Category: Goobermint

Anti-Gun Politicians Lie About Violent Crime Because Telling the Truth Is Politically Costly

Last month, a man murdered his three daughters, ages 9, 10 and 13 in Sacramento, California. He also murdered the court-ordered chaperone who was supervising their visit. The murderer then shot himself. He used a modern rifle.

Democrat Governor Gavin Newsome called it, “Another senseless act of gun violence in America – In a church with kids inside – Our hearts go out to the victims, their families and their communities.”

Democrat State Attorney General Robert Bonta said, “We need to enforce more of the laws that we have. The rise in violent crime throughout the country is almost entirely because of guns.”

Of course they said that. They have to blame “the gun” because to speak the truth about what happened would offend of too many of the Democrats’ special interests. Here is some of what these Democrat officials couldn’t say out loud.

  • Democrat politicians couldn’t tell us the murderer was an illegal immigrant who overstayed his visa five years ago.
  • They couldn’t tell us that the murderer had an active restraining order that made him a prohibited possessor, and his possession of a firearm illegal. They left out that in legal documents the murderer swore he didn’t have any firearms.
  • They didn’t tell us that the murderer’s ex-girlfriend said he had mental health issues and had threatened her with violence and threatened to take his own life.
  • Democrats politicians didn’t tell us that the murderer was under a detainer request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that he could be deported.
  • They can’t say that the murderer was arrested and in police custody only five days ago for driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and assaulting police and medical staff who tried to help him.
  • Democrat politicians have to ignore that 85 percent of violent crimes don’t involve a firearm.

Democrats can’t speak these truths because those admissions would upset the special interests that keep these politicians in power.

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Combine a small apocalyptic sect with one of its major prophecies being fulfilled, as they saw it, by a law enforcement agency who it is said were looking for headlines to bolster its reputation for an increased budget, and what you wind up with is this.

The Waco Siege: What Happened When the Feds Laid Siege to the Branch Davidian Compound

“The record of the Waco incident documents mistakes. What the record from Waco does not evidence, however, is any improper motive or intent on the part of law enforcement.”

The siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is an important event in American history because it directly led to one of the biggest terrorist attacks on American soil – the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. It’s not necessary to defend this act of terrorism to understand why the entire freedom movement of the time was so incensed by it. Indeed, it stood as a symbol of federal overreach and the corruption of the Clinton Administration.

It’s important to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the siege of Waco, just as it is important to do so with the siege of Ruby Ridge or the attack on the American consolate in Benghazi. With every event, it is important to stick to the facts and what can be extrapolated from them to make the strongest argument about what went wrong and why, and what could be done differently in the future.

The Raid of Waco

The actual events of the raid can be difficult to tease out. Each side disagrees as to what the sequence of events were.

What we know is that, based on an affidavit filed by Davy Aguilera, the ATF obtained a search warrant. This was based on the testimony of a postal agent about what he considered to be suspicious deliveries to Mt. Carmel. However, none of the deliveries were in and of themselves illegal, and included items such as forty five AR-15 upper receivers, and five M-16 upper receivers.

The search warrant was mostly based on the number of weapons possessed by the Davidians. But in the United States of America, we have the right to own as many weapons as we can afford. What’s more, the notion that the Davidians were “stockpiling” weapons is a red herring: They were selling weapons (legally) in addition to buying them, so “inventory” might be the more accurate term for what they had at Mt. Carmel.

According to Dick J. Reavis, author of The Ashes of Waco:

“One of the prophecies that has been around Mt. Carmel since 1934 called for an ultimate confrontation between God’s people, or those at Mr. Carmel, and the forces of an armed apostate power called Babylon . . . Perhaps with that in mind, in 1991, the Davidians began studying armaments and buying and selling guns. He (Koresh) pretty quickly found out there is a lot of money to be made at gun shows and he and other people started going to gun shows. And they bought and sold. They bought items that weren’t guns, and they bought items that were guns. We now say, or the press now says, most people say, they stockpiled weapons. All gun dealers stockpile weapons. We call those stockpiles an inventory. There was an inventory of weapons at Mt. Carmel. A number of guys were involved in the gun shows, just as a number were involved in souping up and restoring cars, and just as a number were involved in playing in the band. There were circles or knots or subsets of people who had hobby interests that were only indirectly related to theology, and guns were one of those interests.”

The ATF’s raid, codenamed “Showtime,” was moved up one day in response to a local newspaper’s article on the Davidians. The local sheriff was not aware of the raid, but the Davidians knew it was coming. The ATF chose to raid the property rather than pick up Koresh while he was in town. An ATF agent who had infiltrated the group reported that they knew of the raid and that his cover was blown. When asked what they were doing when he left the property on the day of the raid, he said that the Davidians were praying.

There was another factor influencing the ATF’s decision to raid the Davidians when they did: Money. According to Henry Ruth, one of three independent reviewers of the Treasury Department’s report on Waco:

“With appropriations hearings a week away, a large successful raid for the ATF would’ve proposed major positive headlines for the agency. It would’ve helped counter the narrative of the ATF as a rogue agency. And it would’ve spread fear about radical fringe groups which would put pressure on Congress to increase its budget. Part of their motivation was to use the siege at Waco as a publicity stunt.”………..

The Final Siege of Mount Carmel

The newly minted U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was unhappy with the progress being made at Waco, and invoked (what else) the abuse of children in her pitch for a resolution to the conflict. For his part, President Clinton, who had dealt with a similar situation as Governor of Arkansas in 1985 – with The Covenant, The Sword, and The Arm of the Lord – initially urged waiting out the group. Reno, however, cited antsy agents and budgetary concerns. Ultimately, Clinton told her to do whatever she thought was best.

The FBI Hostage Rescue Team – derisively nicknamed the “Hostage Roasting Team” and which denied any evidence of child abuse – came armed with 50 caliber rifles and punched holes in the walls of the building with explosives so they could pump CS gas into a building with small children and infants inside. The plan was to announce to the group that there was no plan to take the house by force while slowly pumping greater amounts of CS gas inside to increase pressure on them to leave.

The fires began around noon on the final day of the standoff. The FBI maintains that they were started deliberately by the Davidians, with some survivors claiming that the FBI started the fires either intentionally or accidentally. Footage of the Davidians talking about gasoline seem to refer to them making Molotov cocktails to fight the FBI with.

Nine people left the building during the fire. The remaining people inside all died either from the fire, smoke inhalation, were buried alive by rubble or were shot. Some showed signs of death by cyanide poisoning, which would likely have been a result of the burning CS gas. All told, there were 76 deaths.

FBI claims in the 51 days during the standoff they never fired a single shot. Then 27 of the people in the compound died of bullet wounds. Then those were self-inflicted or inflicted by other members inside the compound. Federal investigators considered suicide as a possible form of gunshot death for the Davidians. It did not consider forced execution to be a likely cause of death.

An exchange between Sen. Chuck Schumer and Assistant Attorney General Edward Dennis in the Clinton Administration in the subsequent congressional investigation summed it up best:

Charles E. Schumer, U.S. Congressman, New York (D):We’ve heard that in the 51 days the FBI was involved, they did not fire a single shot . . . First, That would mean quite certainly that 27 of the people who died in the compound, I think the autopsy report showed 27, I may be off by one or two, who died of bullet wounds, those were self-inflicted or inflicted by other members within the compound . . .

Edward Dennis, Former Assistant Attorney General, Clinton Administration: I think that’s a key issue. The fact that Koresh was capable of setting the fire, of killing his own followers, that parents were capable of killing children, or adults were capable of killing children, really says more about the mentality of the individual that you were dealing with and the difficulty in trying to figure out the best way to talk he and his followers out of that compound.

After the Raid

Today the only building on the site is a small chapel erected years after the raid. The building itself was razed. The incoming head of the ATF, John Magaw, was critical of the raid and made the Treasury Department’s Blue Book report on the matter required reading for incoming agents.

Federal Judge Strikes Down Biden Admin’s Travel Mask Mandate

A United States District Court judge in Florida vacated the nationwide travel mask mandate on Monday in a ruling that found the mask requirement for travel via mass transit, planes, and trains violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The lengthy ruling explains how the Biden administration “improperly invoked the order and interpretive rule exceptions to notice and comment,” “improperly invoked the good cause exception” to such rulemaking in a manner that “was not harmless error” and how the mandate “is arbitrary and capricious because the CDC failed to adequately explain its reasoning.”

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New Seattle Police Report on Shootings Underscores Total Gun Tax Failure

Data contained in the Seattle Police Department’s 2021 Year-End Crime Report underscores the complete failure of Seattle’s six-year-old gun control tax on firearms and ammunition that not only hasn’t reduced violence in the city, it also has never come close to meeting projected revenue figures put forth in 2015.

According to the new report, something else the city has not wanted to acknowledge is now revealed, thanks to news coverage by KING5 News, the local NBC affiliate.

Seattle police “responded to 113 shooting or shots fired calls at or near (a homeless) encampment,” KING reported. “That’s 18% of the total 612 calls over the course of the year.”

The report says that was a 6 percent increase over 2020, when police logged 51 shootings at or near an encampment, out of 437 “shootings or shots fired calls” that year. Long story short, homeless encampments tolerated by city government over the past few years have become magnets for crime.

According to KING, “City officials say the data reveals, for the first time, a direct link between public safety and homeless encampments…Mayor Bruce Harrell also acknowledged a direct connection on Thursday.

“Yes, there is a clear correlation between the encampments,” Harrell admitted.

He said this will ignite “a new conversation” with the council about public safety.

Harrell succeeded former liberal Mayor Jenny Durkan, whose four-year term will be remembered for politically catastrophic events including the 2020 Seattle riots, creation of the so-called “CHOP zone” spanning about six blocks of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and the two homicides that occurred there, her remark on national television that 2020 would be a “summer of love,” the City Council attacks on the police budget, and the council’s quick leftward tilt spearheaded by avowed Socialist Councilwoman Kshama Sawant.

But the story not even KING is telling is about the failed gun control tax, a symptom of the larger failure of gun control statewide. Evergreen State gun owners frequently suggest on social media Washington’s recently-passed gun laws should be scrapped, and that the Legislature should repeal provisions of Initiatives 594 (2014) and 1639 (2018) that force gun owners to endure background checks even for private sales—a requirement routinely ignored by the criminal element—require proof of training to purchase a so-called “assault rifle,” and prevent anyone under age 21 to purchase a semi-auto rifle.

In 2015, when the gun tax was proposed by anti-gun former Councilman Tim Burgess, he offered revenue forecasts ranging between $300,000 and $500,000 annually. Revenues were supposed to pay for anti-violence and outreach programs. But the gun control tax has never lived up to the projection, and it actually resulted in the loss of one of the city’s top firearms retailers, which relocated first to Lynnwood in neighboring Snohomish County and then to Woodinville, back in King County, taking its Seattle customers out of the city.

  • In 2016, the first full year of collection, the tax ($25 for each firearm sale and 5 cents on each round of centerfire ammunition or 2 cents for each rimfire round sold) brought in $103,766.22. There were 19 total homicides in Seattle that year.
  • The following year (2017), the tax brought in $93,220.74—a decline of more than $10,000—and the city logged 27 murders.
  • In 2018, the tax brought in even less–$77,518—and Seattle police reported 32 homicides for the year.
  • The next year (2019), the gun/ammo tax produced $85,352 in revenue and the city experienced 36 homicides, according to Seattle police data.
  • In 2020, the year of national civil unrest spurred by the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police, gun and ammunition sales spiked dramatically across the country. This sales surge accounted for a jump to $184,836 in gun and ammunition tax revenue, but was accompanied by a staggering 52 murders.
  • Finally, in 2021, things settled down a bit, gun and ammunition sales slowed and the city realized $165,416 in tax revenue, and murders declined to 40 for the year.

It should also be noted that in 2016, Seattle police logged 265 “shots fired” reports, resulting in 62 non-fatal shootings and 11 fatal shootings. By 2021, according to SPD data, there were 438 “shots fired” reports, resulting in 143 persons wounded and 31 killed by people misusing firearms.

There is no small irony that Seattle is headquarters to the billionaire-backed “Alliance for Gun Responsibility,” a gun prohibition lobbying group that bankrolled the 2014 and 2108 anti-gun-rights initiatives and supported other statewide gun restrictions under the guise of “gun safety” or “gun reform,” which translates to gun control. From the outset, gun rights groups including the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, headquartered in nearby Bellevue, accurately predicted all of these efforts would fail to achieve their advertised goals.

In a typical business environment, any project that consistently fails to achieve its goals or revenue forecast is usually scrapped. When it’s a gun control effort, however, proponents merely double down, contending they didn’t “go far enough” with restrictions.

Media Has a New Talking Point to Defend Joe Biden – but It Makes Him Sound Even Worse

While sometimes you get a little truth from the liberal media, such as when CNN polling guy Harry Enten said how “really, really, really bad” the polling numbers for Joe Biden were — indeed, the worst ever for anyone at this stage of their term — a lot of the liberal media is still an acid bath of people hidebound to push the Democratic narrative to do what they can for Joe Biden.

One of the worst shills for the Democratic narrative is CNN’s John Harwood. But his excuse for Joe Biden — the latest Democratic talking point to excuse his failures — isn’t going to help him. Indeed, it makes him sound worse. According to Harwood, there’s not much Biden can do about any of the problems that are plaguing the country.

There’s just not much President Joe Biden can do about it.
There’s not much he can do to curb inflation.
There’s not much he can do to stop migrants from reaching America’s southern border.
Or to reduce crime,
or to make vaccine resisters get shots that would hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic.
There’s not much he can do to compel cooperation from defectors within his thin Democratic congressional majorities. There is nothing at all he can do to compel it from Republican adversaries who would rather aggravate than alleviate his burdens.

But this appears to be the new talking point for some of the media. Here it is on ABC, as well, on Sunday.

Harwood even admits that Joe Biden’s policies led to inflation, “Liberal and conservative economists share a growing consensus that Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan last year pumped too much money into the economy.” But his response? “Yet the White House can’t fundamentally alter that reality now.”

Oh, great, so we should just suffer when he was told it was wrong and he did it anyway? When he lied to us about inflation being “transitory” for months? When he continues to lie about it being Putin’s fault? And the worst thing is that Biden would have spent even more on the plans that he was trying to push through Congress which — if he had gotten them — would have driven up inflation even more. So either he was still ignorant as to what causes inflation or he’s just so wedded to spending for the Democratic agenda that he doesn’t care how much it might hurt Americans.

Harwood’s excuse for Biden on the border crisis was even worse.

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Analysis: Biden’s Aggression Elevates Gun Politics Before the Election

Will gun control become a top election issue?

It didn’t seem likely for a while. The high visibility of pressing concerns like 40-year high inflation rates, a burgeoning humanitarian crisis in the ongoing war in Ukraine, and domestic culture warring over education policy have been at the top of most Americans’ minds.

But actions taken by President Joe Biden this week may very well have foisted the issue of guns back onto the radar of voters going into November’s midterm elections. Largely at the behest of a sustained pressure campaign from gun-control groups, President Biden announced his new nominee to head the ATF on Monday. He also announced the accelerated release of the final ATF rule banning “ghost gun” kits.

Either action taken on its own would be enough to raise the political stakes. Gun control by executive fiat is a policy route that draws the ire of gun owners and energizes gun-control advocates. But combining that announcement with the another attempt to successfully confirm a permanent ATF director takes the political stakes up a notch.

Getting a permanent ATF director confirmed is a tough battle in any political environment, as evidenced by the fact that only one director has been confirmed since 2006. The Trump administration was not even successful in confirming a nominee despite Republican control of the Senate at the time.

But the failure of David Chipman’s nomination to the ATF director role was perhaps the most high-profile political loss for Biden thus far in an administration that has seen its fair share of contentious confirmation battles. The fact that the Biden administration would return to that well after burning so much political capital in vain last time around suggests a commitment to making gun control a key selling point for his party.

Dettelbach may not have the same political baggage as his ill-fated predecessor. Chipman was a professional gun-control advocate employed by Giffords prior to his nomination. He also had a history of making controversial and derisive statements about the industry and gun owners he would be in charge of regulating at the ATF. Plus, serious concerns about his character while working as a federal agent were uncovered after his nomination.

Dettelbach supports many of the same gun restrictions Chipman did. He was endorsed by the gun-control groups during his failed 2018 AG campaign, but has never directly worked for them like Chipman did. He has used heated rhetoric to question the integrity of Ohio’s elections. But much of his background is still unexplored to this point.

The renewed push for a permanent ATF director is likely part of the White House’s attempt to dissuade voter concerns over rising crime. Dettelbach’s background as a prosecutor and the bipartisan support he has received thus far from other prosecutors and law enforcement officials provides some support for that idea.

However, Dettelbach is on record as supporting contentious gun-control policies like “assault weapons” bans and universal background check mandates. His backing of those policies will undoubtedly raise the salience of gun politics alongside crime concerns in his upcoming confirmation battle.

The president is taking a political risk by announcing another gun-control advocate to lead the agency charged with regulating the firearms industry while releasing controversial new gun regulations. It isn’t immediately clear this nominee will fare better than the last in terms of securing the support of moderates in the Senate, and another tense confirmation fight this close to election season could be a political liability for Democrats. At the same time, his final “ghost gun” kit ban has already mobilized Republican political opposition, and the forthcoming pistol brace ban–which will directly impact millions of Americans–will only add more fuel to that fire.

The President’s handling of gun policy has been underwater for nearly a year. Now, Democrats as a party are polling behind Republicans on guns too.

As election season draws nearer, it’s unclear how enthusiastic moderate Democrats from vulnerable states will be to vote for an ATF candidate with an established history of support for gun restrictions.

But it is clear that the President has set in motion the potential for gun politics to be a motivating issue for voters just months away from a midterm election poised to deliver serious Republican gains. How will voters react?

Why not just say it plainly? Biden is a bald faced liar, and always has been.

Biden Is Truth-Challenged When It Comes to the Second Amendment (and Much Else)

Since taking office, Joe Biden has been busy weaponizing the federal government against Americans who make or desire to purchase firearms. Naturally, he defends this by trotting out false claims about the Second Amendment. A favorite of his is the statement that when the Second Amendment was adopted, people couldn’t buy a cannon.

He’s taken to task for that assertion in this Truth about Guns post. 

Since he first made that statement, it has been refuted several times, such as in this article by Robert Wright.

Does Biden know or care? Of course not. The truth or falsity of a claim doesn’t matter, only advancing his agenda.

Even if it were true that the Second Amendment doesn’t allow anyone to buy a cannon, that would not logically lead to his conclusion that the feds should prevent buying all kinds of other firearms. Neither truth nor logic are of any concern to Biden.

If you’d like to be well armed to argue with Bidenistas over the meaning of the Second Amendment, I suggest reading America, Guns, and Freedom by Miguel Faria.

How Many Senile Democrats Does It Take To Ruin a Country?

We had a couple of “senior moment” stories yesterday involving people in the upper echelons of power in this country. It’s not pretty, but it can’t be ignored. Those of us here on the reality-based side of the aisle are duty-bound to acknowledge when things are amiss.

The first story involves Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who it often seems has been in the Senate since Andrew Jackson was president. Actually, she has been in office since winning a special election in 1992.

It would appear that the senior — no pun intended — senator from the Golden State is not quite as sharp as she used to be, which Robert wrote about yesterday:

Hunter Biden is just the tip of the iceberg: it’s lucrative to be a politician today, even if your father isn’t playing the role of president of the United States. There are innumerable ways in which our elected representatives can grow rich while doing the bidding of some powerful group, all perfectly legal: astronomical advances for books that hardly anyone will read, similarly inflated speaking fees, and much more.

What was once known as the public service has become so remunerative that it’s no wonder that politicians are clutching to power as they never have before in American history. Washington is now top-heavy with the Geritol set, and it doesn’t look as if that’s going to change anytime soon. But the talk around the nation’s capital Thursday is that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Beijing) is in the throes of a cognitive decline so severe as to make Old Joe Biden look as sharp as a tack, and that’s no malarkey, Jack.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote Thursday: “When a California Democrat in Congress recently engaged in an extended conversation with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, they prepared for a rigorous policy discussion like those they’d had with her many times over the last 15 years.

Instead, the lawmaker said, they had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours.” Dagnabbit, Chron, “they” refers to a group, not to an individual, but nowadays when women can get other women pregnant, grammar is the least of our worries.

Robert then goes on to brilliantly provide a variety of reference points to give the reader a sense of just how old Sen. Feinstein is. It’s not mean, it’s factual. I have long advocated for the repeal of the 17th Amendment. The Founding Fathers never intended for senators to be able to linger in Washington with multiple six-year terms, acquiring power that rulers of lesser countries might only dream of.

More troublesome is the ongoing saga of decline that we are witnessing in the man who currently occupies the Oval Office. Matt covered the latest episode in this national torture tale:

Joe Biden has had his fair share of Joe Biden Moments. Slurred words, confusing people, not knowing where he is. Yet, his senility repertoire seems to be expanding as of late, and on Thursday, seeing people who aren’t there appeared to be his latest trick. After giving a speech in which he again tried to blame inflation on Vladimir Putin, Biden turned and appeared to shake hands with thin air, before wandering around confused.

I’m not engaged in some gleeful pile-on here. This is rough stuff. I’m not the youngest guy on the block, I don’t want to end up like this. One of the ways I try to keep my mind sharp is by making sure that I’m not a Democrat.

It isn’t cruel to point out what we are all seeing whenever Biden’s handlers let him go in front of cameras — it’s a legitimate concern. He is, after all, still the most powerful man on Earth. While we’re all on edge worrying about a renewal of nuclear tensions with Russia, having a president who rarely knows where he is might be a cause for worry.

We’re blessed to live in a time when people can have much longer, and more productive, lives. Unfortunately, some people still hit the age wall and need to have the keys to the car taken away.

Or the nuclear launch codes.

The enormity of Biden’s crap-for-brains withdrawal in Afghanistan

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Thanks to the Government Accountability Office, we now have a clear picture of just how much U.S. military equipment has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, thanks to this Administration’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. Let’s have a look…

Aircraft: The Taliban now ranks #26 in the world in total military aircraft, thanks to us leaving behind
208 planes and helicopters:
110 helicopters
60 transport/cargo planes
20 light attack planes
18 intelligence/surveillance planes

Vehicles: You’ve probably seen the footage of the Taliban riding around in our humvees.
We left a total of 75,898 vehicles:
42,604 tactical vehicles
22,174 humvees
8,998 medium tactical vehicles
1,005 recovery vehicles
928 mine-resistant vehicles
189 armored tanks

Weapons: Get ready for this…
599,690 of our weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban:
358,530 rifles
126,295 pistols
64,363 machine guns
25,327 grenade launchers
12,692 shotguns
9,877 RPGs
2,606 howitzers

And you can throw a couple thousand night-vision goggles, surveillance drones, and communication devices on that list as well.

Price tag: In total, it adds up to nearly $84 BILLION DOLLARS in tax-payer-funded U.S. military equipment.

I have started to see other grocery items being rationed too

Baby-Formula Shortage Prompts Rationing at Target, Kroger, Walgreens and CVS.

The US’ largest retailers are rationing baby formula amid a national shortage – less than two months after a recall related to the death of an infant exacerbated the ongoing crisis.

As of Tuesday, stores such as CVS – the country’s largest pharmacy chain – and Target have announced restrictions on the amount of formula purchases shoppers can make, both online and in-person.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Target – which boasts 1,931 stores nationwide – announced stores in most states will now have a five-per-day limit on baby formula purchases, at the request of the Food and Drug Administration.

CVS, meanwhile, which oversees 9,932 US stores, are limiting customers to three purchases a day.

‘Following supplier challenges and increased customer demand, we’ve added a limit of three baby formula products per purchase in our stores and online,’ a spokesperson for the drug store told DailyMail.com Tuesday.

‘We’re continuing to work with our baby formula vendors to address this issue and we regret any inconvenience this causes our customers,’ the spokeswomen added.

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Inflation Hits Annualized Rate of 16.8%: Gas is up 52%. 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, Joe Biden went to Iowa and pandered to corn growers. He is lifting an EPA restriction on the amount of ethanol a gallon of gas can contain. People who follow the fuel industry and understand the engineering around producing fuel know that ethanol is a terrible additive to fuel. It decreases gas mileage. It’s not as efficient as gas.

Remember, Biden is doing this when farmers are going to pay significantly more for fertilizer because of his administration’s missteps in Ukraine leading to Putin’s invasion.

Biden’s actions yesterday just increased corn prices ($ZC_F).

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New Study Shows States With Least Restrictive Lockdowns Fared the Best

ccording to a new study titled “Final Report Card on State Responses to COVID-19,” states that implemented the least restrictive COVID-19 lockdowns performed far better than those that took the more draconian track.

The study, conducted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, found that “states which maximized the individual freedoms of business owners, consumers, workers and parents – and allowed their citizens to make their own risk assessments without government mandates – had the best performance.”

Moreover, the study notes:

“It turns out that in most cases, citizens living in states with minimal government interventions – including Nebraska, Iowa, Florida, and others – were able to make wise health-conscious assessments without an abundance of government rules and mandates. These states came through the pandemic with the least amount of collective damage to their economies, the education of their children, and with health outcomes that were in most cases no worse than states that used more heavy-handed tactics to slow the spread.”

On the other hand, as Stephen Moore, a co-author of the study said, “Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during Covid, particularly in blue states.”

The data absolutely support Moore’s conclusion.

Consider.

In the economic realm, the average unemployment increase for all 50 states and the District of Columbia during the pandemic was 2.8 percent. However, the states that kept their economies open fared far better than their counterparts. For example, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota experienced unemployment increases of 0.9 percent, 0.2 percent, and 0.7 percent, respectively. On the other side of the spectrum, the states that enacted long lockdowns suffered catastrophic unemployment increases, namely Hawaii (8.2 percent), New Jersey (5.5 percent), and New York (5.4 percent).

On the topic of education, the states that kept their public schools open for in-person learning also performed well above those that decided to close public schools for months. As the study notes:

“School closures may ultimately prove to be the largest policy error of the pandemic era in both economic and mortality terms. One study found that school closures at the end of the previous 2019-2020 school year are associated with 13.8 million years of life lost. An NIH analysis found that life expectancy for high school graduates is 4 to 6 years longer than high school dropouts. The OECD estimates that learning losses from pandemic era school closures could cause a 3% decline in lifetime earnings, and that a loss of just one third of a year of learning has a long-term economic impact of $14 trillion.”

Of course, this is even more maddening considering that COVID-19 posed little threat to children.

The third metric assessed by the study, mortality, shows that states that remained open did not experience higher death rates than compared to those that issued longstanding lockdowns.

Per the study, “locking down businesses, stores, churches, schools, and restaurants had almost no impact on health outcomes across states. States with strict lockdowns had virtually no better performance in Covid death rates than states that remained mostly open for business.”

By now, this should not come as that big of a surprise. A few months ago, Johns Hopkins released a similar study that found, “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”

It would be nice if the mainstream media reported these truths to the American public. However, that is far from likely given the fact that the vast majority of the media celebrated lockdown policies while berating governors and other elected officials who enacted less restrictive mitigation measures.

GOA SLAMS NYC MAYOR’S LOUSY ‘TOUGH-ON-CRIME’ STRATEGY AMID THE CITY’S SKYROCKETING CRIME AND SUBWAY SHOOTING

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 12, 2022

Washington, D.C. – Gun Owners of America (GOA) slams New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ failed “tough-on-crime” policies amid today’s NYC subway shooting and the skyrocketing crime that increased 14.5 percent from 2021.

This past November, the Supreme Court heard the case NYSRPA v. Bruen which questioned whether the state of New York’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on this case sometime before the end of June.

New York State Police told the Supreme Court that citizens do not need to carry guns on the subway since there are transit police. Mayor Adams also recently increased police presence on the subway to no avail.

Aidan Johnston, GOA’s Director of Federal Affairs, commented:

“Increased police presence cannot stop every tragedy. Once again, NYC’s gun control demonstrated that it has no impact.

“You are your own first responder. We need to empower individuals to defend themselves and exercise their right to bear arms—especially in public places.

“Only by taking up arms and shooting back can Americans restore public safety and take control out of the hands of violent criminals.”

GOA spokesmen are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America, and its sister organization Gun Owners Foundation, are nonprofits dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. For more information, visit GOA’s Press Center.

Whistleblower: Joe Biden’s ‘crackdown on ghost guns’ based on ATF hoax
Biden infringing on our 2A rights based upon inaccurate ATF data.

Joe Biden repeated some of his most discredited lies about the Second Amendment Monday during a press conference held in the Rose Garden – deer in Kevlar vests, fictitious prohibitions on the right to keep and bear arms, including cannons – but it is the actions he’s taking that are the most worrisome, because they’re all based upon a hoax by the ATF.

Without any congressional action and based solely on the flimsy authority of an executive order, Joe Biden is disarming Americans. He is taking away our right to build guns in our homes, even though Americans have been making guns in their homes since before there was a United States of America. Biden based his decision on “ghost gun” data he was given by the ATF – data even the ATF itself cannot verify, which a whistleblower claims the U.S. Justice Department admitted is inaccurate.

“Last year alone, law enforcement reported approximately 20,000 suspected ghost guns to be – to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That’s a tenfold increase in these ghost guns from 2016. Tenfold in five years,” Biden said Monday. “These guns are weapons of choice for many criminals. We’re going to do everything we can to deprive them of that choice and, when we find them, put them in jail for a long, long time. Law enforcement is sounding the alarms. Our communities are paying the price. And we’re acting.”

The entire “ghost gun” drama was started by Carlos A. Canino, the former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the ATF’s Los Angeles Field Division. In 2020, anti-gun activists asked Canino about the prevalence of homemade firearms in California. An earlier study said 30% of the guns recovered by ATF in California were unserialized “ghost guns,” but Canino said the real numbers were actually much higher. “Forty-one percent, so almost half our cases we’re coming across are these ‘ghost guns,’” Canino said. That was all it took.

A story by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project published last week showed that the ATF cannot verify Canino’s comments.

“I contacted the Los Angeles Field Division earlier today after your initial email, and their Public Information Officer was unable to verify any figures provided in 2019 by former-SAC Canino without knowing the time-period(s) he used for his comments,” an ATF spokesman said in the email.

After the story was published, a staff member for a U.S. Congressman came forward. This whistleblower, who asked that their name be withheld from publication, revealed even more problems about the ATF’s “ghost gun” statistics.

The staff member asked the U.S. Justice Department for “ghost gun” data, since both the ATF and the Bureau of Justice Statistics fall under the DOJ’s purview.

“Because it is not currently a federal crime to own either a homemade firearm or a braced pistol, DOJ claims they do not have accurate/comprehensive databases to track their use in crimes. They compile information from state and local police units – but that information is only as good as what is reported,” the whistleblower said in an email.

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Another ‘Known Wolf’

Brooklyn Subway Attack Suspect Previously Known to FBI and Cleared: Source

A federal law enforcement source told Newsweek that a suspect in Tuesday morning’s Brooklyn subway attack was previously known to the FBI and was entered into the Guardian Lead system in New Mexico though he was cleared after multiple interviews in 2019.

The suspect’s identity has yet to be revealed, but a New York Police Department official confirmed to Newsweek that a person was in custody hours after a vehicle of interest had been discovered.

The subway attack that injured multiple people in the New York City borough of Brooklyn Tuesday morning was initially considered an act of terrorism, the NYPD official told Newsweek. But the federal law enforcement source speaking to Newsweek said the attack could not be classified as terrorism until a motivation is established.

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ATF’s New ‘Ghost Gun’ Rules Are as Clear as Mud
The ATF used a lot of words that invite lawsuits and leave industry insiders baffled.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) finalized “ghost gun” rule surprised Cody Wilson, the head of Ghost Gunner. His company manufactures CNC mills that turn unfinished firearm receivers into products that can be included in completed firearms that have no serial numbers and are, hence, called “ghosts.” He’d anticipated a more-or-less explicit ban on so-called “80 percent receivers” which would leave his Ghost Gunner 3 that can turn a raw block of metal into an AR-15 receiver as the simplest remaining solution. Instead, by his reading, the new rules consumed a lot of pages to go after the most basic end of the DIY market.

Well, maybe. Other industry experts aren’t sure what the rules mean. That uncertainty poses huge challenges for manufacturers, vendors, and anybody trying to establish what is and isn’t legal.

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Nebraska concealed carry handgun bill comes short of votes

LINCOLN — In a surprise, state lawmakers failed to muster enough votes Monday to advance a concealed carry handgun bill, called “constitutional carry” by some.

The vote to invoke cloture was 31-9, two short of what’s needed to stop a filibuster and advance a bill. It was also four fewer senators than the number who supported advancement of the bill from first-round debate.

“To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement,” said State Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon, who has made passing the bill a priority during his six years in office.

25 other states

At least 25 other states have passed such laws. In Nebraska, it would have allowed people to carry a concealed weapon without obtaining a $100 state permit, undergoing a criminal background check and passing a gun safety class.

Brewer had worked for several weeks to negotiate a compromise to Legislative Bill 773 with the Omaha police union and police department, which had expressed concern about the bill watering down existing gun control ordinances in the state’s largest city and complicating their job of reducing gun violence.

The compromise amendment would have left in place an Omaha ordinance that requires registration of handguns. It also would have allowed for the continued prosecution of the crime of “carrying a concealed handgun” if a concealed gun was used in a long list of “covered offenses,” from robbery and kidnapping, to cockfighting and disorderly conduct.

NRA urged ‘no’ vote

But the powerful National Rifle Association urged a “no” vote against the amendment, calling it “a discriminatory attempt to place Omaha’s extreme firearm registration requirement into state law.”

Senators failed to pass the compromise amendment on a 13-29 vote — 12 fewer “yes” votes than needed.

The defeat pushed the Omaha Police Officers Association from neutral on the bill to oppose and sparked a debate over whether voting for LB 773 was a vote against law enforcement.

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What Biden Didn’t Tell you (and Your Friends Don’t Know) about Guns and Serial Numbers

Things are not always as they seem. President Biden said guns are causing crime. The President needs an excuse for the increase in crime while he has been in office. I have to wonder why guns didn’t cause crime before Joe Biden took office but are causing crime now, particularly in Democrat controlled cities. This recent surge in violence isn’t a surprise to anyone but confirmed Democrats. The President needs to blame guns to distract us from his failed political decisions. Here is some perspective that the President hid from us.. or maybe he just forgot.

The obvious fact is that we let criminals out of jail during Covid. The inmates didn’t stop being criminals simply because we faced the Chinese flu and released them on the public. That political decision meant we had more dangerous criminals on the street who might commit crimes. We also refused to put criminals back in jail when they committed new crimes. That took away the deterrent effect of our justice system. Politicians made this problem, not a new kind of firearm.

Politicians created more violent crime because they put more criminals on the streets and because each criminal was committing more violent crimes than before. Biden also threw open our borders so drug gangs could move drugs almost at will. Even an elderly politician can understand why this causes more crime.

Of course, that isn’t what President Biden said. He said it is all about guns with strange serial numbers. He didn’t mention that serial numbers were not even required on firearms until 1968. Many of our classic semi-automatic handguns had been in production for almost 6 decades by then, so there are tens of millions of unsterilized firearms in legal circulation. True, you can also get a government employee from the ATF to say anything the President wants him to say, but believing that a missing serial number causes crime plays us for a fool. The law enforcement sources I trust have not seen a surge of homemade and un-serialized firearms causing crime. What Democrats call a “ghost gun” isn’t a firearm at all, but an incomplete part of a gun.

The President refused to say that the vast majority of our violent crime isn’t committed with a firearm. If we magically stopped all “gun crime” today then we’d still have the remaining 85 percent of violent crime to deal with tomorrow. Fewer than 1 in a hundred criminals used a long gun of any kind, a rifle or shotgun. Of course, Biden didn’t mention that. He probably forgot.

Most murders are committed by drug gangs fighting other drug gangs. Consider what that means since these gangs move MILLIONS of illegal immigrants across our border and move BILLIONS of dollars of drugs around the US each year. Those drug trafficking organizations have their own privately made submarines to move drugs. That says they can easily move a few ounces of steel, plastic, and lead anywhere they want them. Gun prohibition doesn’t work any better than drug prohibition.

We will not disarm violent drug gangs by regulating legal gun owners. It is dangerous to try and will cost more lives than it saves.

President Biden refused to mention that civilians use guns in armed defense. We know that ordinary civilians in the US use firearms defensively about 1.7 million times a year, or several thousand times every day. It is important to have a sense of perspective and proportion to understand what that means.

We defend ourselves with a firearm thousands of times a day, but there are about 10 thousand criminal murders with a firearm in the entire year. Honest citizens use a gun for justified self-defense about 170 times for each criminal murder. Guns in civilian hands are far more likely to save a life than to take one.

Think of it this way. If Biden’s the new gun regulations disarm even a few honest gun owners, yet somehow disarmd many criminals, then the new regulation will still cost innocent lives by disarming more innocent victims of crime. Unfortunately the news is likely to be worse than that. Criminals don’t care about gun laws and background checks; you have to live in a fantasy world to believe they do. Maybe the president believes it, but we shouldn’t.

Criminals ignore our laws, so legal gun owners are the only ones affected by our 23 thousand firearms regulations. If all those existing gun laws didn’t stop violent crime, then what makes President Biden think criminals will obey his new gun laws?

More confirmation that SloJoe™ is just a puppet and Obammy is pulling the strings

Joe Biden Nominates Obama’s Harvard Law School Classmate to Head ATF

The White House released a fact sheet Monday noting that President Joe Biden is nominating former President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School classmate Steve Dettelbach to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).

The White House described Dettelbach as “a highly respected former U.S. Attorney and career prosecutor who spent over two decades as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice.”

Additionally, the Hill pointed out that Dettelbach was Obama’s Harvard Law School classmate.

The Daily Mail observed that Dettelbach espoused support for various gun controls during an “unsuccessful” bid to become attorney general of Ohio in 2018.

The Mail explained that Dettelbach “has called for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.”

During Dettelbach’s unsuccessful bid for attorney general of Ohio, WOSU reported that he also opposed allowing teachers and staff to be armed for classroom defense, even in situations when those teachers and/or staff were “former military or law enforcement.”

Biden’s previous nominee for the ATF, David Chipman, was also pro-gun control. Breitbart News noted that he was a Gabby Giffords’ gun control associate who supported an AR-15 ban.

It’s not about deer hunting and they all know it, all too well.

It’s part what’s in the article, and part this:
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party [which is the Chinese goobermint] commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. —Mao Tse Tung 1938
They want the ability to ‘command’ restricted as much as possible.

 

They want to protect the criminals from you

We must ban the guns says the leader of the party that unleashed violent, murderous mobs on American citizens to win an election and let convinced criminals out of prison because of a cough.

The fastest growing demographics of gun owners are women and minorities in urban areas who have come under siege from criminals due to COVID and Social Justice bail reform policies that let criminals go free.

Gun control will not reduce crime.

It will hinder these new demographics of fire time gun owners from buying effective tools of self defense.

Leftist, as part of their dimmer switch of violence, understand how crime and criminals can be used as effective tools of political coercion and enforcement.

Armed citizens cannot be allowed to defend themselves from criminals or the political use of criminals is voided, so the obvious solution is to disarm the law abiding citizens, not re-arrest the criminals.

Again, this is about inflicting pain on the people for trying to lives lives of self reliance.