November Was 11th Consecutive Month of Record Firearm Background Checks

November 2020 was the eleventh consecutive month of record National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) background checks.

FBI figures show there were 3,626,335 NICS checks performed in November 2020, which represents more checks than were performed in any November since NICS was established.

Breitbart News reported that January through October already witnessed ten consecutive months of record checks. This means January 2020 saw more NICS checks than any January prior, February 2020 saw more than any February prior, March 2020 saw more than any March, April 2020 more than any April, and so on, all the way through October.

Now November 2020 brings the consecutive streak to 11 months.

In addition to the monthly records, 2020 as a whole is breaking the record for the most NICS checks in a given year. On November 9, 2020, the National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) reported that the number of checks conducted January 2o20 through October 2020 alone represented “13% more checks than the previous busiest year for the NICS office.”

For example, 28,369,750 NICS checks were performed in all of 2019, but 35,758,249 have already been performed in 2020, and the month of December may yet bring millions more checks into the mix for this year.

TYLER GUN WORKS .22 MAGNUM RUGER BEARCAT
BUILDING MEMORIES PAST AND FUTURE
WRITTEN BY JOHN TAFFIN

Bill Ruger apparently always looked back into history to find inspiration for many of his projects. In 1958, probably after studying the Remington .31 cap-n-ball pocket pistol, Bill did the same thing as he had done with the Single-Six. He brought out an up-to-date .22 version and called it — this also came from history, cars not guns this time — the “Bearcat” after the Stutz Bearcat automobile. It was fitting such a beautiful car would lend its name to Ruger’s second .22 revolver. Continue reading “”

McDonald’s fries used to be a treat. Now, in Germany (at least in the Germany of 30+ years ago) they’re still fried the ‘old fashioned’ way.
And I did a comparison ‘taste test’ – with about a 20 hours time lag – between the two when my Battalion re-deployed to the U.S.
I hit the McDonalds at Frankfurt/Rhine Main airport just before we left and the one in Lawton Oklahoma’s downtown mall when our trip finally ended.
2 things told me I was back home. The 1/4 pounder & fries’ taste reminded me of cardboard, and the prices on everything were posted in dollars.

My Hunt for the Original McDonald’s French-Fry Recipe.

From Julia Child to Paul Bocuse to James Beard, some of the biggest names in food history are also people who have professed their love for the same french fry—a french fry that, in no exaggerated manner, birthed an empire. A french fry that no one has eaten in more than 30 years.

McDonald’s original french fries were cooked in beef tallow. For that fact, they were bullied out of production by a well-funded, well-intentioned businessman and self-proclaimed health advocate named Phil Sokolof, who unknowingly dethroned what many fans claim was the greatest french fry to ever meet mass production. “The french fries were very good,” Child said in a 1995 interview, “and then the nutritionists got at them … and they’ve been limp ever since … I’m always very strong about criticizing them, hoping maybe they’ll change.”

Child never lived to see McDonald’s fries return to their former glory, and sadly, and there’s no indication they ever will. That’s why I set out on a quest to find the original recipe.

My hunt for the lost McRecipe took me up the corporate ladder and to obsessive corners of Reddit. I spoke to fast-food experts, super-fan museum curators, and a 79-year-old former employee of the very first McDonald’s. After weeks of digging, I procured a recipe for the original fries that one fast-food historian believes to be the real deal, one I recreated several times to ensure its legitimacy. I sweat over hot tallow, bled from cutting perfect shoestrings, and literally got pulverized salt in those wounds. But according to at least one expert, I have reason to believe the recipe I’ve uncovered is authentic.

Before you recreate a masterpiece, it bears knowing from whence it came. Continue reading “”

Carjacking victim shoots, kills 14-year-old suspect in Jennings

JENNINGS — A 14-year-old boy suspected in an attempted carjacking has died after being shot by the car’s owner, police said Monday. The boy was identified as Damaurio Thomas of the 5100 block of Lexington Avenue in St. Louis.

The attempted robbery occurred at 9301 Lewis and Clark Boulevard in Jennings, on the parking lot of a gas station. Police were notified about 3:45 p.m. Sunday and found the car’s owner and Damaurio near Jennings Station Road and Lewis and Clark Boulevard. Police said the man who fired the fatal shot was 53 years old. He was taken into custody by police and was cooperating with investigators, St. Louis County police Sgt. Benjamin Granda said.

Damaurio had an accomplice who got away, authorities said. Police have not released a description of the accomplice. After being shot, Damaurio tried to run away but was found by officers near the scene suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest. He was taken to a hospital where Granda said he died hours later.

Granda said police recovered guns from the man and the boy. He said it wasn’t clear if the suspects fired a weapon.

The man’s car was a Cadillac CTS and officers “believe the suspects entered the vehicle but did not leave the property in it,” Granda said in an email.

Suspect in attempted carjacking dies after being shot by motorist, hit by vehicle in Compton

A man suspected in a carjacking attempt in Compton died after being shot by the intended victim and then run over by at least one vehicle Sunday night, authorities said.

Deputies responded to the intersection of Compton Boulevard and Santa Fe Avenue shortly after 8:30 p.m. when someone reported hearing gunshots in the area. A man was found lying in the intersection and pronounced dead at the scene, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department stated in a news release. The unidentified man had at least one gunshot wound and had apparently been struck by at least one vehicle, according to the release.

Investigators believe the man, who was armed with a handgun, had tried to carjack a vehicle that was stopped for a red light when he was shot by the motorist. The shooter stayed at the scene and was talking to investigators, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Alfred said.

It was unclear whether the suspect was hit by one or more vehicles. The driver or drivers did not remain at the scene, Alfred said. Officials have not determined whether the man’s death was the result of the gunfire or being struck by a vehicle.

It’s also unknown if the motorist who shot the suspect was legally carrying their firearm.

Europe Sends Its Condolences to Iran.

Ever wonder why so many Americans share President Trump’s skepticism of Europe? Look no further than its reaction to the assassination of the mastermind of Iran’s atomic-bomb project. Moshen Fakhrizadeh was a leader of Iran’s effort to obtain an atomic bomb to use on the country in which the survivors of the Holocaust found redemption. Yet the Europeans rushed out a statement calling the attack a “criminal act.”

Plus, too, the EU, in a statement from its High Representative, Josep Borrell, extended condolences to the bomb maker’s family. We don’t dismiss the cruelty of war. Yet the European Union expresses not a syllable of appreciation for the possibility that the attack might yet buy time and safety for Israel (and Europe). Nor did it acknowledge the early warnings from Jerusalem about what Fakhrizadeh was up to.

Nor was there a particle of historical reference. No reference was made of, say, the attack on Iraq’s nuclear program in 1981. That’s when Israeli F16s suddenly wheeled out of the skies over Baghdad and destroyed the reactor the French were building to help Saddam gain the capability to use atomic weapons against Israel. That attack was condemned the world over (including, in America, by the Reagan administration*).

No one has ever had any illusions about the fairweatherness of Europe’s friendship toward Israel. Just the other day, President Macron called Ben Smith of the Times to complain about the way the American press was criticizing him for his crackdown on Islamist violence. Last week at Antwerp, the trial began of Iranian terrorists who, on a tip from Jerusalem, were collared while preparing to attack France. So why is Mr. Macron silent?

Ordinarily, we might skip another editorial on this head. European hypocrisy is hardly news. Then again, too, it’s likely that America will shortly install a new administration intent on resuming the course of appeasement with Iran. It might be too soon to say who perpetrated the latest attack in Iran. It’s not too soon to mark the logic for Israel to seize its opportunities, if that is what has happened, and to do so, if necessary, alone.

This is sad.
A lot of my guys did their Deck Landing Qualifications on the ‘Bonny Dick’

Navy Will Scrap USS Bonhomme Richard.

The Navy decided to scrap the amphibious assault ship that burned for nearly five days earlier this year, concluding after months of investigations that trying to rebuild and restore the ship would take too much money and too much industrial base capacity.

The July 12 fire aboard USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) began in the lower vehicle storage area but ravaged the island, the mast and the flight deck as it burned its way through the inside of the big-deck amphib. The ship remained watertight throughout the ordeal and hasn’t been moved from its spot on the pier at Naval Base San Diego, but between the fire itself and the days-long firefighting effort, about 60-percnet of the ship was ruined and would have had to be rebuilt or replaced, Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, the commander of Navy Regional Maintenance Center and the director of surface ship maintenance and modernization, told reporters today in a phone call.

“After thorough consideration, the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations have decided to decommission the Bonhomme Richard due to the extensive damage sustained during that July fire. In the weeks and months since that fire, the Navy conducted a comprehensive material assessment to determine the best path forward for that ship and our Navy,” he said. Continue reading “”

2020’s Safest Cities in America

Half Of America’s Safest Cities Are In Constitutional Carry States

A fundamental adage of the gun control movement is that more gun laws equals less gun crime. The only problem with that belief is that it’s patently untrue. The website WalletHub recently compared more than 180 cities across the country to determine which cities are the safest for residents and visitors, and it turns out that fully half of the ten safest cities are in states that have very strong Second Amendment protections, including Constitutional or permitless carry.

The website didn’t only look at violent crime rates when determining which cities are the safest, but that was a big part of the criteria along with the number of reported COVID cases, law enforcement per capita, and some 40 other factors in three specific areas of concern; Home and Community Safety, Natural Disaster Risk, and Financial Safety. Once those risk factors were tabulated, the site ranked all 180 cities, and with one notable exception, the vast majority of the safest cities are in states that do a decent job in recognizing our right to keep and bear arms.

  1. Columbia, Maryland
  2. South Burlington, Vermont
  3. Plano, Texas
  4. Nashua, New Hampshire
  5. Lewiston, Maine
  6. Burlington, Vermont
  7. Salem, Oregon
  8. Virginia Beach, Virginia
  9. Raleigh, North Carolina
  10. Gilbert, Arizona

Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Arizona are all Constitutional carry states, while the gun laws in Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina are all fairly robust in terms of Second Amendment protections. Columbia, Maryland is the one city in the Top Ten Safest Cities that’s located in a state with restrictive gun control laws, and those laws don’t seem to be doing much to keep residents in Maryland’s largest city safe. Baltimore, Maryland is way down towards the bottom of WalletHub’s list of safest cities, coming in 155th out 182 metropolitan areas.

If gun control alone were enough to reduce violent crime, then cities like San Bernardino (ranked 180th out of 182), Los Angeles, (172), Oakland (165), and Washington, D.C. (160) would be among the safest places in the country instead of coming in towards the bottom of the rankings. In fact, it’s worth noting that California has the “best” gun control laws in the country according to groups like Giffords and Brady, but it’s also home to some of the most dangerous cities in the United States.

California’s ten day waiting periods, bans on so-called assault weapons and high capacity magazines, prohibitions on online and out-of-state sales of ammunition, background checks on in-person ammo sales, microstamping requirements, and the other onerous restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms may make gun control activists happy, but they don’t do much to keep people safe.

Conversely, some of the safest cities in the country don’t have any California-style gun laws in place. That should be enough evidence to put to rest forever the absurd assertion that more gun laws equals less crime, but you and I both know that the gun control movement is going to keep repeating the lie that we can ban our way to safety. It’s going to be up to Second Amendment activists to keep making the case that not only are these gun control laws unconstitutional, but they’re ineffective as well; promising security at the expense of our rights, but instead making us both less safe and less free.

New York: Voluntarily Waive Your Gun Rights…Legally

Maybe this one shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. A group of New York Assembly Democrats – Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, and co-sponsored by Jeffrey Dinowitz, Fred Abinanti, Richard Gottfried, Assemblywoman Fahy, Rebecca Seawright, Assemblyman Englebright and Assemblyman Dickens – have proposed legislation that would make it possible for New Yorkers to voluntarily waive their gun rights.

Well hello, 2020, you’ve done it again.

The Post-Journal reports:

If approved, anyone would be able to file a voluntary waiver of their right to purchase a gun. The State Police would then request photo identification to verify the person’s identity before accepting the form. Waivers would include an alternate individual to be contacted if the waiver is revoked.

No sooner than 21 days after filing a waiver, an individual would be able to file a recovation of their waiver.

But don’t worry, it won’t be made some sort of mandatory deal or anything . . .

Waivers would not be able to be required as a condition of employment or for benefits or services. The proposed law also states no records required by the registry law would be subject to disclosure and would remain confidential for matters of health care, employment, education, housing, insurance, government benefits and contracting.

Right.

Is this just New York? Well . . .

Washington and Virginia have recently enacted legislation, and nine other states, including Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin, have introduced similar bills in the legislatures.

 

Plans to disarm Portland State campus police on hold after too many quit.

Portland State University announced in August its plan to disarm campus police officers by replacing their firearms with tasers, but those plans have been put on a temporary hold.

The plan to disarm officers was announced earlier in 2020 after rallies and protesters at PSU called for justice for Jason Washington, who was killed by officers in 2018. Campus Reform reported on the efforts of PSU students and staff to disarm officers in 2019.

Campus Police Chief Willie Halliburton stated that in order for unarmed officers to be safe, the school would need two officers for every shift, which hasn’t been possible due to the retirement or resignation of several officers.

In a video message addressing the issue, Halliburton stated, “I am fully committed to transforming this police agency into a unit that will achieve these goals. We’ll do this without carrying weapons while on patrol.” Continue reading “”

Only 100 Billion Years! *gasp* And I had so much planned for the future.

Our Solar System Is Going to Totally Disintegrate Sooner Than We Thought.

Although the ground beneath our feet feels solid and reassuring (most of the time), nothing in this Universe lasts forever.

One day, our Sun will die, ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core shrinks down into a white dwarf, gradually leaking heat until it’s nothing more than a cold, dark, dead lump of rock, a thousand trillion years later.

But the rest of the Solar System will be long gone by then. According to new simulations, it will take just 100 billion years for any remaining planets to skedaddle off across the galaxy, leaving the dying Sun far behind. Continue reading “”

Philadelphia customer walks in on robbery at takeout restaurant, shoots suspect dead

A customer who walked into a robbery happening at a Philadelphia takeout restaurant shot and killed the armed suspect and will likely not face charges, authorities said.

Police said three employees were inside the Wingstop in northeast Philadelphia Sunday when a 53-year-old man walked in wearing a mask and gloves around 10:30 p.m. The suspect allegedly pointed a gun at them and demanded the employees hand over the money from the cash register drawer.

Investigators said that’s when a customer, identified by police only as a man in his late 20s, walked in talking on the phone, likely not noticing a robbery was taking place, WPVI reported.

The suspect then turned and pointed his firearm at the customer, demanding he turn over his cell phone.

The customer pulled his own gun and fired one shot at the perpetrator, striking him in the neck, said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene.

The incident remains under investigation and police are reviewing surveillance video.

The customer remained at the scene and was cooperating with authorities. He is not expected to face criminal charges.

“The customer who was also a victim because he had the gun pointed at him remained on scene, did cooperate with police,” Small said, according to KYW-TV. “We do have his weapon we know that just one shot was fired from that customer.”

The Right to Own a Gun Isn’t Just for Americans

The United States is unique for its tradition of gun ownership, which often shocks foreigners and leaves them in a state of disbelief at how ubiquitous firearm ownership is. Moreover, the idea of people carrying firearms almost seems unreal to many. Indeed, gun ownership is as American as apple pie and will not go away so easily, much to the dismay of the most rabid of gun control proponents.

Just look at gun sales since the covid-19 pandemic lockdowns took place. In the first six months of 2020 alone, 10.3 million firearm transactions went through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). From January to October, 17.2 million background checks were conducted, which surpassed the 2016 record of 15.7 million.

In short, gun ownership in America won’t go away so easily. It’s a firmly established tradition that has its roots in practices that go back to the British Isles. The Assize of Arms of 1181 issued by Henry II obligated all freemen of England to possess and bear arms in service of the king.

Further, Ryan McMaken has observed that America’s militia system drew a considerable amount of inspiration from the Levellers—English libertarian-minded reformers who were advocating for a decentralized militia that stood against the British Crown’s efforts to centralize political power in the mid-seventeenth century.

The “folkway” of firearm ownership made its way to the American colonies, where it took on a more radical twist and became a unique part of the American experience. Through its codification in the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms became an integral civil liberty and a unique aspect of American political culture that has largely withstood government overreach. But now there’s reason to believe that this concept will likely be going international. Continue reading “”

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

There’s a war against truth… and if we don’t win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty.

The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness.

Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the enormously popular YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech.

The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful
weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them.

A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights, The Parasitic Mind will be the most controversial and talked-about book of the year.

Barack Obama Smears Trump’s Latino Voters.

Confounding Democrats across America, President Trump made big gains in the Latino community on Election Day in states like Florida and Texas, vastly improving his 2016 performance with them.

The data doesn’t lie, as Politico explains:

Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and harsh immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. And he did better with Latinos in exit polls of each of the top 10 battleground states, a POLITICO review of election data found.

Joe Biden still won Latino voters overall. But as post-election data trickles in, Democrats are growing concerned. Trump’s notable gains weren’t limited to Miami’s Cuban Americans or border-region Tejanos. Although Florida and Texas stood out for the notable shift, Puerto Ricans as far away as Philadelphia and Mexican Americans in Milwaukee drifted Trump-ward.

………..

There are many reasons for Trump’s improved standing with a voting bloc that has long been crucial to Democrat wins at the state and national levels. We’ll get into those in a minute, but first, let’s take a look at how former President Barack Obama tried to explain away Trump’s gains.

In an interview to promote his new book “A Promised Land,” Obama told the New York City-based “Breakfast Club” radio program Wednesday that Hispanic voters who went for Trump ignored his allegedly racist rhetoric and instead supported him because he was pro-life and against gay marriage:

“Those of us who live in DC or New York or LA,” Obama argued, sometimes lack “a good enough sense of how big this country is and how a lot of folks do not accept at all” policies that people living in larger metropolitan areas take for granted.

The former president turned to the topic of Hispanics who voted for Trump as an example.

“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump, but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” he explained.

While Trump is indeed pro-life, gay marriage was never a focal point of his 2016 presidential campaign, nor did he make it an issue during his presidency.

So with that in mind, on what did Obama base his claims? He didn’t say, but it’s a safe bet to guess that the basis for his remarks came out of the same old Democratic playbook that almost always boils down Republican gains among key voting groups to some form of bigotry or ignorance, because minorities who vote for Republicans couldn’t possibly be rejecting the Democratic Party for legitimate reasons, right?

Contrary to what Obama told the Breakfast Club hosts, the Hispanic voters who pulled the lever for Trump and other Republicans in down-ballot races did so because they rejected the Democrat messaging on socialism, defunding the police, and job-killing initiatives like the Green New Deal:

Continue reading “”

The party of tolerance, diversity and inclusivity:

Morning Joe: We Have No Reason to Tolerate, Understand Anyone Who Supported Trump.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has a habit of picking on his own friends and family members who supported President Trump, but on Tuesday’s Morning Joe, he took it a step further and plainly admitted that his obsessions with the President are more important to him than the concerns of the American people.

Speaking to wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough griped: “[W]e can sit and try to figure out, Mika, why people feel the way they feel. I’m more concerned on why they’re as comfortable as they were with an autocrat —“.

Knowing where this diatribe was going, Brzezinski interrupted: “I am too.” Naturally, their own concerns that they whine about every morning overwhelm those of the American people.

Sounding just like a caricature of a closed-minded journalist, safely shielded from regular Americans in his liberal bubble, he arrogantly added: “I don’t — I don’t know that — that journalists that have been cloistered in New York City and Washington, D.C., uh should — should run around America trying to figure out why people feel the way they feel. I think people have told us through two elections.” Continue reading “”

David Prowse, Man Behind the Darth Vader Mask, Dies at 85

The Englishman worked on the first three ‘Star Wars’ films, but it was James Earl Jones’ voice, not his, that was heard. He could have played Chewbacca instead.

David Prowse, the champion English weightlifter and bodybuilder who supplied his 6-foot-7 frame — but not the voice or the deep breathing — to portray Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, died early in the morning on Saturday following a short illness. He was 85.

Prowse’s death was confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by his agent Thomas Bowington on Saturday night. Bowington Management also shared the news on Twitter, announcing his passing with “great regret and heart-wrenching sadness for us and million of fans around the world.” Continue reading “”

‘Safety’ Tips from Gun Prohibitionists Have Hidden Agenda

“Gun sales are way up, in Pennsylvania and across the country. And many are first-time owners,” The Philadelphia Inquirer notes in a “Philly Tips” column. “Here’s what you need to know about gun safety.”

Gun owners can be forgiven if that assertion causes their antennae to go up. The mainstream press, what I call the DSM (Duranty/Streicher Media), has not exactly been supportive of the right to keep and bear arms. Plus, we have seen too often how the term “commonsense gun safety laws” is contorted by gun-grabbers (with little actual knowledge of firearms and shooting) to mean more infringements that won’t do a thing to stop evil people from doing evil things and stupid/lazy people from doing stupid/lazy things.

So, the initial questions ought to be: Who are the experts? What are their qualifications? Do they have an observable agenda?

Scott Charles is the first “authority” we meet, presented as “a gun violence educator and trauma outreach coordinator for Temple University Hospital.”

He says he’s a gun owner, but if he has any specialized training/credentialing that give him notable credibility as a gun safety expert, whoever wrote up his Temple Safety Net profile failed to list them. Instead, we find he has been “an at-risk youth specialist for the State Department of Education [and] assisted in the development of a statewide rite of passage program for young African American males.” He went on to get some degrees that have nothing to do with firearms and has been featured on network television, PBS, and a “documentary” about urban criminals using guns. He’s received some community awards, one of them being from CeaseFire PA, a group that used to admit it was about “gun control.”

So what are Charles’ “gun safety” qualifications? If you didn’t give him time to look it up on the internet, would he know who Jeff Cooper was and be able to explain his rules? Would he be able to tell you what to do about safety issues shooters may encounter at the range like misfires or hangfires? Could he even tell you what those are? Maybe he could. Maybe we just need to see a relevant CV. Maybe.

“As a gun owner and someone who sees the consequences of gun injury, this is something we should take seriously,”  Charles pontificates. “We have a lot of novice, first-time gun owners taking that gun home where there are children, and the data we have says that firearm is most likely to be used to harm somebody in the home.”

So we see him adopting the gun-grabber talking point that guns in the home are more dangerous than not having them in the home. But he nonetheless says he has them in his home. Agenda much? Then you go to his Twitter page and his political predispositions make it all clear. Continue reading “”

Yeglesias is to paraphrase Paul( of Tarsus) ; ‘A Proggie of Proggies’
Maybe he’s also one of the ‘new gun owners’ and he bought an AR even?

BLUF:
Yglesias’ piece has been met with mostly positive comments from his audience, and several say that they’ve been persuaded by his argument, which is fantastic. Look, as much as I’d love to convert every one of these folks to Second Amendment stalwarts, I know that’s not going to happen. I tend to subscribe to Milton Friedman’s view of politics:

The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.

I’ll accept the wrong people doing the right thing for purely political reasons if it leads to our Second Amendment rights becoming more secure. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to continue to evangelize on the issue of the importance of our Constitutional rights, but we also need to think about ways to make our case in language the Left can understand, and Yglesias’ argument is a good exercise in how to do so.

Vox Co-Founder: Democrats’ Embrace Of Gun Control “Misguided”

Gun owners and conservatives have been saying this all along, of course, but it’s rare these days to hear someone on the Left admit that gun control isn’t such a great idea politically speaking. Kudos to Matt Yglesias for stepping up to the plate. The pundit, who recently left Vox because even his progressive views were ticking off the young socialist staffers and he wanted the freedom to speak his mind without them pitching a fit over his columns, headed off to Substack, where he’s writing for a paid audience and enjoying complete editorial freedom.

In his latest piece, Yglesias admits he’s stirring the pot with his lefty audience by arguing that Democrats would be better off dropping gun control as a political issue, but this isn’t just an attempt to troll his audience. As Yglesias puts it, the “juice here just isn’t worth the squeeze.”

The entire piece by Yglesias is well worth a read and far too long to quote extensively here, but his basic point is simple: Americans may say they support a few individual gun control agenda items like universal background checks or red flag laws, but there’s no stomach or yearning for the kind of firearm-free society that gun control advocates embrace.

Yglesias is a lefty, and he’s not making an argument trying to convince his audience of the importance of the Second Amendment as an individual right. His point is that it’s not an issue that Democrats should run on. Continue reading “”

Robbery suspect fatally shot by victim in Lauderdale Lakes

LAUDERDALE LAKES, Fla. – A man was fatally shot by the victim he was trying to rob last week in Lauderdale Lakes, authorities said.

According to Broward Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Carey Codd, the unidentified man and another suspect, identified as Litanis Alcira, 41, of Margate, committed an armed robbery around 10:30 p.m. last Friday in the 3900 block of Northwest 34th Way.

Codd said one of the robbery victims fired his gun and shot Alcira’s accomplice.

Alcira drove the man away from the scene and called 911, Codd said.

She said deputies responded, as well as Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue personnel.

The man who was shot was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died.

Alcira was arrested on charges of murder and two counts of armed robbery.

The case will be forwarded to the Broward County State Attorney’s Office to review the circumstances of the shooting by the robbery victim, Codd said.

Resident shoots 2 suspects in Lynchburg home invasion

The Lynchburg Police Department is investigating a home invasion that occurred on Wooldridge Circle early Wednesday morning, Nov. 25.

According to police, at 1:40 a.m., officers responded to the 100-block of Wooldridge Circle for a report of a burglary in progress.

They say two men knocked on a residence and assaulted the resident before trying to enter the home. The resident shot both suspects who suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

27-year-old James Franklin of Roanoke is charged with breaking and entering and assault and battery and 26-year-old Alan Douglas Mould of Lynchburg is charged with breaking and entering and assault and battery.

 

Don’t understand? Au contraire mon ami. They hold it in contempt.

Axios Founder: Most media publications don’t understand 50% of America.

The founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei, says that he’s concerned America will split in two over the lack of understanding of Trump supporters’ values.