Biden said he had a plan. Biden said he would “shut down the virus.” So why hasn’t he executed this plan and shut it down already? Instead, he’s now saying, “Hey governors, this is on you now. I’m gonna have an ice cream cone and take a nap.”

I hope the ‘a liberal is merely a conservative who hasn’t been mugged carjacked yet’ meme holds true for this one.

Carjacked congresswoman has a long history of embracing gun control

Last Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon had her luxury SUV stolen at gunpoint by a couple of armed men in Philadelphia. As Cam noted, five people are facing charges after this brazen carjacking that happened in broad daylight at FDR park.

Crime that happens in a dark alley at night is one thing, but this sort of daytime crime becomes common when the State abdicates its basic function in maintaining the rule of law. Philadelphia has done just that, extending its Brotherly Love to violent criminals thanks to far-Left Democrat D.A. Larry Krasner.

Those of us in the Second Amendment community know all too well how criminal-coddling policies that lead to crime spikes are used as a pretext to pass more gun control laws, which turn us – the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who want to mind our own business – into criminals. That’s a feature, not a bug, of the gun control movement, and that’s what Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon’s campaign website showcases. Here are members of the Gun Grab Lobby who endorsed Scanlon’s congressional bid:

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