Montana House of Representatives Pass ‘Permitless Carry’ Bill

HELENA- The Montana House of Representatives voted 66-31 Thursday to pass House Bill 102 by Representative Seth Berglee (R-Joliet). House Bill 102 removes state barriers to individuals exercising their constitutional right to carry a firearm for self-defense. It allows individuals who are lawfully allowed to open carry a firearm to carry concealed in the same areas without a permit. Additionally, HB 102 ensures that young adults on our college campuses aren’t denied their fundamental right to self-defense.

“It is long past due that law-abiding Montanans’ right to self-defense is respected without state barriers,” Rep. Seth Berglee said Thursday. “This bill modernizes Montana’s antiquated permitted and permitless carry laws to better reflect the safe carrying of firearms in the 21st century.”

House Bill 102 now moves to the Montana Senate for consideration.

“House Bill 102 is a priority bill for House Leadership, and I want to thank Representative Berglee for carrying it,” said Speaker of the House Wylie Galt. “House Republicans will continue advancing bills this session that protect the rights and individual freedoms of Montanans from government intrusion.”

CCW permit holder fatally shoots 18-year-old suspect during attempted robbery in Linden

COLUMBUS, Ohio — An 18-year-old man was shot and killed Tuesday night by a man who has a concealed carry license after the teenager tried to rob him, according to Columbus police.

Officers were called to the E&E Food Market in the 700 block of East Hudson Street in the Linden area around 7:25 p.m.

When officers arrived, they found 18-year-old Kiran Hill shot. He was taken to Riverside Methodist Hospital in critical condition, where he later died.

Police said Hill and 17-year-old Josiah Cocroft tried to rob a 33-year-old man at the market.

Police said Hill pulled a gun on the man and then the man, who has a CCW permit, pulled out his own gun.

Hill was shot when he and the man exchanged gunfire, police said.

The man who shot Hill stayed at the scene.

Police arrested Cocroft, who detectives said was with Hill, and charged him with murder.

Man Shoots Robber Who Was Holding Up Woman At Gunpoint In Calumet Heights

CHICAGO (CBS) — A man was holding up a woman at gunpoint in the Calumet Heights neighborhood late Tuesday when another man stepped in and shot the robber, police said.

At 5:59 p.m., the 39-year-old woman was on the street in the 9000 block of South East End Avenue when the robber walked up, took out a gun, and demanded her property, police said.

Then another man approached both the robber and the victim, took out his own gun, and shot the robber, police said.

The robber was wounded in the right leg and found his own way to Jackson Park Hospital, where his condition was stabilized, police said.

Area Two detectives were investigating late Tuesday.

Well, actually it’s ‘We The People‘ are the key.

Manchin Key to Thwarting New Gun-Control Legislation, Second Amendment Groups Say.

As the Biden administration prepares to enter office, Second Amendment activists are looking to a Democrat in the hopes that he will serve as a bulwark against his own party’s efforts to tighten gun-control laws.

With Democrats set to take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress in just seven days, Second Amendment activists are raising the specter of sweeping legislative action, from an assault-weapons ban and universal background checks to a federal red-flag law that would allow police to seize guns from those perceived as a threat.

The activists are looking to the upper chamber’s most conservative Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin (W. Va.), as a key ally, pointing to his opposition to the sorts of procedural changes, such as ending the filibuster and court packing, that could allow Democrats to pass gun-control legislation with a simple majority.

“If [Manchin] caves on that, we lose everything. If he stands strong, then we can defeat everything,” said Erich Pratt, senior vice president of the Gun Owners of America.

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California Is Worse Than You Think.

My colleague from the philosophy department was becoming increasingly angry. He was trying to be polite, but it was clear that he was raging inside. After a few minutes, he smiled a very strained smile and excused himself.

Our conversation was about California, or to be more specific, California governance. As readers can imagine, he was bullish on how the Democratic Party governs the state, California being perhaps the most one-party state in the USA. Every statewide election has gone to a Democrat in the last decade, and Democrats have a supermajority in the state legislature, which means that there is no meaningful Republican opposition and whatever the Democrats want, they get.

Not surprisingly, California governance is squarely progressive. The unions representing government employees effectively run the legislature, and as a result, pay, benefits, and pensions for those workers increasingly are straining the state budgets. (Steven Greenhut, a libertarian journalist based in California, has documented the unsustainable growth of government in that state for nearly two decades.) Yet, the state continues to march politically and economically in the progressive direction as though the laws of economics didn’t matter.

For the most part I have observed progressive California from far away, but my life took a different turn a few years ago, and the state is becoming my new home. I married a retired nurse from Sacramento in 2018, and because of health issues with her adult daughter, she has to remain in that city, something not in our original plans. Because my school’s campus either has been closed or severely restricted during the covid-19 lockdowns, I have spent most of the past year working from my wife’s home.

Living and working in California has offered me the opportunity to observe California progressivism up close, and it has been an interesting experience. Yes, the state where I officially reside, Maryland, is famously one-party and progressive, but the progressivism of California makes Maryland’s legislature look almost red state by comparison and surreal in some ways.

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Arkansas Senate panel advances ‘Stand Your Ground’ bill

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — An Arkansas Senate panel on Wednesday advanced legislation loosening restrictions on the use of deadly force in self defense, two years after failing before the same committee.

By a 5-2 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed the proposal that remove would the state’s duty to retreat in certain circumstances. The measure now heads to the majority-Republican Senate.

A similar proposal failed before the same committee two years ago but was widely expected to win approval Wednesday, with five of the bill’s sponsors holding seats on the eight-person panel.

For Our Leftist Elites, the Double Standard’s Meant to Be Blatant. That’s the Point

I came to understand our political situation today by watching gorilla documentaries. Let me explain.

At day’s end, when I’m exhausted, I wind down by finally turning on the television. The last things I usually watch are nature films, on the diverse, fascinating, and mostly apolitical channel CuriosityStream. For a grand total of $12 per year (as of now), you get access to thousands of polished, beautifully produced documentaries on every subject from ancient history to contemporary science. It’s the best entertainment money I’ve ever spent.

Invariably, I look for animal films. First of all, I’m a sucker for God’s innocent creatures, especially the furry ones. But I take delight in all the evidence of direct, Divine design all through the animal kingdom — from speeding sharks to circling condors. I do wish CuriosityStream would air some programming from the Discovery Institute. Its scientists do much better explaining nature via design than Darwinists do with their “just so” stories and smuggled-in teleology. (“Evolution developed the eagle’s eye to make it a better hunter… .”)

The Pyramid Is the Point

One thing I notice among most higher mammals, especially primates: the almost universal preoccupation with hierarchy. In some species, only the highest status female gets to breed. Once she claims that position, usually by bullying other females, it goes mostly unchallenged. But much more prevalent are species where the status that matters is male. The dominant male collects a harem of she-gorillas or sea lionesses, and fathers all the group’s children. Lesser males steer well clear of females, and accept the scraps from hunts, lest they summon the alpha male’s wrath. Often the dominant males will go out of their way to humiliate their lesser brethren, just to remind them who’s boss.

And that’s how to understand what’s happening politically right now in America.

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10 Republican Representatives voted with the Demoncraps. They are:

John Katko (NY)

Liz Cheney (WY)

Adam Kinzinger (IL)

Fred Upton (MI)

Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)

Dan Newhouse (WA)

Peter Meijer (MI)

Tom Rice (SC)

Anthony Gonzalez (OH)

David Valadao (CA)

They were talking about impeaching him before he was even sworn in, which tells you a lot about the seriousness of this. Whoopdie-Doo

BLUF:
If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell does not attempt to reconvene the Senate, it all but guarantees Trump won’t be tried in the Senate until after 1 p.m. on Jan. 20, an hour after he becomes an ex-president.

House impeaches Trump a second time, but conviction and removal are unlikely.

The House impeached President Trump for the second time Wednesday, charging him for behavior they believe caused the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead, dozens injured, and the historic building defaced and damaged.

Ten House Republicans joined all House Democrats to pass a single impeachment article accusing Trump of inciting an insurrection.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, must now decide when to send the article to the Senate, which is not scheduled to be in session until Jan. 19 and is unlikely to consider it until after Trump leaves office.

Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20 at 12 p.m.

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Montana House Weighs Elimination of Many State-Mandated Gun Free Zones

The Montana House will soon vote on legislation to defend self-defense rights by eliminating state government-mandated gun free zones at Montana university campuses and other schools on public property.

The self-defense legislation, House Bill 102, is sponsored by Rep. Seth Berglee (R-Dist. 58).

HB 102 is presented as an Act “to enhance the safety of people by expanding their legal ability to provide for their own defense by reducing or eliminating government-mandated places were only criminals are armed and where citizens are prevented from exercising their fundamental right to defend themselves and others.”

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A few days ago, I told the Shootists’ Vice-Chairman to mark my words that on 21 January, we’d start to see a miraculous national recovery begin from the bug, just to make SloJoe look good.

Will COVID Numbers Now Shift for Biden’s Benefit?

How much of the past year was about the actual coronavirus rather than a political weapon to damage President Trump and remove him from office? The answer is obvious. We have had viral pandemics before, including a seasonal influenza, without mask mandates, social distancing, business closures, travel restrictions, and hysterical media coverage.

Much of the hair-on-fire reporting is over cases and deaths. As I have previously written, a positive test is not the same as a case, and a death with COVID is different than death from COVID.

What if these definitions suddenly change in the upcoming weeks, once Joe Biden is in the White House, creating the impression that getting rid of the Orange Man caused the case and fatality numbers to suddenly plummet, not because of anything Biden did, but simply because he isn’t Trump?

Rewriting history is a popular pastime for the left. Just ask George Orwell or observe current events including the social media purge and cancel culture. How might this play out with COVID?

Start with testing — the PCR test which is overly sensitive. From that bastion of right-wing conspiracy, the New York Times,

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

In addition, a positive PCR test is not necessarily a case of COVID. There is a “case definition,” something the corporate media is willfully ignoring. According to the CDC, a case requires, “presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.”  Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.

The result is that case counts are wildly inflated and are being used to drive lockdowns, business and school closures, mask mandates, and other measures that may not be necessary or even helpful.

What if the definitions conveniently change in the upcoming weeks?

As reported by Zero Hedge last week, “The FDA today joined The WHO and Dr. [Anthony] Fauci in admitting there is a notable risk of false results from the standard PCR test used to define whether an individual is a COVID case or not.”

Did Dr. Fauci just realize this? After decades working in public health and infectious diseases, test sensitivity is something he understands only too well. If he knew, did he say or do anything?

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FIGHT BACK AGAINST ANTI-GUN SOCIAL BIGOTRY
DON’T FEED THE GUN PROHIBITIONISTS!

For the past few months, a major gun rights organization has been quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — conducting what amounts to an educational campaign, alerting the nation’s gun owners about anti-gun businesses and their CEOs who use their profits to discriminate against the Second Amendment.

This is not a “boycott list,” as some have unfairly described it. According to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), the purpose is to provide gun owners with information so they can decide where to spend their money.

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BIDEN’S TWEET WAS ATTACK ON ALL GUN OWNERS; SAF’S PROGRAM FIGHTS BACK

BELLEVUE, WA – Joe Biden’s Twitter message to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords may read like a threat against one gun rights organization, but it is really an attack on every gun owner in the nation, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

Biden pledged to work with Giffords on her extremist gun control agenda, and promised to “defeat the NRA,” in the process, but SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said that’s just cover for a bigger goal.

“Joe Biden has labored relentlessly for decades to reduce the Second Amendment to rubble,” Gottlieb stated. “He may attack one group by name, but his goal is to crush the rights of every gun owner in our country.

“By attacking the Second Amendment Rights of 100 million Americans,” Gottlieb continued, “Biden is not bringing us together but dividing us further. If people take to the streets in protest, if violence occurs it will be his fault and he should be impeached for violating our constitutional rights and inciting violence. Maybe it is time to ban him from Twitter and Facebook!”

This week SAF is launching its new major advertising effort to recruit tens of thousands of gun owners into the 2nd Amendment First Responder program. SAF is running a one-minute message 40 times this week, on several national networks, to educate millions of law-abiding gun owners about the gun rights battle. This message will appear on DirecTV, Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, MSNBC, The Weather Channel, One America News Network, CNBC, HLN, Bloomberg and Dish TV.

This hard-hitting ad urges gun owners and viewers concerned about the civil right to bear arms to join the fight by texting ‘PROTECT 2A’ to ‘474747’. By texting, people can support SAF’s educational and legal action programs to protect their rights.

“Joe Biden isn’t fooling anybody,” Gottlieb observed. “He spent 47 years on Capitol Hill trying to turn the right to keep and bear arms into a regulated privilege. Now that he’s headed to the White House, he thinks he will be able to complete his mission. We’re working to swell the ranks of our 2nd Amendment First Responder project to stop him.”

“We didn’t start the fire, Biden did,” he said.

 

Suspect killed by employee during smoke shop robbery in Barstow
Unidentified man shot multiple times by store employee

A shooting at a smoke shop in Barstow this week left a robbery suspect dead after Barstow Police officials said he pointed a handgun at a store employee and demanded money and property.

The shooting occurred Wednesday afternoon at the So Cal Smoke Shop located at 1251 East Main Street. There, detectives learned through an investigation that the employee retrieved a handgun and shot the unidentified man as he was robbing the business, according to a Barstow Police statement.

The detectives interviewed multiple witnesses, reviewed surveillance video and processed the scene as part of the investigation, the statement said.

Officers were dispatched to So Cal Smoke Shop at about 2:37 p.m. Wednesday after receiving a report of a person shot during a robbery. At the scene, they found the alleged robber unresponsive, not breathing and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

The officers administered CPR and paramedics from the Barstow Fire Protection District continued life-saving efforts once they arrived. Despite their efforts, the man was later pronounced dead at the scene.

A deputy coroner from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Coroner Division and a deputy district attorney from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office also responded to the scene and assisted Barstow Police with the ensuing investigation, the statement said.

Liberal Media Scream: CNN wants conservative media squelched in ‘national emergency.’

This week’s Liberal Media Scream features CNN’s senior media reporter demanding the targeting of conservative media outlets who ignored their anti-Trump bias in reporting on the president and his administration.

On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, Oliver Darcy demanded conservative news sources be “held accountable,” clearly suggesting that they must be squelched, an expansion of the so-called “cancel culture” imposed with glee by outlets such as Twitter and Facebook on conservatives and even President Trump.

He cited Fox News and “TV providers that beam OAN and Newsmax into homes, or Rush Limbaugh. There are a lot of people profiting off of lies and conspiracy theories.”

He insisted, “this informational environment” must be “cleaned up.”

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Who’s Promoting A Civil War? The Media.

We Need a New Media System
If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.

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Cap and Ball Sixguns: Old Technology, New World

Ammunition is in short supply these last few months, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. RImfires and common defensive calibers like .380, 9mm and .45 went first, then .223/5.56. Since the election, even shotgun shells are scare as hens’ teeth. Leftist politicians may not have to gut the Second Amendment if shooters can’t find ammunition. When Mahbub Ali gave Kim a revolver, it was fully loaded. “Of what use,” the wily Afghan observed, “is a gun unfed?”

What ammunition is still available is often at scalpers’ prices. Paying a dollar a shot for steel-cased Russian junk is not my idea of a sweet deal, but what else can you do? In many parts of the country components for shooting muzzle-loaders are still available. Front-loading long guns now rival the power, accuracy and dependability of conventional cartridge firearms.

But what about handguns? Are cap and ball revolvers equally practical in today’s world?

My answer is a qualified “yes”. They are less convenient, slower loading, and require more care, but good ones are more than acceptably accurate. Power? Colt’s 1847 Walker, firing 60 grains of black powder and a 143-grain lead ball produces 396 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. A heavier conical bullet and the same charge pushes energy over 450 foot-pounds. That compares with the .357 Magnum and .40 S&W. Smaller-framed .44s and .36s equate to the .44 Special and .38 Special cartridges.

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Well, if they try any shenanigans around here, I can almost assure that they’ll be the ones ‘shocked’.

NEW ROLE FOR ANTIFA: BIDEN’S ‘SHOCK TROOPS.’

The election of President-elect Joe Biden does not signal the end of violent anarchist group antifa, sometimes portrayed by sympathetic media as a national anti-Trump movement.

Unmasked cover image.jpg

Instead, according to a journalist who has tracked its every move, antifa is likely to feel emboldened to challenge pro-Trump critics of the new Democratic administration.

And following Wednesday’s violent protests in the halls of Congress by Trump supporters, said Andy Ngo, “They will feel, in their own right, legitimized” to retaliate.

Ngo is a self-made antifa expert and critic who has used his platform on Twitter, with 842,200 followers, and as editor-at-large at the Post Millennial to publicize the violence of the group, including his own beating and death threats from members.

Next month, he is publishing his first book about the group, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, which includes excerpts from training books, identifies key leaders, and reveals a plan to recruit members through Major League Soccer fan clubs, including those for the Portland Timbers.

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Missouri Media Blaming Gun Laws For Violence

Everywhere you go, you tend to find violence exploding in this country, The violence surge isn’t isolated to one or two places; just about every major city has seen an increase. Almost no one is reporting a reduction in violence over the year, and that’s despite months of people being locked down in their homes. That suggests that when they got out, they made up for lost time.

In Missouri, they’re having the same problem as most everywhere else. That’s not surprising. St. Louis, for example, is a city that’s been plagued by violence in recent years.

Yet, it seems that once again, the media has to trip over themselves to lay at least some of the blame on gun rights.

To understand the full scope of gun violence across the state, The Kansas City Star interviewed experts, gathered information about dozens of shooting victims from families and obituaries, and analyzed data from police and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun incidents across the country. Because no complete official record exists, the numbers are preliminary, sourced from thousands of media outlets and public agencies.

The effort was undertaken as part of the Missouri Gun Violence Project, a two-year, statewide solutions journalism collaboration supported by the nonprofits Report for America and the Missouri Foundation for Health. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has also been a part of the collaboration.

In an extraordinary year, the people across the state grappling with violence — criminologists, health care professionals, violence interrupters, law enforcement officials — say the coronavirus pandemic’s disruptions aggravated gun violence, putting individuals more at risk and hampering prevention efforts.

But even before the pandemic, Missouri was primed to see worse violence after more than a decade of rolling back gun restrictions and a longstanding lack of trust between police and the most at-risk communities in the state’s largest cities.

Yet the publication acknowledges that the violence in Missouri is primarily driven by St. Louis and Kansas City, their two largest municipalities.

The problem I have is that if gun laws were the problem, then why wasn’t the problem more spread out? Why wasn’t it a problem for much smaller communities? These towns were under the authority of the exact same gun laws, after all. If the gun laws were responsible, then you’d think you’d see an uptick in violence across the board.

Before 2020, you didn’t.

In 2020, most people did acknowledge that the pandemic played some kind of role in the increased violence. It would be impossible not to acknowledge that fact simply because it’s right in front of our eyes.

But elsewhere, we didn’t see the problems being associated with gun laws anywhere else until the pandemic. If lax gun laws are the culprit, then we should see an increase across the board, and we simply don’t.

What that tells me is that it’s not the gun laws that are the problem. Again, if they were, the problems would be everywhere and they’re simply not. No, the problems reside somewhere in the cities themselves.

Yet the media prefers to scapegoat gun rights and gun ownership because it’s convenient and their readers lap it up. Heaven forbid they ever try to look a little deeper at the issue.