Category: RKBA

The state with the most restrictive gun laws had the most active shooter incidents last year

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is out with a new report on active shooter incidents across the United States last year, and there are some significant findings worth talking about, including the fact that several of the incidents were stopped by armed citizens.

The report details 61 “active shooter incidents” last year, which the agency defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in ai populated area.” Specifically excluded are acts of self-defense, gang and drug-related shootings, and domestic incidents, as well as “crossfire as a byproduct of another criminal act”. And while gun control activists invariably point to these types of attacks as justification for their attempts to criminalize the right to keep and bear arms, the report’s data suggests that gun control doesn’t serve any sort of preventative benefit to stopping these attacks.

According to the report, the most restrictive state in the Union when it comes to gun control laws also led the way in the number of active shooter incidents. California had six such incidents last year, more than any other state, though Texas and Georgia were close behind with five such incidents reported in each state. Active shooter incidents were reported in 30 states altogether, up from 19 states in 2020, with a total of 243 Americans killed or wounded in the attacks.

The FBI report notes that in 17 of the 61 incidents, law enforcement “engaged the shooter,” while there were six incidents where citizens either “engaged” the attacker or where “citizen involvement impacted the engagement.” It’s unclear to me what differentiates those two categories, because in both cases there were armed citizens who put a stop to the attack or prevented any further bloodshed.

One example of “engagement” noted by the FBI was the attack at a Metarie, Louisiana gun store in February of 2021, in which a suspect shot and killed two people and wounded two more before he was shot by multiple armed employees of the business. An example of “citizen involvement” in the FBI report was the shooting at an Agrex grain elevator in Superior, Nebraska last October when a recently fired employee left the building only to return a short time later with murder on his mind.

NSP said [the suspect] made his way into the door and shot a manager, Darin Koepke, 53, twice in the chest and the arm, the former of which was fatal. Roby said [the suspect] shot Koepke again as he lay on the floor.

The entire shooting event lasted under 20 seconds, according to NSP, and was briefly halted due to the gun jamming. NSP said [the suspect] fired a total of five rounds in the incident.

NSP said there were eight employees in the building at the time and others outside. Roby said supervisors were on scene during the shooting due to the termination and other employees were there “because they worked there.”

Roby said Koepke likely saved “countless lives” by barricading a door.

In addition, troopers say the man who returned fire did prevent it “from becoming even worse.”

Troopers say the Nuckolls County Attorney will not prosecute the man who returned fire.

…  “The Nebraska State Patrol considers all the survivors of this terrible incident to be victims,” said Capt. Jeff Roby.

Roby said NSP would not be naming the man who returned fire “and actively stopped this active shooting event. That man’s quick actions likely saved lives.”

Of the six incidents in which civilians either “engaged” or “involved” themselves in stopping the active shooter, four of them involved the defensive use of a firearm (the other two involved citizens tackling the shooter after five people were shot, and an Idaho teacher who talked a 12-year old girl into giving up a gun that she had used to shoot three people at a middle school). None of the incidents involving armed citizens took place in “may issue” states, by the way.

Just two of the 61 incidents covered in the FBI’s report took place at a school, with three other incidents unfolding at other government buildings. The vast majority of these targeted attacks took place in “areas of commerce” (32 incidents) or “business environments open to pedestrian traffic” (28 incidents).

The FBI report also notes what the agency calls an “emerging trend involving roving active shooters”; individuals who shoot in multiple locations and in some cases over multiple days, though it didn’t provide any details on exactly how many of the 61 incidents could be classified as such.

L-o-n-g unroll of a thread, but read the whole thing.

Andrew Follett says ‘the media is telling you two major lies’ about mass shootings and gun control

A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control

1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings.

2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence

#2A 

Although events in the U.S. tend to get the lion’s share of media exposure, mass shootings are clearly a worldwide issue.

The US makes up about 1.15% of the world’s mass shootings while having almost 5% of the world’s population.

Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.

And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster

4 times as many per capita died in mass shootings in FRANCE as in the US. 21 times in Norway.

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Inconvenient Truth: CNN Admits Majority Doesn’t Want More Gun Control!

You can’t tune into Morning Joe nowadays without hearing it trumpeted that somewhere between 85-90% of Americans want more gun-control laws.

But over on CNN, Wednesday morning’s New Day was telling an inconvenient truth. Check out how co-host John Berman framed matters. You might normally expect him to present things from a strongly pro-gun control perspective, but this is how he teed up Enten:

“One thing you hear is that around 90% of Americans support background checks, but does that tell the whole story about how much agreement there really is? . . . Maybe not exactly what you think.”

They pointed to a Gallup poll showing that a majority of Americans are either satisfied with the current level of gun control—or actually want less gun control!

Enten displayed numbers showing that only 36%, barely one-third,of Americans, want more gun control, whereas 54% are satisfied with current laws or want less gun control!

Enten also cited two recent state referendums on background checks. He noted that in Maine, the proposal to expand background checks was actually defeated, and in Nevada, passed with the slimmest of margins, at barely over 50%.

Summing up, Enten said:

“So you look at those polls that say background check: 80%, 90%! When you look at people actually voting on the measure, it’s not anywhere close to that! It’s much more of a 50/50 proposition.”

Meanwhile, back at Morning Joe, it’s more gun control, all the time.

This NewsBuster is a regular New Day viewer, and for some time now has noted inklings of a move away from the hard-left line it had taken for years. The Chris Licht [CNN’s new head honcho] effect? But MSNBC seems committed to toeing the liberal line — to the bitter end?

BLUF
The truth is that proposals for a prison society of disarmed and surveilled subjects shepherded by public employees are unworkable. The state can’t defend us from danger, and nothing obligates us to pretend otherwise. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to do it yourself.

If You Want Protection for Your Loved Ones, Do It Yourself

Police in Uvalde, Texas, face a barrage of criticism for delays in confronting the shooter who slaughtered children and teachers last week. Officials admit law enforcers screwed up; worse, they impeded parents who wanted to intervene, leaving the crime to be ended by agents who ignored police orders. As politicians rush to leverage tragedy to advance legislative agendas, we’re reminded again that it’s foolish to place our trust in authority or to surrender our ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted of police choosing to wait for backup and equipment before intervening in a massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers. “It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”

That decision delayed the response for over an hour. Finally, a Border Patrol team that drove 40 miles to the scene defied orders and stopped the shooter’s rampage.

“Federal agents who went to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday to confront a gunman who killed 19 children were told by local police to wait and not enter the school — and then decided after about half an hour to ignore that initial guidance and find the shooter,” noted NBC News.

The feds weren’t the only ones willing to intervene. Instead of taking on Ramos, local police tackled, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed parents rather than allow them to take action at which officers balked.

“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez who was briefly arrested for challenging official indecision.

“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”

This isn’t the first time police faced criticism for dithering in response to danger. By the time officers entered Colorado’s Columbine High School in in 1999, 47 minutes had passed allowing the shooters to do their worst before killing themselves. Columbine was supposed to spur changes in police policy, but that wasn’t apparent during a 2018 incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

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‘We Need Your Guidance’ — Joe Biden Meets with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Gun Control and Online Extremism

President Joe Biden warmly welcomed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to the White House on Tuesday, expressing his interest in her views on gun control and online censorship in her country.

“We need your guidance,” Biden said as he welcomed Ardern to the Oval Office. “And it’s a pleasure to see you in person.”

He praised the prime minister warmly for making progress on issues like climate change, combatting “violent extremism online,” and gun control.

“You understand that your leadership has taken a critical role on this global change, it really has,” he said.

Ardern has become a darling of the left after she pushed forward strict gun control laws in New Zealand, banning most semi-automatic rifles after the horrific Christchurch shooting in 2019. She also has repeatedly called for more tech censorship of online extremism, blaming the internet for radicalizing the shooter.

Biden appeared impressed.

“I want to work with you on that effort and I want to talk with you about what those conversations are like if you’re willing,” he said.

Biden expressed sadness that mass shootings continued happening in the United States, renewing calls for change.

“There’s an expression by an Irish poet that says too long a suffering makes a stone of the heart,” he said, claiming he had been to more “mass shooting aftermaths” than any president in American history.

Biden said he met with about 250 of the family members of the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for about four hours on Sunday.

“Much of it is preventable, and the devastation is amazing,” he said.

Ardern said she was willing to work with Biden on issues of violence, noting that there was a need for global progress on the issue.

“If there is anything we can share that would be of any value, we are here to share it,” she said.
Biden told reporters he planned to meet with members of Congress on the issue of gun control.

“I will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you,” he said.

Mass shootings renew efforts to target gun manufacturers’ legal shield

Efforts to hold firearms manufacturers legally liable for gun violence could become a new battleground in the nationwide debate over gun control after a series of fatal mass shootings.

Democratic state legislatures have shown a renewed interest in broadening the industry’s liability with new laws while a recent landmark settlement between a gun manufacturer and victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting could embolden other potential plaintiffs.

In California in the immediate wake of the Uvalde shooting, state legislators advanced a gun control package that included a bill that would open up gun manufacturers to civil legal liability for certain marketing and design practices.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) had vowed in recent months to push for a gun control law similar to the controversial Texas abortion restriction that allowed private individuals to sue healthcare providers who performed banned abortions.

“California will not stand by as kids across the country are gunned down,” Newsom said following the Texas school shooting. “Guns are now the leading cause of death for kids in America. While the U.S. Senate stands idly by and activist federal judges strike down commonsense gun laws across our nation, California will act with the urgency this crisis demands.”

The proposals are similar to a New York state law enacted last year that opens manufacturers up to civil public nuisance lawsuits if they fail to implement reasonable safeguards against unlawful distribution or use of their firearms.

On Wednesday, the New York law survived an initial legal hurdle when a federal judge dismissed a gun industry lawsuit challenging its constitutionality.

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A better term might be ‘willful ignorance‘. And the willfully ignorant take pride in their ignorance. They wear it like a medal. They don’t want to know anything about those icky guns. And in the case of politicians, they’re equal parts stupid and deceitful.

Certain Americans reveal their Second Amendment illiteracy

Biden capitalizes on every opportunity to broadcast how severely uninformed he is — but this Memorial Day, he settled on airing his ignorance via the gun debate, saying a 9mm bullet will blow a “lung out of the body.”  Those of us who have seen a 9mm round know how emphatically wrong he is.

Yet, despite the gross magnitude of his blunder, it’s not the worst I’ve heard.  As it turns out, many Americans are completely uneducated on every facet of the gun debate, and they share one common denominator — they’re all Democrats.  Let’s take a look back at some of the top contenders for the Democrats’ stupidest moments regarding the right to bear arms.

Patricia Eddington, a former state legislator for the state of New York, once said:

Some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat-seeking device. So, you don’t shoot deer with a bullet that size. If you do, you could cook it at the same time [emphasis added].

What does Eddington think?  You could shoot a deer and then walk over with a knife and fork, ready to feast?  Despite actually making this claim, Eddington said this prior to the introduction of a gun control package, including a bill she sponsored.

Next up, Mr. Thomas Binger, the prosecuting attorney in the Rittenhouse case.  Although Binger’s registered political affiliation is unknown, FEC contribution data lists donations to ActBlue.  Mr. Binger’s first blunder was picking up a rifle, immediately putting his finger in the trigger well, and aiming it at a room full of people.

Binger’s second mistake was speculating that hollow point rounds “explode” upon impact.  Again, for the educated among us, the appropriate word would be “expand,” as this type of bullet doesn’t detonate into fragments — it’s not a grenade.

Now we have Dianne Feinstein, federal senator from California, who declared:

We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.

What?  Hunting humans is not legal.  The only legal way to kill humans is via abortion, which she unequivocally supports.

And lastly, we have Donzella James, a state senator out of the great state of Georgia, who stated, “Yes, I believe in the Second Amendment.  But why are we spreading the access to guns to everyone?”

Although we didn’t need a reminder, it is worth pointing out that somehow, being a Democrat politician apparently makes one incapable of understanding firearms, or the idea of a God-given right that is not to be infringed — and brings us a few laughs.

I always have.

Take Gun Banners Rhetoric Seriously

In the wake of a tragic shooting like the one in Uvalde, Texas, one thing is certain to come” The hateful rhetoric from anti-Second Amendment extremists. It’s been the same old, predictably vicious lie that has come since Columbine (or sooner): Because Second Amendment supporters exercise our First Amendment rights to protect the right to keep and bear arms, we are now child-killing domestic terrorists (or worse).

The owner of the company who made the firearm the shooter used to commit the horrific deeds at Robb Elementary School had been labeled an enabler of the murder of children on social media over ads the company ran. That’s a lie, too.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course. It could take a thousand columns to outline all those lies. But Second Amendment supporters need to take the level of rhetoric seriously.

Part of it is simply holding anti-Second Amendment extremists to their own standard. After all, some claimed that Sarah Palin incited Tucson with no more evidence than a symbol laid out on a congressional district in the 2010 midterm elections. That particular blood libel still persists in some quarters.

Crickets made more noise than those same people when someone who intended to carry out a mass shooting at a socially conservative think tank admitted in court that he used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to select his target. But the SPLC never faced any heat for that, certainly nothing near what Palin endured.

And don’t let yourself be gaslit by the likes of Nicolle Wallace, either. The idea that anti-second amendment extremists want to take away guns is not a “frothy delusion” when we actually have people extolling the injustices that England, Australia, and New Zealand inflicted on gun owners for crimes and acts of madness they did not commit.

But at the same time, this rhetoric needs to be taken seriously. These days, we have no idea what sort of permission slip is being signed in someone’s mind because of the words coming from a talking head, a Hollywood celebrity, or even from the White House itself.

Will it be a bank or credit card company CEO deciding to financially deplatform gun-rights groups, gun manufacturers, or FFLs? Will it be an employer who decides to fire someone because they are a member of the NRA? Or could it be something worse? This is a question that is out there these days.

Second Amendment supporters have a very tough row to hoe in beating back attacks on our freedoms. But we should also remember those who smeared us – and protect ourselves by defeating anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level via the ballot box.

 

House Dems’ gun package to raise age limit for semi-automatic rifle purchases, ban ‘high capacity’ magazines

The House Judiciary Committee is set to hold an emergency meeting Thursday to pen an extensive gun control package.

Democrats are currently pushing a series of eight bills aimed at suppressing gun ownership, referred to collectively as the “Protecting Our Kids Act,” Fox News confirmed.

The bills contain proposals raising the minimum age for purchasing a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21, a ban on “high capacity magazines,” a registry for bump stocks, and more.

The House will vote on some form of the package when they return to session next week.

The House package is expected to go nowhere in the Senate and is seen as more of a show vote, as a bipartisan group of senators tries to agree on a bill that could pass the Senate.

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Uvalde – The Case For More Guns

Democrat politicians and their Liberal media megaphones have been screaming for control since the massacre in Uvalde last week. No one needs an AR-15, they screech. The resident in the Oval Office jokes that the AR-15 is not necessary because the “deer aren’t wearing Kevlar” and lies that the 2nd Amendment is not absolute, although James Madison would beg to differ. Based on what we saw, Uvalde actually makes the case for more armed residents.

Like most Americans, I have been both furious and nauseated about the slaughter of innocent school children in Uvalde since word began spreading. I have been a police and military supporter my entire life. I have always believed the police were the good guys. In Uvalde, the police were some of the cowards. Good guys aren’t cowards. Piers Morgan in the New York Post wrote, “Uvalde shooter wasn’t the only sniveling little coward — so were the cops“:

Yet incredibly, there were up to 19 armed police officers inside the school for 70 minutes before 18-year-old Salvador Ramos finished his hellish homicidal rampage.

That’s one for each of the 9 and 10-year-old children who were murdered.

These cops were all trained to use guns to protect the public and were all carrying guns to protect the public.

But when the moment came to protect the youngest, most vulnerable and defenceless members of the public, they went AWOL.

Or rather, they stood there outside the classroom where the kids were trapped, doing absolutely nothing.

This was despite several of the desperate children frantically calling 911 on cell phones pleading for help.

Eight calls in total were made from the classroom between 12.03pm and 12.50pm when the police finally went in.

We’re told they were waiting for keys to access the classroom, tactical equipment, and an order to go in.

But it sounds to me like what they were really waiting for was a collective infusion of bravery and duty like the kind Rob O’Neill and his fellow SEALs displayed in Abbottobad, Pakistan, 11 years ago.

And it never came.

Instead, these shameful excuses for ‘law enforcement’ did nothing as 19 children and two teachers were blown to pieces at close range by a maniac with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

The cowardly cops made a cordon to keep parents back. Initially. I thought that was necessary. Can’t have Moms running into the school willy-nilly endangering others and hampering the cops who are in there to make holes in the shooter. But I was waaaay wrong. The videos of parents pleading with law enforcement to go into the school. I identify with the emotion of each of the parents in this video:

You can feel their anger, desperation, fear and frustration.

The Uvalde cops are cowards. That’s clear. The residents claim it’s a small town where everyone knows everyone. Really, it has been almost a week and we are just now finding out that Creepy Massacre Kid was a bully (not bullied), who tortured animals and threatened to rape girls. Really? No one thought to snitch on Creepy Massacre Kid?

The Twitterverse had their collective knickers in a knot because the NRA was still going to hold its convention. I’m not a big fan of the NRA because they are more interested in selling life insurance than educating the public on safe weapons handling. Watching the protesters on Twitter scream about guns made me even more furious.z

 

Why do people think behavior like that is going to convince anyone about anything?

The “blood on your hands” mob are even more wrong than usual. What we need in this country are more armed and trained citizens. When Antifa burns down a city, what do the police do? Nada. When a gunman is murdering children, what do the cops do? Nothing. Imagine a few of those angry desperate moms in the video armed. Armed with a gun, a long rifle, a window breaker. The Creepy Massacre Kid would have assumed room temperature in a few seconds.

What the heck is this waiting for a master key? Take care of yourself, my people. Don’t rely on anyone else. Cops or government. Buy a gun and take a safety class.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he is going to “Do something”. It won’t help you, whatever he does.

Babbling Biden Blurts Out Dems’ Gun-Grabbing Endgame

Welcome to 2022.

Even the days that are supposed to be slow news days get a shot of newsiness in them. Yesterday should have been one of solemn remembrance for our military heroes who have died defending this great nation but President LOLEightyonemillion’s puppetmasters once again let him speak into a microphone.

Yeah, I don’t get the strategy either.

As is his wont, Biden wandered a bit off-script, perhaps revealing a bit more than what the cabal that runs his brain wanted him to. My Townhall colleague Leah Barkoukis covered the story:

President Biden raised eyebrows on Monday when he spoke about what he considers sensible restrictions on “high-caliber weapons” in the wake of the horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last week.

The president recalled visiting a trauma hospital in New York, where he explained doctors showed him X-rays of gunshot wounds that were caused by different firearms.

“They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life,” Biden told reporters outside of the White House. “A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”

He went on to claim “there’s simply no rational basis for [high-caliber weapons] in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting.”

So while most Democrats have targeted what they call “assault weapons” in the wake of the mass shooting, Biden appears to be setting his sights on handguns, too, which isn’t the first time he’s singled out one of the most popular firearms in America.

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the slippery slope.

One of the main points of contention in the right/left gun argument (calling it a “debate” is ludicrous) has been over the definition of “assault weapons.” You see, the anti-Second Amendment people have never had one. OK, nobody really has because it’s a nebulous concept.

Perhaps I’m a bit off in saying that the gun-grabbers don’t have a definition for assault weapons. It’s more accurate to say that they’ve always been disingenuous about it. It’s a diversion tactic to make the less-informed think that they aren’t coming for all guns. They want to be coy and do things incrementally, unlike Canadian Prime Minister Justin Hitler-Trudeau.

Thanks to Old Joe’s complete lack of a filter, they have less of a smokescreen to hide behind now.

US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority. Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power
Rebecca Solnit

 

Again, it’s nice when they supply the means for positive identification.

This, right there in black and white, is what the Bill of Rights is all about. The protection of minority rights over the tyranny of a majority that the founders knew from the lessons of history were all too commonplace in a ‘democracy’ where the masses could be swayed (like this airhead) into advocating riding over the rights of the populace in the search for their version of Utopia that has always turned into Hell.

Preventing “The Tyranny of the Majority”

People often refer to the United States as a democracy, but technically speaking, that’s not true. It’s a republic.

Big deal, you say? If you care about your rights, it is. The Founding Fathers knew their history well, so they knew better than to establish the U.S. as a democracy.

In a democracy, of course, the majority rules. That’s all well and good for the majority, but what about the minority? Don’t they have rights that deserve respect?

Of course they do. Which is why a democracy won’t cut it. As the saying goes, a democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

The Founders were determined to forestall the inherent dangers of what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they constructed something more lasting: a republic. Something with checks and balances. A system of government carefully balanced to safeguard the rights of both the majority and the minority.

That led, most notably, to the bicameral structure of our legislative branch. We have a House of Representatives, where the number of members is greater for more populous states (which obviously favors those states), and the Senate, where every state from Rhode Island and Alaska to California and New York have exactly two representatives (which keeps less-populated states from being steamrolled).

Being a republic, we also don’t pick our president through a direct, majority-take-all vote. We have an Electoral College. And a lot of liberals don’t like that.

Their attacks on the College are nothing new, but the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 renewed their fury. After all, as they never tire of pointing out, Mrs. Clinton captured more of the popular vote than Donald Trump did. They see the Electoral College as an impediment to their political victories, therefore it’s got to go.

The latest attack comes via new lawsuits filed in federal courts in four states (Massachusetts, California, South Carolina and Texas). “Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in presidential elections,” said David Boies, an attorney who represented former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election.

I doubt Mr. Boies and his fellow attorneys are really ignorant of why we have an Electoral College. But it’s important that the rest of us know.

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BLUF
“Instead of leading to a ‘Wild West’ atmosphere or blood running in the streets, licensed concealed carry by law-abiding citizens helps reduce crime, and assists police officers.”

Who Would Have Guessed, Gun Control Failed in 1881 Also

An article for Smithsonian magazine (Matt Jancer, Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West), reviews the ordinances of Tombstone, Arizona, and other frontier towns in the 1880s, observing that the gun control laws of the time were imposed at the local level and that bearing arms was a “heavily regulated business.”

The notorious Gunfight at the O.K Corral arose, it seems, because “Marshall Virgil Earp, having deputized his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and his pal Doc Holliday, [was] having a gun control problem.”

Tombstone (with a population that hovered around 3,500) had enacted Ordinance No. 9, effective April 1881, to prohibit carrying any deadly weapon within city limits “without first obtaining a permit in writing.” Later that year, lawman Earp’s brothers had charged one Isaac (“Ike”) Clanton with violating the ordinance in the context of escalating animosity between Clanton, the Earps, and Holliday. Clanton’s rifle was seized, and a judge fined him $25 and another $2.50 in court costs. The sheriff later intervened to disarm Clanton’s associates, but after several demands failed to convince them to surrender their firearms. Soon after, the Earp-Holliday group converged on the Clanton-McLaurys, with Wyatt Earp allegedly declaring, “I want your guns.” A contemporary newspaper called what followed “one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone, a day when blood flowed as water, and human life was held as a shuttlecock.”

Tombstone of the 1880s is a peculiar model for those who today agitate for greater local authority to restrict or ban firearms.

Ike Clanton survived to file first-degree murder charges against the Earps and Holliday, claiming they had acted with criminal haste in precipitating the confrontation to kill their personal enemies. The court ruling in the preliminary hearing dismissed the charges but determined that Virgil Earp, “as chief of police” who relied on the assistance of his brother and Holliday to arrest and disarm the Clantons and McLaurys, “committed an injudicious and censurable act… and … acted incautiously and without due circumspection;” however, this was not criminally culpable given the state of affairs “incident to a frontier country,” “the supposed prevalence of bad, desperate and reckless men,” and the specific threats that had been made against the Earps.

The ordinance, in this case at least, proved to be almost entirely ineffective. As recounted in the court decision, Sheriff Behan had “demanded of the Clantons and McLaurys that they give up their arms, and … they ‘demurred,’ as he said, and did not do it.”

More significantly, modern jurisprudence on the Second Amendment confirms that, subject to limited exceptions, the right of responsible citizens to carry common firearms beyond the home, “even in populated areas, even without special need, falls within the Amendment’s coverage, indeed within its core.” The ruling, Wrenn v. District of Columbia (2017), arose out of a challenge to the District of Columbia’s concealed carry law, which restricted licenses to applicants who could satisfy a “good reason” requirement, as defined in the law (living or working in a high-crime area, for example, did not qualify). The District justified this scheme by claiming that the Second Amendment did not protect carrying in densely-populated or urban areas like Washington, D.C.

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Madison on the 2nd Amendment & militia clause

The Supreme Court in the Heller decision explained that the second amendment guarantees an individual right of the people to keep and carry arms for their defense in the event of a confrontation.

The anti-gun crowd, however, refuses to accept this common sense reading of the amendment. The best way to interpret the Constitution begins with actually reading it.  The next best thing is to read what the Constitution’s chief drafter, James Madison, had to say about America’s founding document.  Madison was the chief author of the Federalist Papers, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton.  The Federalist Papers offer great insight into the political theories of the day that led to our system of government.

Students of the second amendment should be familiar with both Federalist 29 and 46, which discuss the role of an armed populace in protecting the precious freedom which had so recently been won.  It was that thinking that led to the adoption of the second amendment.

Madison was also the original drafter of the Bill of Rights, including what would become the second amendment. The anti-gun crowd regularly accuse second amendment supporters of only focusing on what Justice Scalia called the operative clause of the second amendment, the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  They assert that we ignore the prefatory clause that reads, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”  To them the prefatory clause confirms that the purpose of the amendment was to protect the right of the states to have militias or as they sometimes phrase it, the right to bear arms when in militia service.

However, beyond that, they never exactly explain what is meant by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The anti-gun crowd cling to the so-called collective rights view of the amendment that held sway with a number of federal circuit courts pre-Heller.  However, beyond denying an individual right to keep and bear arms, those courts said precious little on exactly what the amendment actually protected.

It was commonly stated outside the court room that the operative clause meant that the federal government could not disarm the state militias.  But that is not what the amendment says and no federal circuit court actually provided any reasoned discussion supporting such an interpretation.  In any event, if that were what the amendment was meant to accomplish, one would think the amendment would have been written in some way like “A well-regulated militia being necessary for a free state, Congress shall not infringe the right of the states to arm the militia.” However, this interpretation of the amendment would have worked a radical transformation of Congress’s power over the militia.

The Constitution addresses the militia in Article I, Section 8.  It states “The Congress shall have the power … To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”

Thus, it was Congress’s responsibility, not the states, to organize and arm the militia, with the states having only the responsibility to appoint officers and train the militia as Congress mandates.   The militia is not treated by the Constitution as a creature of the several states, but of the nation as a whole to be organized, armed and disciplined by Congress, while being trained by the states as Congress directs.

Congress has in fact exercised this authority.

Title 10 of the United States Code, Section 311 defines the militia of the United States with certain exceptions as “all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and … under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and … female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.”

The National Guard is the organized militia and the unorganized militia consists of those militia members not in the Guard.  In the Second Militia Act, passed in 1792, Congress specified the arms militia members were to have.  It was incumbent on militia members to report for training and duty with their own arms. The second amendment did not change Congress’s authority over the militia, nor was that the intent of the amendment.  Most notably, the second amendment did not provide that the states would or could arm the militia.  If that were the meaning of the second amendment, then states could be free to arm the militia in any way they saw fit.

States could for instance under the collective rights view of the second amendment, authorize each member of the unorganized militia to own a fully automatic weapon such as the M-16.  That would raise issues with respect to the provisions of the National Firearms Act of 1934, which greatly restricts the ownership and transfer of automatic weapons.  States could also abrogate many other federal firearm restrictions. It is certainly the case that some founders, such as Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, feared that Congress would neglect its responsibility to arm the militia.  And so it is not an unreasonable view that a primary purpose of the second amendment was to ensure that the militia would not be disarmed by taking guns away from the people who constituted the militia.

However, that view is perfectly consistent with the wording of the operative clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  The amendment thus ensured that there could be a body of the people armed and available to serve in the militia.  It had nothing to do, however, with transferring to the states the right to arm or specify the arming of the militia.  That remains the prerogative of Congress. Review of the legislative history of the second amendment confirms that it was designed to protect an individual right of the people generally to possess and carry arms.

When Madison initially introduced the various proposed amendments that would later become the Bill of Rights, he proposed to insert the bulk of them, including what would later become amendments one through five, part of the sixth amendment, and amendments eight and nine, into Article I, Section 9, between Clauses 3 and 4.  His speech to Congress can be found here.

This is the portion of the Constitution which limits Congressional power over individuals.  Clause 3 is the prohibition on Bills of Attainder and ex post facto laws.

Clause 4 is the limitation on the imposition of taxes directly on individuals as oppose to excise taxes on economic transactions.  This clause has been substantially abrogated by the sixteenth amendment, authorizing the federal government to tax incomes.  In other words, Madison proposed to put these amendments into that part of the Constitution that protected individual rights of the people from the federal government. The context of Madison’s original introduction to Congress of the Bill of Rights, including the second amendment, is powerful evidence supporting the conclusion that the right to keep and bear arms was intended to confirm an individual right of the people to arms.

Madison did not propose to place the second amendment in that part of the Constitution that governs Congress’s power over the militia.  The obvious reason is that Madison was seeking to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, not some undefined right of the states to arm or control militia members within their borders.  Indeed, it was Madison himself who coined the phrase “Bill of Rights” to refer to the amendments he was proposing, including what would become the second amendment.  States do not have rights.  They have powers.  Individuals have rights.  In any event, the second amendment guarantees in its own words a right of the people, not a right of the states.

Hero Border Patrol Agent: Allow Teachers to Carry Guns for Classroom Defense

Jacob Albarado, the off-duty Border Patrol agent who rushed into Robb Elementary School during Tuesday’s attack to save his daughter, says teachers should be trained and armed for classroom defense.

Breitbart News reported that Albarado borrowed a shotgun from a local barber where he was about to get a haircut when he learned of the attack and charged into the school to save his daughter.

He found her alive and helped her and numerous other children get out of the building.

The school did not have an armed guard on duty when the attack occurred, and the gunman entered through an unlocked door.

The New York Post reports that Albarado wrote of his frustration on Facebook after the attack, saying, “I’m so angry, saddened and grateful all at once. Only time will heal their pain and hopefully changes will be made at all schools in the U.S. and teachers will be trained & allowed to carry in order to protect themselves and students.”

The commission that investigated the February 14, 2018, Parkland high school shooting noted that armed teachers could have made a difference in the outcome of that heinous incident.

Breitbart News observed that Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, head of the Parkland commission, said the investigation of the Parkland attack had changed his views on armed teachers — he went from opposing the idea to supporting it. He noted, “People need to keep an open mind to it, as the reality is that if someone else in that school had a gun it could have saved kids’ lives.”

No, Raising the Age of Gun Ownership Won’t Stop School Shootings

America is still reeling after the unspeakably tragic mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children dead. In the aftermath, we’re all understandably looking for answers. Yet many top Democrats are rallying around one gun control proposal that’s actually a false solution.

Their idea is simple: Raise the age to buy a gun to 21. Most school shooters are teenagers, the argument goes, and you can’t drink alcohol until age 21, so why can you buy an AR-15?

This idea is gaining training on the Left, with many Democratic politicians, progressive commentators, and even the White House throwing its weight behind the proposal.

But there are a few big reasons why this proposal is unrealistic, impractical, and ultimately unlikely to accomplish anything.

First, any law uniformly raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would face immediate constitutional challenges, and likely be stuck down as a violation of the Second Amendment. You don’t have to take my word for it: A federal appeals court just recently struck down a California law raising the age to purchase semiautomatic weapons to 21 as unconstitutional for exactly this reason, calling it a “severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home.”

Think about it like this: Whether you like it or not, the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, which differentiates this right from something like drinking alcohol. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to drink a Brewski with the boys.

And the age of legal adulthood is still 18. (Whether it should be is another question). It would obviously be unlawful and absurd to pass legislation saying that the constitutional right to free speech, for example, only kicks in at age 21. (although it would save us some headaches). As long as we consider 18-year-olds legal adults, we cannot legally or morally justify stripping them of their constitutional right to self-defense.

Any bill attempting to do so is likely doomed, especially with the current conservative Supreme Court. And any legislative solution to the rise in school shootings that won’t hold up in court isn’t a “solution” at all.

Yet even if these proposals did somehow survive constitutional scrutiny, I still don’t think raising the age to buy a gun would meaningfully reduce school shootings. Any 18, 19, or 20-year-old so disturbed that they decide to kill elementary school children is almost certainly going to be determined enough to circumvent an age limit, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Do high schoolers really struggle to get their hands on alcohol, after all?

It wouldn’t be particularly difficult for a determined killer to simply have someone purchase a firearm for them (like every teenager in America has done for booze). Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in the Columbine shootings. The killers were both under 18, yet simply had someone older buy the guns they used. In many other school shootings, the killers stole the guns from an older family member.

In short, raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would not help us meaningfully reduce the frequency of these atrocities, though it would strip millions of law-abiding young adults of their right to self-defense. This isn’t just a hypothetical disadvantage; according to the Institute for Medicine, guns are used in self-defense approximately 500,000 to 3 million times per year in the U.S.

Like everything, gun control has trade-offs. By leaving law-abiding people defenseless, it can also create its own victims.

What’s more, the misguided focus on age-based gun control pulls the national attention away from more promising solutions, like reforming the way the mass media covers mass shootings. Mass shooters crave the infamy that’s granted to them by our if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage of these atrocities, and the status quo encourages copycats—so much so that experts estimate that if we stopped plastering the names and faces of these villains and instead focused coverage on the victims, we could reduce mass shootings by up to 33 percent.

It bears repeating: We could potentially reduce mass shootings by up to one-third with simple media reforms. Unlike far-fetched and legally dubious gun control proposals, this kind of reform wouldn’t face such monumental political and constitutional hurdles.

Those who insist on trying to raise the age to buy a gun to 21 are almost certainly coming from a good place. But in reality, their efforts are worse than useless.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

Deceit as a strategy by the Editors at Scientific American

The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives

“The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.”

They have to lie to justify their beliefs and agenda. You only need to click on their own reference to discover the lie. Guns kill more children than auto accidents? Only if you consider 24 year old people as “children”

 

“For much of the past few decades motor vehicle crashes were the most common cause of death from injury—the leading cause of death in general—among children, teenagers and young adults in the U.S. But now a new analysis shows that, in recent years, guns have overtaken automotive crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death among people ages one through 24.”

They are intentionally lying in an effort to deprive an entire nation of a specific enumerated right.

Liberals Want the Government to Save Us from Guns, Conservatives Want Guns to Save Us from the Government

Guns aren’t going away. Yes, school shootings are horrific, we all agree. Liberals who whine that “conservatives love guns more than children” are stupid, entitled cucks who have never been punched in the face for their shooting off their mouths. They jump and scream on cue when tragedy strikes but they are nothing more than useful idiots for the REAL reason the far left wants to take away our guns.

FACT-O-RAMA! Liberals are fighting for the right to kill a kicking, heart-beating baby minutes before it’s born but are happy to stand on a pile of dead kids to take away guns from law-abiding Americans.

We Need More Gun Laws!

Your liberal sister-in-law is all over Facebook with this nonsense, but guess what?  New York is as red as Lavrenti Beria’s lucky underpants, and its stringent laws couldn’t stop the left-leaning Buffalo shooter from blazing up a grocery store full of black people.

Stalin would smile at Chicago’s stifling gun laws, but that doesn’t keep the Windy City denizens from perforating each other every time the thermometer hits 88 degrees.

FACT-O-RAMA! Memorial Day Weekend kicks off Chicago’s summer “Festival of Lead.” Check out heyjackass.com for real-time updates of the carnage. As of this writing, Chicago has seen 1,165 of its citizens ventilated this year so far. Let’s check back Tuesday morning to see how many Chicagoans gained 10 grams of weight over the weekend.

Liberals look to politicians to “save” them from the very Constitutional amendment written to protect them. This is a level of stupidity not seen since the introduction of Ayds weight loss candy, which hit the U.S. at roughly the same time as the AIDS virus got to America–and a young Dr. Fauci screwed that up too.

 

We Need More Gun Training!

I’m all for gun training for sane, law-abiding gun owners, but training is a bad idea for murderous nutters who want to annihilate innocent people. When someone buys a gun to slaughter kids, the last thing you want is to teach him how to do it better.

Conservatives know liberals are too dense programmed to realize gun confiscation and an unarmed population will lead us into two deadly traps:

1) We will be easy pickings for criminals who will NOT give up their weapons. Liberals aren’t even allowed to mention the wildly out of control crime problem ripping up our large cities lest they be seen as “racist.” Better to sacrifice their kids to the crime wave than admit there IS a crime wave.

2) We will be easy pickings for the commies currently running the Democrat party. THAT is the reason the left wants our guns. If you think Joe Biden cares about dead kids please show me a picture of him in Waukesha, WI, after black supremacist Darrell Brooks mowed down almost 70 white people, many of them children.

REMINDER-O-RAMA! Politicians swear to uphold the Constitution. That includes the 2nd Amendment. Those attempting to vaporize the 2nd Amendment are therefore enemies of the state and need to be imprisoned.

Sure, Biden will likely go to Uvalde, TX. It’s a shame it took 19 dead kids to actually get the cabbage-in-chief to the border. But don’t believe the old man’s rhetoric about guns. He doesn’t care about dead kids; he wants you vulnerable.

Biden is a dinosaur in a tar pit. He pretends he hasn’t spewed a lifetime of racism from the same lips he used when sucking up to career segregationists like West Virginia’s favorite klan klown, Sen. Byrd. Gropey Joe knows the Democrat Party has been taken over by pinkos and toes the line to keep his head off the chopping block, or his wife “Dr.” Jill knows the score and does what it takes to keep AOC and her commie squad from sending Joe to the cornfield.

Unlike the pink-haired, gender-free toilet people on the left, conservatives fight to keep children alive from the moment of conception and beyond. The bolshie harpies fight to dismantle a fetus minutes before its birthday, then have the audacity to pretend they care about kids when a crazy train shoots up a school. I’d invite them to bite me but I don’t want a scorching case of monkeypox.

My favorite mouth feces that flies out of lefty lips is this, “Conservatives only care about a baby before it’s born. They don’t care what happens after that!” I invite these dolts to search the words “Catholic adoption agencies.” Now search “Antifa adoption.” Checkmate, prags.

I know it can be hard for conservatives who value life and guns to wade through a spate of mass shootings. The lefty politicians and news outlets do that on purpose. For me, the answer is simple: more guns. I find it maniacal that progressives can watch unarmed people get massacred and think, “We need fewer firearms.” What they somehow seem to miss is that EVERY mass shooter is stopped by good guys with guns.

FACT-O-RAMA! Making schools “gun-free zones” is arguably the dumbest thing to come out of Washington D.C. since Nancy Pelosi. You know where mass shootings NEVER take place? Gun ranges, because madmen know that they are FULL OF GUNS.

A man in Las Vegas tried to steal a gun from a gun store. Guess what happened? He got shot by a lot of guns.

The mainstream news is happy to bring you tragic stories of schizos slaughtering innocent people but no one cares to mention how many people stop crimes with firearms.

Memorial Day Weekend is here. Let’s remember those who have died fighting defending the same Constitution the Democrat party is looking to chop up into convenient (for them) bite-sized morsels, leaving out the most important part, the 2nd Amendment, which was intended to stop them from doing just that.

Well, this guy is ‘sorta’ pro gun position. He’s another one that believes background checks actually solve anything.

Explaining the USA Pro Gun Position to a Foreigner
In the wake of a school shooting, no less.

I was asked by an intelligent rationalist lady who will remain anonymous to explain the USA pro-gun position. She’s from a European country and recently moved to the USA. This is what I told her, with a bunch of linkbacks to prior HWFO and Open Source Defense material. You may find this post useful over the next few days.

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