tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65983509767380284382024-03-13T17:35:52.805-04:00Our American FreedomA far right guy in northeast New Jersey who will hold both sides of the aisle accountable for un-American activities which will infringe on our individual liberty.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.comBlogger235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-48594188005266355282013-02-26T09:16:00.000-05:002013-02-26T09:16:38.435-05:00Beyond The Bumper Sticker: 10 Ways Americans Can Support the Military FamilyAmen. My God bless and keep all of you who serve. May He guide and comfort all of your families in times of separation and loss. Thanks to all of you. <br />
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by Erin Whitehead, Marine Corps spouse <br />
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Yesterday, many Americans paused to honor those who have served and continue serving in our nation’s military. Flags were flown and prayers were said in civilian homes and backyards around the country. <br />
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But because of the nature of our lives, the military spouse community has a special understanding of the meaning behind Memorial Day. For us, it is not simply another day off work, a chance to BBQ, or the opportunity to save big bucks on a mattress or new car. It is about honoring those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country… a sacrifice that can keep us awake at night with worry. <br />
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Sometimes, it feels as though the “civilian” community just does not get what the holiday is really about, which can feel frustrating and make us feel like we are in this alone. But the reality is that many Americans do understand the true meaning of Memorial Day. They do want to support our troops and understand, on some level, the hardships that they and their families have endured over the past 10 years of war. <br />
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But unless they’ve actually served or been a member of a military family, it’s really hard to truly “get it.” They want to do something to make sure our troops and families know how much they are appreciated… but how do they help when they don’t know what is needed?<br />
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It’s a two-way street. We have to be willing to share in what areas we can use support. We asked our social media community to share what things they think Americans could do to help out or simply show their appreciation for the sacrifices of service members and their families. We hope you will share this list with those civilians who want to show their support…because there really are a lot of them out there.<br />
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10 Ways Americans Can Support the Military Family<br />
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10) Take the time to learn what our life is really like.<br />
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There are many misconceptions about our lifestyle. The list is a mile long. Some of the most frustrating are that our spouses can return home for important events (holidays, births, all family emergencies), that once they return from deployment everything goes back to normal, and that we make a lot of money. But unless you know a family and can ask for their perspective, how do you learn more? There is no shortage of blogs written by military spouses, and they’re easy to find with a simple Google search. There are also many organizations that service military families—again, very easy to find online. And of course, you can visit www.baseguide.com to read our articles, follow us on social media, or subscribe to the magazine.<br />
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9) Leave politics out of it.<br />
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Our troops serve and put their lives on the line, despite their own personal political beliefs. Support for them should be the same. And please, when you learn that someone is military, or married to a service man or woman… don’t ask us what we think of the war. Don’t ask us who we’re voting for in the upcoming election. And please don’t give us your personal opinion on either topic. Please remember that the President, like him or not, is our spouses’ boss. Hearing an opinion that the wars have been a huge waste of money and lives can really anger a spouse. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have your own personal beliefs on these topics, but unless we are already very close friends or family, we would just rather not talk about it with you.<br />
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8) Hire Us<br />
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According to The Department of Labor, military spouse unemployment rates are 26%, way above the national average. Many times spouses follow their service member to a duty station where they are either over or under qualified for most available employment. They often do not have the same network of contacts that may help a native of the area find a job, and often times when an employer finds out someone is a military spouse, they are reluctant to hire them. We get it. Who wants to hire someone who will only be here for 2 or 3 years? The thing is, you may only have a military spouse working at your business for a few years… but the skills and life experience we bring to the table are often times outstanding. We have learned to be flexible and make the best of complicated situations, we can handle tasks on our own, and we are used to working with people from all walks of life… just to name a few. Employing the spouse of a service member isn’t just for the benefit of the spouse. Easing the financial burden for a military family reduces the stress for the person serving… making it easier for them to focus on their job. And when our service member retires, or transitions out of the military, hire them too. Military service instills a sense of loyalty, a hard work ethic, and strength of character. Veterans have proven time and time again to be very valuable employees.<br />
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7) Offer a military discount. <br />
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Sure, a small discount helps out a military family. But it is about more than that. When a business offers that discount, they are saying “thank you” on a daily basis to their military customers, and it makes us feel appreciated. Many times, the entire reason some businesses are able to thrive in a town is because a neighboring military installation brings in thousands of patrons. Besides, it has been my experience that military families are very loyal. I will drive to the other side of town to use a business that offers even a 5% discount to military… because I appreciate them for showing their support, not because I think I am entitled in any way.<br />
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6) Don't Forget our Gold Star Families.<br />
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A Gold Star Family is a family who has lost a service member. Many times when someone is killed, there is an outpouring of support for the family… at first. But it seems to wane after a while as life moves on for the rest of us. For that Gold Star family, they live with the sacrifice their loved one made every single day. Their kids grow up without either mom or dad. Young widows/widowers try to put the pieces of their lives together again. Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are changed forever. They need, and deserve, ongoing support from the very people their husband, daughter, father, or sister made that sacrifice for. There are many great charities that would welcome your help in making sure these families always have the support they need. I will share with you my favorite. Military Spouse Magazines 2010 Army Spouse, Nicki Bunting, started an amazing charity called “Bubba’s Belly Run”. It is in honor of her husband, Capt. Brian “Bubba” Bunting who was killed in Afghanistan shortly after returning from his two-week R&R at home. Not long after receiving his death notification, Nicki learned she was pregnant with their second son. The couple had always wanted a large family. While pregnant with her deceased husband’s child, she started this annual run to raise money for Gold Star families. In the past three years, they have raised over $100,000. To find out more information about how to donate, or to bring Bubba’s Belly Run to a town near you, please visit www.bubbasbellyrun.com. On this site, you can also inquire about sending a note of support to a family who may have lost a loved one several years ago. A note from a grateful American who just wants to offer continued condolences, thoughts or prayers can be of great comfort. Nicki saves every letter she has ever received so that her boys can one day read them and know how much people appreciate the sacrifice their dad made.<br />
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5) Admitting you don't know what to say is better than saying the wrong thing.<br />
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There are a ton of “Top 10 Things NOT to Say to A Military Spouse” lists floating out there on the Internet. I won’t rehash them all here. I truly believe most civilians mean no ill will when they say things that we may perceive as insensitive. Again, it goes back to simply not understanding because you haven’t had the same experiences that we have. As spouses, we need to learn to be less sensitive and help people understand how we feel. Instead of just getting mad, we can say “I know you didn’t mean that to offend me, but saying that you understand how I feel during deployment because your husband went to a conference in DC last week, minimizes what I am going through,” is perfectly acceptable. And for civilians, it is perfectly fine to say, “I wish I knew the words to say, but I don’t. I am willing to listen though, and try to understand.” <br />
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4) Don't offer to help, just help. <br />
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Most military members and their families are very proud. We may face some unique challenges, but we like to believe we can tackle any and every thing that comes our way. The reality is that sometimes we could use a helping hand… but you won’t find us asking often. So if you say, “Please let me know what I can do to help” to a spouse who is holding down the home front alone for a year, they will graciously respond with, “Okay. Thank you!” But they will probably never ask for help. If you know a military family living in your neighborhood, there are simple things you can do. If you are mowing your lawn on a Saturday, just pop over next door and mow theirs, too. If you notice the trashcan is still at the curb two days after pick-up, pulling it to the side of the house is a nice gesture. Have enough pizza points for a free pie? Order a pizza to be delivered one night and stick a note on the door saying “Please don’t cook tonight, pizza will be delivered at 6pm.” Know a new mom who is about to come home after delivering her baby while dad is deployed? Leave a bag of essential grocery items at her front door, so she doesn’t have to navigate the store with a brand new baby. If you are friends with the next-door neighbor whose wife is at six weeks of training in the summer, ask “Can Susie please come have a sleepover with our daughter”? If you don’t know a family, Blue Star Families is a national organization that can help you find a way to help military and their families in your area. www.bluestarfam.org<br />
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3) Let Congress know that you support our troops. <br />
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There is always legislation affecting our military being discussed in our nation’s capitol. It doesn’t matter what your politics are: Making sure that our service members and veterans are fairly compensated and have services and programs available to them should be a bi-partisan issue. Let your elected officials know that while we all know tough decisions sometimes have to be made in government, Americans are committed to making sure that those who volunteer to defend our freedoms are taken care of if those sacrifices leave them with a lifetime of physical and emotional scars. Our troops are not asking for more than what they have earned, but one of the biggest ways you can support them is to make sure our country keeps good faith with the military. Call your congressional representatives and say, “I support our troops, and it will be reflected in the way I cast my ballot”.<br />
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2) Teach your children what a real hero looks like.<br />
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The number one way to make sure our troops are appreciated and supported in the future is to teach our kids what it means to serve in the U.S. Military. There are many different kinds of people that kids seem to look up to these days. Some of them are great role models, and some of them are less than perfect examples of what it means to be a responsible, productive citizen. If you are looking for a true hero for your kids to look up to, there is no shortage of them in our Armed Forces. For example, take Sergeant Dakota Meyer, veteran of The U.S. Marine Corps and a Medal of Honor recipient. The story of his bravery in combat is impressive, but so is the way he currently lives his life as a hardworking, upstanding citizen and role model. His twitter feed features a #morningmotivation every day that I enjoy reading. A recent post read “The keys to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom and charity.” You (and your teenagers) can follow him @Dakota_Meyer at www.twitter.com. Another hero to learn more about is Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills, who during his third tour to Afghanistan was critically injured by an IED. During that explosion he lost portions of both arms and legs and is currently only one of four living quadruple amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His strength and courage as he recovers from his injuries is inspiring, and his attitude will make you believe that you too can tackle any challenge you face. To learn more about his story and to get links to his You Tube clips, visit his website at www.travismills.org. Your children may not end up one day serving in the military. But by teaching them about the sacrifices made and about some of our nation’s finest, hopefully they will grow up to be appreciative of those who do serve, and will find some way to be in service to their country as well.<br />
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1) Say "Thank You", and say it often.<br />
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Some of the most touching moments we experience happen when complete strangers stop my husband to say a heartfelt “thank you.” This is perhaps the simplest thing on the list, and one that cannot be overdone. When you see someone in uniform, extend a handshake and a “thank you for your service.” When you see an older gentlemen wearing a VFW hat, ask him when he served and tell him how much you appreciate him. This may seem like a small thing, but many of our service members and vets don’t expect much. To know they are appreciated is validation enough.<br />
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When polled, members of our military will tell you over and over again: The reason they signed up was not simply for the GI Bill, health benefits or to see the world. I believe the majority of them say that it was a desire to serve their country. Their families support them unconditionally because they love them, and believe their job is important. Many military families will tell you that they do not need help, and that the only thing they want is to make sure their service member is taken care of. It is true… military families are often times strong, resilient and capable of handling things on their own. To be honest, they really don’t need the help of their fellow Americans.<br />
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But that isn’t the point. The fact is that a small percentage of our population has volunteered to serve our nation. When called upon to do so, they will lay down their lives in defense of every single one of us, and sadly too many of them have done just that. Isn’t it the responsibility of all Americans to recognize these brave men and women for their service and to do whatever we can to show our appreciation? Lending a helping hand to a military family isn’t about charity—it is a way to let our service members know that while they are serving, America will take care of their loved ones in their absence. Helping our Gold Star families is a way to say, “We can never understand your loss, but are humbly grateful for the sacrifice your loved one made.” <br />
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As a military spouse, I can tell you that I am just as proud and independent as the next person. I choose to continue to support my husband’s career, despite the hardship because I believe in what he does and I love him dearly. I do not feel entitled to any special perks because of my husband’s service, and I don’t expect a handout. <br />
But I will tell you that when civilians take the time to show their appreciation, it makes those lonely nights, the frequent moves, the stress of yet another looming deployment… a little easier to handle. And when my husband, a Marine who has served for 16 years, gets a tear in his eye because of the kindness of a stranger who genuinely appreciates what he does… it gives me a bit of understanding into why he wanted to serve this amazing country in the first place.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-28145298405476107732013-02-23T19:04:00.000-05:002013-02-23T19:04:19.310-05:00New Jersey - Land of Liberal FucktardsAre you fucking kidding me?<br />
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New Jersey: Assembly Passes Over 20 Anti-Gun Bills<br />
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Posted on February 22, 2013<br />
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Yesterday, the New Jersey State Assembly passed over 20 pieces of anti-gun legislation that we previously reported on here. These bills now go to the state Senate and can be heard at any time, so please begin contacting your state Senator. We have been told that action on these bills is likely to happen in March or April, however, continue to follow NRA-ILA alerts. When these bills do start to move in the Senate, New Jersey Second Amendment supporters will need to protest in record numbers against them. <br />
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Below are brief descriptions of the anti-gun bills passed in the Assembly yesterday:<br />
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Assembly Bill 588 (Spencer / Coutinho / Deignan) – Could prohibit possession of commonly owned ammunition.<br />
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Assembly Bill 1116 (Fuentes / Spencer) – Establishes 180-day prohibition on purchase of handgun for certain individuals who fail to report loss or theft of firearm.<br />
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Assembly Bill 1329 (Greenwald / Quijano / Coutinho) – Reduces maximum capacity of ammunition magazines to ten rounds.<br />
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Assembly Bill 1387 (Wilson / Johnson) – Permits municipalities to establish “weapons free zones” around schools and public facilities.<br />
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Assembly Bill 1613 (Bramnick / Johnson) – Establishes Educational Security Task Force.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3510 (Johnson / Vainieri Huttle) – Requires proof of firearms safety training as a condition for issuance of firearms purchaser identification cards and permits to purchase handguns.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3583 (Wilson) – Creates task force to explore areas to improve school safety.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3645 (Greenwald / Eustace / Mosquera) - Requires ammunition sales and transfers be conducted as face-to-face transactions.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3646 (Greenwald) - Establishes a regulatory system to govern the sale and transfer of ammunition.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3659 (Barnes, III / Johnson) - Revises definition of destructive device to include certain firearms of 50 caliber or greater.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3666 (Cryan / O’Donnell / Jasey) - Prohibits mail order, internet, telephone and any other anonymous method of ammunition sale or transfer in New Jersey.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3668 (Jasey / McKeon / Cryan) - Prohibits investment by state pension and annuity funds in companies manufacturing, importing and selling “assault firearms” for civilian use.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3687 (Stender / Fuentes) - Disqualifies persons named on federal Terrorist Watchlist from obtaining a state firearms identification card or permit to purchase handgun.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3717 (Lampitt / Singleton) - Requires submission of certain mental health records to National Instant Criminal Background Check System.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3748 (O’Donnell / Mainor / McKeon) – Criminalizes the private sale or transfer of firearms.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3750 (Cryan / O’Donnell / Quijano) - Establishes regulatory and reporting program for all ammunition sales.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3754 (Cryan / O’Donnell / Quijano) - Requires firearms seizure when mental health professional determines patient poses threat of harm to self or others.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3772 (Eustace / Wagner / Vanieri Huttle) - Requires that firearms purchaser identification cards display picture and mandates that firearms purchaser identification cards be renewed every five years.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3796 (Mainor) – Provides ninety-day window for persons to dispose of certain unlawfully possessed firearms.<br />
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Assembly Bill 3797 (Mainor) – Requires law enforcement to report certain firearms information to inter-jurisdictional electronic databases including the national Integrated Ballistics Identification Network.<br />
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Assembly Committee Resolution 180 (Greenwald) – Urges President and Congress of United States to enact legislation enforcing stricter firearms control measures.<br />
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Assembly Bill R143 (Quijano / Cryan / O’Donnell) - Expresses support for Attorney General's gun “buyback” program.<br />
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Assembly Bill R144 (Oliver) – Urges Governor Christie’s Administration not to apply for annual exemption from requirements of federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-73954761872977498702013-02-04T18:34:00.000-05:002013-02-04T18:34:00.500-05:00Why Does the Anti-Gun Camp Need to Lie?Lying sacks of dog crap. Nothing but a duplicitous den of theives. Friggin left.<br />
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By William A. Levinson<br />
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Human beings are almost universally receptive to impartial facts, and people will therefore support any course of action that is inherently right and effective. If the truth were on the side of the enemies of the Second Amendment, they would not need to lie to the public along with fellow members of Congress.<br />
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The Brady Campaign Speaks with Forked Tongue<br />
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The Brady Campaign has a long track record of using distorted statistics to deceive the American people, including well-meaning donors of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money. Consider, for example, the Brady Campaign's statement that a firearm in the home is 43 times as likely to kill a family member as a violent criminal. The Brady Campaign, therefore, wants us to believe that gun owners shoot family members in fits of rage, when the truth is very different.<br />
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Of the gun deaths in the home, the vast majority are suicides. In the 43-to-1 figure, suicides account for nearly all the 43 unjustifiable deaths.<br />
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... Putting aside the suicides, the Kellermann/Reay figures show 2.39 accidental or criminal deaths by firearm (in the home) for every justifiable fatal shooting.<br />
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Some of the "accidents" may, in fact, be suicides, because police and newspapers sometimes preserve the decedent's reputation by saying that he shot himself while cleaning his gun. This is a physical impossibility, because you have to disassemble a gun to clean it. Even if we accept the 2.39-to-1 ratio, however, note the phrase "every justifiable fatal shooting." From police instructor Massad Ayoob's The Truth About Self Protection:<br />
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For every one shooting thirteen to fifteen criminals are deterred or driven off just by the sight of the gun, and this fully accomplishes what the homeowner bought the gun for in the first place. When you also consider the fact that only about one out of four people who are shot actually dies, you realize that for every home intruder shot dead by the resident, there are ninety-nine others who don't get killed, but who give up their assaults.<br />
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The Brady Campaign must therefore admit that, for every 43 misuses of a firearm in the home (including suicide), 100 violent felonies are prevented. For every genuinely accidental or criminal firearm-related death in the home, more than 40 violent felonies are prevented. Property theft, by the way, is not a violent felony; we are talking about rapes, aggravated assaults, and murders.<br />
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The Brady Campaign adds:<br />
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What's more, a more sobering study conducted by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis found that suicide is the leading cause of death among gun buyers, especially women, in the first year after the weapon was purchased. In fact, the study -- which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine -- found that a person who purchases a handgun is 57 times more likely to commit suicide within a week of buying the weapon than the general population as a whole.<br />
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This statement confuses cause and effect and is an insult to the intelligence of anybody who has studied basic statistics. If somebody kills himself with a handgun within a week of buying it, he almost certainly bought it for the express purpose of suicide. Similar "facts" could doubtless be quoted for first-time purchases of sleeping pills (especially with alcoholic beverages) and ropes.<br />
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The Brady Campaign has also played fast and loose with campaign finance laws, as shown by the fine that the Federal Election Commission levied against it for misconduct.<br />
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In 2003, the Brady Campaign's PAC was fined $26,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to properly disclose $200,000 it spent on mailings in 2000 opposing two Republican House candidates, Reps. Ernest Fletcher (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)<br />
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This brings us to the Million Mom March, a true poster child for the ethics, character, and integrity of the entire anti-Second Amendment movement.<br />
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The Million Mom March<br />
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The Million Mom March, with which Senators Feinstein (CA), Levin (MI), and Mikulski (MD); Hillary Clinton; Tipper Gore; and numerous members of Congress were closely associated, underscored the anti-gun movement's total lack of character and integrity as follows.<br />
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(1) Misuse of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money to influence an election<br />
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(2) Solicitation of money, volunteer time, and corporate contributions under the fraudulent premise that firearm misuse kills 12 or 13 children a day. Dianne Feinstein, Jerrold Nadler, and many of their associates signed their names to this falsehood.<br />
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(3) A Form 990 tax return that told the IRS that the group had not tried to influence legislation even though its express purpose was to demand so-called commonsense gun laws.<br />
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A group that tells its own donors and volunteers that its mission is to promote public safety, turns around and uses the donations for lobbying and electioneering, and then tells the IRS that it spent no money on the latter activities is simply not credible. The Violence Policy Center also is on record as planning openly to lie to the public.<br />
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Assault weapons, just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms, are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons -- anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun -- can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.<br />
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The VPC therefore seems to admit that that it is using money that is 501(c)(3) tax-exempt for educational purposes to confuse the public over the relationship between a semiautomatic rifle and a machine gun. "Plastic firearms" is yet another deliberately deceptive phrase. Many firearms have polymer frames, but their steel barrels cannot possibly get past an airport metal detector.<br />
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Dishonest Lawsuits Against the Gun Industry<br />
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The dishonesty of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, is well-known. As argued by Spitzer before he was caught with expensive prostitutes:<br />
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It is now clear that most manufacturers and wholesalers are unwilling to give up the profits they reap from selling guns into the criminal market.<br />
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...[HUD] Secretary Cuomo said, "The gun industry should follow the lead of Smith & Wesson and accept common sense-safety [sic] standards to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals.<br />
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Gun manufacturers already followed these standards meticulously by selling firearms to the public only through federally licensed gun dealers, who, of course, do not sell to criminals or minors. The ethics of Cuomo and Spitzer, therefore, differ little from those of common criminals -- a line that their fellow travelers Governor Rod Blagojevich (IL), Rep. Mario Biaggi (NY), and Rep. Bobby Rush (IL) crossed to become convicted felons. Rush was a member of the Black Panthers, who, at the time, called for the murder of police officers: "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!" Cop-killers and their supporters have nothing to say about gun control in which anybody should take the slightest interest.<br />
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This leaves the anti-Second Amendment camp with serious questions that are simply not going to go away. If they are right, why do they need to lie?<br />
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William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-5330198040930582172013-01-26T18:33:00.001-05:002013-01-26T18:33:32.747-05:00'Gun Violence in America Is Off the Chart'Keeping with the theme of lies from the left...<br />
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By Henry Percy<br />
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In August 2012, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Time magazine in which he asserted that "gun violence in America is off the chart compared with every other country on the planet. The gun homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia."<br />
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Because the arguments he made then are being parroted anew in the drive for gun control, his assertions cry out for examination in light of the facts. To start, why would he single out the "gun homicide" rate rather than the total homicide rate? I know a couple whose son was beaten on the back of the head with a tire iron. While his parents are bitter that neither offender was charged, I never heard them say, "Well, at least Tom was murdered with a blunt instrument rather than a gun."<br />
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Unfortunately, Mr. Zakaria neglects to document the sources for his facts, if indeed they are facts. Though holding a PhD from Yale and serving as a trustee for that institution, he does not recognize plagiarism when he commits it -- he issued an "unapologetic apology" for stealing much of his article and was suspended from publishing in Time for a month. Well, he did not call it stealing, merely a "terrible mistake ... a serious lapse." But he will be happy to talk to your Rotary Club -- his fee is only $75,000.<br />
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Let's look at homicide rates as reported in the 2011 Global Study on Homicide, conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The latest year with the most complete data is 2008, used here. The total homicide rate for the US was 4.1 times that of the UK and 4.5 times that for Australia. Still not good, but nowhere close to the "30 times" Mr. Zakaria laments.<br />
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The UN Global Study has data on 187 countries, ranging from a high of 61.3 per 100,000 in Honduras to 0 in Palau. Where was the United States? Number 99, with 5.4 homicides per 100,000. Over half the countries in the world had a homicide rate higher than ours.<br />
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Homicide in Developed Countries<br />
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Because admitting that the US homicide rate is low compared to over half the world's countries would undercut their arguments, gun-controllers instead compare us to "rich" or "developed" nations -- carefully cherry picked, of course. I cannot count how many articles I have read about the rapid expansion of the middle-class in Mexico, about Brazil's status amongst the rapidly rising BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), etc. Mexico's homicide rate in 2008 was 2.4 times greater than that of the US, Brazil's 4.2 times greater. Somehow these countries are ignored when someone like Mr. Zakaria wants to make a point.<br />
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Of course, statistics always need qualification. For instance, the murder rate in the US would be higher were it not for the improvement in emergency room procedures in the past 10 years alone. On the other hand, homicides for many Third World countries are understated for a variety of reasons: they lack reliable, centralized databases, people are hesitant to report crimes to a corrupt police force, and so on. In addition, governments have plenty of incentive to understate their homicide rates, such as encouraging investment or not scaring away tourists. In short, many of the figures contained in the UN Global Study are probably too low.<br />
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Small versus Large Countries<br />
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There is another problem with comparing every country on the globe head to head: the vast differences in population size and makeup. For instance, Palau, an island nation in Micronesia, has a population of 21,000 and a homicide rate of zero. They could have two murders next year and suddenly move up to position 68. Comparing a country the size of the US, with 315 million people, to a country the size of Palau makes no sense. I am fairly confident there are many American cities with populations of 20,000 with a homicide rate of zero.<br />
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Homicide rates within the US vary tremendously by locality, as data from the US Census Bureau shows. For 2009, the high was 24.2 per 100,000 (District of Columbia) and the low 0.9 (New Hampshire). Moreover, New Hampshire is only half as murderous as Belgium, one of the "rich" or "developed" nations writers like Mr. Zakaria are so fond of comparing us to. In fact, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Utah, and Vermont all have rates lower than Belgium's.<br />
<br />
Mr. Zakaria finds a "blindingly obvious causal connection" between "easier access to guns" and homicide rates. If that is so, why does the nation's capital, with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, have a homicide rate nearly 27 times higher than that of New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die"), which has some of the most permissive gun laws (open carry without license, concealed carry licenses for $10)? Why does Illinois, likewise boasting extremely restrictive gun laws, have a rate over 9 times higher than New Hampshire's? If there is a "blindingly obvious causal connection," could it be that high homicide rates go hand in hand with restrictive gun laws? Or could the problem be with people, human beings, rather than inanimate objects?<br />
<br />
Race<br />
<br />
Shortly after being sworn in as Attorney General, Eric Holder told an interviewer that the US is "essentially a nation of cowards ... we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial." I don't know if Mr. Holder is an "average American," but here's a small contribution to the national dialogue on "things racial" from the Bureau of Justice Statistics:<br />
<br />
In 2008, the homicide victimization rate for blacks (19.6 homicides per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (3.3 homicides per 100,000) ... the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000).<br />
<br />
Guns from Mexico?<br />
<br />
Just before New Years I was channel surfing and paused upon seeing the stern visage of the Rev. Jesse Jackson opining on the 500 murders in Chicago in 2012. He said he was not going to accept that, and added, "These guns come from the suburbs and from Mexico." Mexico? The advocates of gun control have been telling us for years that guns flow from the US to Mexico. While it has always been debatable how many of Mexico's weapons come from America, we do know that well over 2,000 were delivered to the drug cartels courtesy of our own federal government through Operation Fast & Furious. Now we are to believe that the bad guys in Chicago transport weapons across an international border and over 1,300 miles north?<br />
<br />
Gun-Free Households<br />
<br />
Then there is Amitai Etzioni, University Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University, writing on the Huffington Post. He urges everyone to put up a "gun free" sign in their home, apartment or condo and counsels parents not to allow their children to play in homes without the signs. Can't we just declare the whole world "gun free" and eliminate murder?<br />
<br />
David Gregory, in a recent interview on NBC with Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, mocked the notion of posting armed guards in schools. As it happens, Mr. Gregory sends his children to Sidwell Friends School, where the children of presidents traditionally go (Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton studied there, as do Sasha and Malia Obama). With tuition at $34,000, Sidwell caters to millionaires and billionaires.<br />
<br />
The "Friends" in the school's name refers to the Society of Friends (Quakers) who run it. Sidwell has an 11-member security department, many of them police officers (presumably armed, though it is difficult to know). These are in addition to the Secret Service detail that protects the Obamas' two daughters. It is a delicious irony that Quakers, dedicated pacifists, might welcome so many guns in their midst.<br />
<br />
Here's a question for Professor Etzioni: Should David Gregory refuse to let his children play with Sasha or Malia because the White House is not gun free? If signs are so effective, here's an opportunity for the president to lead from the front by disarming the Secret Service and hanging "Gun-Free Zone" signs on the railings around the presidential mansion.<br />
<br />
The Mentally Ill<br />
<br />
What can be done? How about legislation making it easier to commit the mentally ill. Most were deinstitutionalized in the 60s and 70s? Between 1955 and 2000, the number of state psychiatric hospital beds was reduced by 93%. The campaign to release inmates was largely driven by: 1) the belief that the unstable could simply take medications and live in the community; and 2) cases of wrongful committal (yeah, man, the people that are locked up are the only sane ones, man, just watch One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest). Were people wrongfully committed to mental hospitals? No doubt. Are people wrongfully imprisoned? Of course. Is that sufficient reason to dismantle our criminal justice system? Are schizophrenics better off pushing a shopping cart, jibbering to themselves, and sleeping under overpasses? But, someone says, most of the disturbed are harmless. True. But how many Jared Loughners, James Holmeses, and Adam Lanzas can we tolerate wandering around among us?<br />
<br />
Getting someone committed in Connecticut is nearly impossible:<br />
<br />
Police said they had no evidence Lanza had been medicated when the killings occurred. But even if Lanza had a proven history of mental illness, having him forcibly committed would have been nearly impossible.<br />
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Connecticut is one of a handful of states in America that does not have an "assisted outpatient treatment" law. Under AOT laws -- the kind proposed and ignored earlier this year in Connecticut -- states can force a mentally ill person into treatment if there is a risk of harm to others. Without them, states typically cannot institutionalize someone unless they've already done harm to themselves or others.<br />
<br />
What organization was largely responsible for defeating the bill to make involuntary commitment easier? The ACLU.<br />
<br />
The suggestion that we make involuntary commitment easier raises outcries from advocates of personal freedom on both the right and left. But the sad truth is that the treatment mental professionals offer the severely disturbed is to: 1) prescribe psychotropics and hope they take them; or 2) prescribe psychotropics and institutionalize them, where they are forced to take their meds. The second option is usually impossible due to both the law and the lack of beds.<br />
<br />
I know a woman whose highly intelligent son became schizophrenic in college and, without going into specifics, became a serious threat to himself and others. The court ordered him to stay on his medications, which he has -- so far. Will he do so for the rest of his life? Who knows, because the price the drugs exact is greatly diminished mental capacity. He is employed by a large retail chain as a box boy with no hope of advancement. The heartbreaking part is that he knows he has diminished capacity: not long ago he said, "Mom, remember when I used to be smart?" But distressing as his story is, far more tragic is a Jared Loughner or Adam Lanza living freely among us.<br />
<br />
Henry Percy is the nom de guerre for a technical writer living in Arizona. He may be reached at saler.50d [at] gmail.com.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-26999556573516649362013-01-25T19:44:00.000-05:002013-01-25T19:44:14.812-05:00Governor Cuomo: Dishonesty is not EnoughAll of us here are fully aware of the level of scumbag that highly visible liberals will sink to and we all know what a leftist, reactionary sack of crap Mario jr. is. Wait until the end for the really offensive, in so many ways, comments of "Fast Eddie" Rendell. They must be stopped and we have to use their own rules against them. From this article I see their method as "By any means necessary." OK sounds goos to me.<br />
<br />
By William A. Levinson<br />
<br />
New York's Governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his predecessor Eliot Spitzer (aka Emperor's Club VIP Client 9), are well known for their dishonesty and lack of integrity. As shown by their own state government's Web site, both fomented malicious, groundless, and frivolous lawsuits whose sole purpose was to harass law-abiding gun manufacturers. The failure of Cuomo's latest anti-gun legislation to exempt police officers proves him incompetent, and amendment of the law to exempt police officers reinforces his dishonesty even further.<br />
<br />
Malicious Lawsuits Against the Gun Industry<br />
<br />
Client 9, along with then-HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, are on record as orchestrating frivolous and malicious lawsuits whose sole purpose was to harass firearm manufacturers into bankruptcy. This is from Client 9's own Web site (emphasis is mine):<br />
<br />
With the action, New York becomes the first state in the nation to sue gun manufacturers.<br />
<br />
"For more than a year, we sought to achieve reasonable reforms through negotiations with the gun industry. It is now clear that most manufacturers and wholesalers are unwilling to give up the profits they reap from selling guns into the criminal market. So we must now seek a court to order to do what any good corporate citizen would have done voluntarily, and make our homes, streets and schools safer," said Spitzer, who was joined at a New York City news conference by U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, anti-gun violence advocates and law enforcement officials.<br />
<br />
Spitzer's lawsuit charges nine gun manufacturers, three importers and twelve wholesalers with contributing to and maintaining a public nuisance through ongoing production and distribution practices. Among the manufacturers named are: Glock; Sturm-Ruger; Colt's; Beretta; Taurus; Bryco; and Intratec.<br />
<br />
...Secretary Cuomo said, "The gun industry should follow the lead of Smith & Wesson and accept common sense-safety standards to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals.<br />
<br />
...Unlike lawsuits filed by more than 30 cities and counties during the last two years, the Attorney General's case focuses on a statutory provision of New York law that explicitly defines unlawfully-possessed handguns as a public nuisance.<br />
<br />
...Specifically, the manufacturers and wholesalers are accused of contributing to and maintaining the public nuisance by engaging in design and distribution practices that place guns in the hands of criminals in New York State.<br />
<br />
We agree that an unlawfully-possessed firearm is a public nuisance and even worse, just as an unlawfully-possessed narcotic (controlled substance) is a public nuisance. These items do not, however, fall into the wrong hands through the fault of their manufacturers. Gun manufacturers sell their products to the public only through Federally licensed dealers. FFL dealers who value their licenses do not sell to minors, and they must run background checks to make sure they don't sell to criminals. Pharmaceutical companies sell controlled substances via licensed pharmacists, who in turn require a doctor's prescription before they will hand such items over to a patient. The handful of doctors and pharmacists who engage in drug diversion are held professionally and, in some cases criminally, responsible, but nobody would even think of blaming the manufacturers.<br />
<br />
Client 9's and Andrew Cuomo's attempt to sue gun manufacturers, therefore, illustrates their lack of ethics, character, and integrity. Their malicious lawsuit was, by the way, dismissed by a court of law. This fact is particularly telling, and damning as well:<br />
<br />
In its suit, New York City contended that the gun makers had made themselves liable under that narrow exception, by failing to monitor firearms retailers closely enough and thus allowing guns to end up in the hands of criminals.<br />
<br />
This takes us back to the simple fact that firearms retailers are licensed as such by the Federal Government and, in the absence of disciplinary action such as revocation of an FFL, the manufacturer can reasonably assume the retailer to be in compliance with the law. Cuomo's latest anti-gun legislation has meanwhile proven him incompetent as well as a declared enemy of the entire Second Amendment.<br />
<br />
New York Bans Target Pistols and Police Sidearms<br />
<br />
We showed previously that New York, under Andrew Cuomo's leadership, has declared war on the entire Second Amendment by banning .22 caliber target pistols that, while theoretically usable for self-defense, are best suited for making inexpensive holes in pieces of paper. Most of these pistols take 10-round or even larger magazines, and are therefore now illegal in New York. Now there is concern that the reckless, slipshod, and irresponsible haste with which New York's legislature enacted its new gun law also outlaws police sidearms that accept more than 7 rounds. Governor Cuomo must now scramble to "clarify" what the law means, and possibly amend his law to exempt the police. This exemption underscores his dishonesty even further.<br />
<br />
Cuomo Opposes the Natural Human Right of Self-Defense<br />
<br />
When Governor Cuomo argues that only the police should have magazines larger than 7 rounds, he is saying openly that private citizens do not have the natural human right of self-defense. If a private citizen needs to use a handgun for anything other than sporting purposes, he needs it for exactly the same reason a police officer needs it: self-protection against one or more violent aggressors. The only difference between the private citizen and the officer is that the latter has both the duty and the authority to intervene in situations in which it would be ill-advised or even illegal for the citizen to involve himself.<br />
<br />
A police officer might have to defend himself from somebody he has challenged for breaking into an unoccupied building, or even from somebody who turns a non-criminal traffic stop into a lethal confrontation. You and I don't even have the authority to compel another driver to pull off the road and stop his vehicle, although we can call 911 to report a drunk or reckless driver. We might, however, have to defend ourselves from one or more violent home invaders. Once the perpetrator(s) initiates deadly violence against either a police officer or a private citizen, the defender has a legitimate need for a weapon that can end the violence. This could be a 9 mm pistol with a 17-round magazine, or a .45 Automatic with one-shot stopping capability. In either situation, the defender should have at least one extra magazine, and should know how to change magazines quickly.<br />
<br />
Former PA Governor Rendell Adds Another Layer of Outrage<br />
<br />
If Andrew Cuomo's outright dishonesty is not enough, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who also supported frivolous lawsuits against the gun industry, added still more outrage. These words should mobilize all supporters of the Bill of Rights, and alienate his own side in the bargain:<br />
<br />
"...the good thing about Newtown is, it was so horrific that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity on their side."<br />
<br />
The only "good thing" about the Sandy Hook shooting was the perpetrator's decision to finally rid the human species of himself. The fact that Mr. Rendell finds this brutal crime politically convenient, along with Rahm Emanuel's "Never let a good crisis go to waste," tells us everything we need to know about the other side's ethics, character, and indeed basic humanity.<br />
<br />
William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-28100990486353098862013-01-24T19:37:00.001-05:002013-01-24T19:37:43.071-05:00They're Coming to Take Our Guns Away, Ha-Haaa!Wake up America. Here come Diane and Barack and Mario jr. Keep your focus down-range. <br />
<br />
By Chad Stafko<br />
<br />
You may recall the 1966 cult-classic by Napoleon XIV titled, "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa." The lyrics of that song describe an individual who is out of his mind and who is being taken "to the funny farm" and to "the loony bin" so he can be attended to by "those nice young men in their clean white coats."<br />
<br />
The subject of the song is simply considered a danger to society, a menace if you will, crazy, and unable to make rational decisions on his own. He's unreasonable and refuses to conform to the society around him. <br />
<br />
Enter today's debate over guns. Obama, Biden, and the rest of the political left are using similar language and characterizations in their description of gun owners. Theirs is a coordinated effort to paint American gun owners as crazed, government-hating lunatics, whose guns, used for sport, recreation, and defense are somehow a great danger to our society, potential Adam Lanzas or Jared Loughners.<br />
<br />
Of course, this should come as no surprise. Recall Barack Obama's description of middle-class voters and the challenge he faced in getting their votes way back in 2008, "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."<br />
<br />
Today's push by the leftist media has managed to raise the insult level even higher recently. Take Carol Costello of CNN for example. On December 27th, in questioning NRA President David Keene, she shared this comment from her Facebook page, "Why is the NRA crazy? Why are they, like, out of touch with reality?"<br />
<br />
Costello paints a picture of gun owners as out of step with society, yet recent polling is hardly indicative of such. A Gallup poll conducted earlier this month found that only 38% of Americans are dissatisfied with current gun laws, while 43% are either satisfied or believe the laws should be loosened. <br />
<br />
Other polls have found only a slight majority of Americans believe there should be any increase in gun control legislation. Yet, we the legal gun owners of America are somehow considered out of touch and crazy? According to the liberals, legal gun owners who want to sustain their ability to defend themselves against those who wish to do them harm is some type of right-wing, extremist idea...an idea that they lament is found in our Constitution in the Second Amendment.<br />
<br />
Oh, but there is plenty more insulting characterizations of legal gun owners from other prominent liberals and the White House.<br />
<br />
Take former Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell. Appearing on that bastion of balanced reporting, MSNBC, Rendell characterized gun owners as "looney, nuts, off their rocker."<br />
<br />
Note that Rendell isn't just saying we legal gun owners of America are wrong, but that we're lunatics and far out of the norm of society. Don't you think if Rendell had the power to somehow confiscate every gun in America he would jump at the chance?<br />
<br />
Also, consider President Obama's comments Monday regarding those who oppose the heavy gun control proposals he's to announce Wednesday, "As far as people lining up and purchasing more guns, I think that we've seen for some time now that those who oppose any common sense gun control or gun safety measures have a pretty effective way of ginning up fear on the part of gun owners that somehow, the federal government's about to take all your guns away."<br />
<br />
So, it's the 2nd Amendment crowd, the National Rifle Association, and conservative talkers and writers who are, in the words of Obama, "ginning up fear." Really? This is the man, remember, who characterized middle-class voters as people who "cling to their guns." <br />
<br />
Obama also, back in 1996 when he was running for the Illinois Senate, filled out a questionnaire for a community group in Chicago in which he answered "yes" to a question that included whether the State should ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns. <br />
<br />
And yesterday, President Obama took advantage of all the spadework, using his signing session for 23 executive actions to medicalize gun ownership under Obamacare, making it "clear that his health law, known as the Affordable Care Act, allows doctors to ask patients whether they have guns in their homes, and will tell them they are able to report any threats of violence they hear to police"<br />
<br />
Indeed, how silly of us, legal gun owners to think that our President would ever seek to take away our guns. Just ignore the fact that he's from Chicago, which has some of the most stringent gun controls in America, and that he mocks those who cling to their guns, and that he filled out a questionnaire for a liberal community group in which he agreed that guns need to be out of the possession of Illinoisans. <br />
<br />
And, we're the crazy ones?<br />
<br />
Chad Stafko is a writer and political consultant living in the Midwest. He can be reached at stafko@msn.comAlways America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-39864392867704347002013-01-22T18:30:00.001-05:002013-01-22T18:30:11.615-05:00Obama Supporters Are Shocked, Shocked, I Tell You....Dumb and getting dumber. There is no coming back for America. Period. Only preserving what you got. Taxes are far too high; all of them income, property, sales, capital gains, death. We get far too little for them. Dumbass liberals (oxymoron, I know) this fucker and his minions lied to you just like the rest of us the only difference is people with brains knew he was coming after all of our money. The more money they have the more control they have, same goes for guns. Wake up and start fighting back you people are like fuckin zombies went it comes to this guy. Seriously.<br />
<br />
January 7, 2013 <br />
Selwyn Duke<br />
<br />
<br />
My mother always used to say, "Life is the best teacher." Sure is -- and sometimes it smacks you right upside the head. It appears that this has happened with Barack Obama supporters now witnessing their paychecks shrink in the wake of tax increases. And they're none too happy. In fact, they're shocked. <br />
<br />
Shocked, I tell you.<br />
<br />
Providing examples of this liberal anger and angst, Joseph Curl writes:<br />
<br />
"What happened that my Social Security withholding's in my paycheck just went up?" a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. "My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don't feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna' hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over 400 grand. What happened?"<br />
<br />
Well, pal, I'll explain it. George Bush has found a way to control Obama's mind, sort of like a zombie. I mean, you don't think the great orator's mouth makes all the mistakes it does (off-Teleprompter) because it's actually controlled by the great orator's brain, now, do you?<br />
<br />
Curl continues:<br />
The Twittersphere was even funnier.<br />
<br />
"Really, how am I ever supposed to pay off my student loans if my already small paycheck keeps getting smaller? Help a sister out, Obama," wrote "Meet Virginia." "Nancy Thongkham" was much more furious. "F***ing Obama! F*** you! This taking out more taxes s*** better f***ing help me out!! Very upset to see my paycheck less today!"<br />
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How can you pay off loans with smaller paychecks, Virginia? Ask Nancy; she sounds like a real intellectual.<br />
<br />
<br />
Curl again:<br />
<br />
"_AlexTM" sounded bummed. "Obama I did not vote for you so you can take away alot of money from my checks." Christian Dixon seemed crestfallen. "I'm starting to regret voting for Obama." But "Dave" got his dander up over the tax hike: "Obama is the biggest f***ing liar in the world. Why the f*** did I vote for him"?<br />
<br />
I could explain why, Dave -- very clearly. But I don't use the kind of language you do. So I'll just say, my good man, that you're what they now call a "low-information voter." And you and your comrades have given us a low-information president. <br />
<br />
Curl mentions that more is yet to come, when other Obamabots get their first paychecks on the 15th. I'll add that even this is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait 'til they feel the full bite of ObamaCare and whatever else is coming down the pike.<br />
<br />
Well, as the old Dutch proverb goes, "We grow too soon old and too late smart."<br />
<br />
Then again, sometimes the age shows up without the smarts.<br />
<br />
Curl tells us that many liberal posters are blaming these tax hikes on Bush. This is no surprise. I'm telling you, some of these people's epitaph will read, "It's Bush's fault."<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-37052370846835581072013-01-21T19:40:00.001-05:002013-01-21T19:40:50.618-05:00"The Gun Is Civilization" by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)<br />
<br />
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some. When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender. <br />
<br />
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat— it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly. <br />
<br />
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force, watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable. <br />
<br />
When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation... and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act. Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-7438097525284491872013-01-20T22:52:00.001-05:002013-01-20T22:52:37.273-05:00Who might be domestic enemies of our Constitution?I have been saying this since I started this little blog.<br />
<br />
January 11, 2013 <br />
K.E. Campbell<br />
<br />
Article VI, clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads<br />
<br />
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned...shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution...<br />
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Accordingly, on January 3rd, members of the 113th U.S. Congress took the following oath<br />
<br />
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.<br />
<br />
Who might be domestic enemies of our Constitution?<br />
<br />
In previous American Thinker posts, I have written about the wisdom of the late Henry Hazlitt. As to the question posed above, Hazlitt articulated well the answer in a 1956 article and other writings. <br />
<br />
"The greatest threat to American liberty today," he wrote, "comes from within." Specifically, Hazlitt was referring to "a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology." Uncomfortable though it may be to say or express it, proponents of that ideology were then and are now the enemy referenced in the congressional oath. They are those who are hostile to our heritage.<br />
<br />
"[It] isn't too difficult to recognize the totalitarian mind," and by implication the devotees of the doctrine of government control over the individual, "when we meet one." In short "Its outstanding mark is a contempt for liberty." Acknowledging the difficulty in precisely defining liberty, Hazlitt contrasted it with its antithesis, slavery.<br />
<br />
The roots of totalitarianism lie in the "contemporary faith in the necessity and benevolence of a continually expanding government intervention." Totalitarians, according to Hazlitt, want total control, but not necessarily total suppression. They "suppress merely the ideas which they don't agree with, or of which they are suspicious, or of which they have never heard before; and they suppress only the actions that they don't like, or of which they cannot see the necessity. They leave the individual perfectly free to agree with them, and perfectly free to act in any way that serves their purposes..." <br />
<br />
Hazlitt prophetically described "three main tendencies or tenets" toward the "road to totalitarianism" that we find ourselves on. First among them is "the tendency of the government to attempt more and more to intervene, and to control economic life," that is, the<br />
<br />
...pressure for a constant increase in governmental powers, for a constant widening of the governmental sphere of intervention. It is the tendency toward more and more regulation of every sphere of economic life, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of the individual. The tendency toward more and more governmental spending is a part of this trend. It means in effect that the individual is able to spend less and less of the income he earns on the things he himself wants, while the government takes more and more of his income from him to spend it in the ways that it thinks wise. One of the basic assumptions of totalitarianism, in brief (and of such steps toward it as socialism, state paternalism, and Keynesianism), is that the citizen cannot be trusted to spend his own money. As government control becomes wider and wider, individual discretion, the individual's control of his own affairs in all directions, necessarily becomes narrower and narrower. In sum, liberty is constantly diminished.<br />
<br />
The second main step to totalitarianism is, according to Hazlitt, "the tendency toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government at the expense of local governments," that is,<br />
<br />
...the growth of power in Washington at the expense of the states.<br />
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The concentration of power and the centralization of power...are merely two names for the same thing. This second tendency is a necessary consequence of the first. If the central government is to control more and more of our economic life, it cannot permit this to be done by the individual states. The pressure for uniformity, and the pressure for centralization of power, are two aspects of the same pressure.<br />
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...Planning from the center is possible only with centralization of governmental power...[The] federal government assumes more and more of the powers previously exercised by the states, or powers never exercised by any state; and the Supreme Court keeps steadily stretching the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to authorize powers and federal interventions never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. At the same time recent Supreme Court decisions treat the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution practically as if it did not exist.<br />
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The third step is "the tendency toward more and more concentration of power in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative and judiciary." According to Hazlitt,<br />
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In the United States this tendency is very marked today. To listen to our pro-totalitarians, the main duty of Congress is to follow the president's "leadership" in all things; to be a set of yes-men; to act as a mere rubber-stamp.<br />
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The dangers of one-man rule have been so emphasized and dramatized in recent years...that any warning of this danger to Americans may seem needless. Yet most Americans, like the citizens of the countries already victimized by their native [totalitarians], may prove incapable of recognizing this evil until it has grown beyond the point of control. One invariable accompaniment of the growth of Caesarism is the growing contempt expressed for legislative bodies, and impatience with their "dilatoriness" in enacting the "Leader's" program, or their actual "obstructionist tactics" or "crippling amendments." Yet in recent years derision of Congress has become in America almost a national pastime. And a substantial part of the press never tires of reviling Congress for "doing nothing" - that is, for not piling more mountains of legislation on the existing mountains of legislation - or for failing to enact in full "the President's program.<br />
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What invariably results is capitulation and an ambiguous law "setting forth a number of vague but high-sounding goals and [creation of another] agency or commission" that "proceeds to become a prosecutor, court, and legislative body all rolled into one" and "starts laying down a series of rulings and handing down a series of decisions, many of which surprise no one more than the congressional members who created the agency in the first place."<br />
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Hazlitt had much more to convey about the dictatorial trend, the enemy within, and their tactics and techniques. I recommend reading the entire article and other of his books and publications. We are far down the road Hazlitt warned us about -- due in large part to U.S. Senators' and Representatives' forsaking of their sworn duty to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-79946164636864202822013-01-19T15:28:00.000-05:002013-01-19T15:28:18.594-05:00When Kids and Guns MixTeach your children well...<br />
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January 11, 2013 <br />
By Selwyn Duke<br />
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We all know what can happen when kids and guns mix. And today I will tell you some stories about that very thing. The kids' names were Kendra and Alyssa, and then there was the 11-year-old boy whose name we just don't know. What we do know is that they lived in places called Bryan County, Albuquerque, and Palmview. We know that guns were in their homes -- and that something horrible befell them. <br />
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Last year, 12-year-old Oklahoman Kendra St. Clair was home alone, unsupervised. At some point she accessed her mother's handgun -- a .40-caliber Glock. Then Kendra pulled the trigger. <br />
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And that bullet tore into flesh. <br />
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You probably know the rest of the story. <br />
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Or maybe not.<br />
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The bullet tore into the flesh of a 32-year-old home invader, causing him to flee. Kendra was left scared and crying, but unscathed.<br />
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The story of Albuquerque 11-year-old Alyssa Gutierrez turned out differently. Three teenage burglars broke into her home, but they fled after she merely grabbed her mother's rifle. No one was hurt, but the criminals were caught.<br />
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But sometimes innocents do get shot. Such was the case with an 11-year-old Palmview boy in 2010. At home with his mother, he got his hands on a .22-caliber rifle. And after the two armed and masked illegal aliens who had broken into their home shot through their bedroom door after the mother refused to open it, hitting the son in the hip, the boy returned fire. He struck one of the criminals in the neck, causing them both to flee. They were apprehended when the wounded miscreant showed up at a local hospital. <br />
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These were children who lived in places called Bryan County, Albuquerque, and Palmview. Thank God, they still live in those places. And that's what can happen when kids and guns mix.<br />
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If you're unacquainted with my work, you perhaps didn't expect this piece to take the turn it did. You perhaps didn't hear these stories; the mainstream media doesn't report such things much. But now that you have, ponder this question: do you wish these children hadn't had access to firearms? Because they won't if the gun grabbers of the world have their way.<br />
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Of course, the above real-life stories are just that: anecdotes. Some will say they're rare and not statistically significant. And I suppose they are rare; most people will never face such evil and have the ability to thwart it. Yet they're not nearly as rare as a Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech: your chance of dying in a school shooting approximates that of being struck by lightning. In contrast, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans each year use guns for self-defense and that 400,000 of them say they would have been killed if they hadn't been armed. That's 400,000 a year.<br />
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Do I believe they all would have been murdered? No. People have a penchant for the dramatic, and fear and stress can corrupt judgment. But even if only one half of one percent of them are correct, that's 2000 innocent lives saved with guns every year. This is approximately 76 times as many as were killed at Sandy Hook and considerably more than were lost in all American gun massacres during the last 40 years. And if five percent of them are right, it amounts to 20,000 innocent lives saved -- far more than the number murdered with guns in America every year. <br />
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Ah, "that big 'if,'" some will say. Woulda', coulda', maybe, perhaps, I suppose. Of course, we should also consider that those 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses represent rapes, robberies, and assaults thwarted -- usually without firing a shot. And that's part of the problem. It's a headline when a gun goes off; it can be head to the next story when a criminal is merely scared off. As for hypotheticals, they aren't as emotionally compelling as a school shooting, where you see victims' pictures, grieving relatives, and emergency vehicles dominating your TV.<br />
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Perhaps it would be different if we, as in a science-fiction movie, could somehow get a glimpse into alternate gun-free futures, where the world's Kendras and Alyssas and millions of other good citizens couldn't defend themselves. Maybe if the citizenry saw in living color how many of these people, while now safe, would have been left brutalized, killed, and lying in a pool of their own blood, we could compete for emotional impact. Thus we should remember, to use a play on a Frederic Bastiat saying, that a bad policy-maker observes only what can be seen; a good policy-maker observes what can be seen -- and what must be foreseen. Dead innocents killed with guns can be seen; the innocents who would be killed were it not for guns must be foreseen.<br />
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Yet even what can be seen, such as the stories I opened with, won't usually be because they don't fit the anti-gun mainstream-media narrative. Instead we hear about how 13 children a day are killed with firearms, with no mention that this "'statistic' includes 'children' up to age 19 or 24, depending on the source [most of these incidents involve teenage gang members shooting each other]," writes Guy Smith at Gun Facts. Or we're asked questions such as "Why does anyone need an AR-15?" Perhaps we should ask the then 15-year-old Houston boy who used that very weapon to defend himself and his younger sister against two burglars in 2010. <br />
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Here's what you might learn: being a light gun (seven pounds) with little recoil, it's an ideal firearm for youngsters and women. A lady I knew once fired a shouldered shotgun when she was a girl, and the kick knocked her on her backside; an AR won't do this. This is partially because its high-tech mechanism absorbs much of the recoil energy, but also because it is not nearly as powerful as even many hunting rifles. <br />
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How can this be? Isn't this "scary black gun" a "killing machine," as Piers Morgan put it? As explained and illustrated in this video, this class of weapons is designed to wound a 170-lb. man, while a high-powered hunting rifle's purpose is to kill a 300 to 800-lb. deer or moose. In fact, in some states and countries it is illegal to hunt large game with an AR-caliber round (.223) for fear that its relative ineffectiveness will leave a wounded and suffering animal wandering the forest. As to this, note that the AR-wielding 15-year-old Houston boy shot one of the intruders at least 3 times - and the man lived. It might have been a different story had the teen used a 30.06 deer rifle, and a very different one with a buckshot-loaded shotgun.<br />
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So do kids and guns mix? Well, kids and their guns have sometimes been mixing it up with criminals -- and coming out on top. But neither kids nor anyone else mixes well with guns when ending up on the wrong end of one. This happened at Sandy Hook. It happened in Aurora, CO. It happens during many other garden-variety crimes. And it could conceivably happen scores of thousands of times more every year. The only way to find out precisely how many more times is to disarm the American people. <br />
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Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-28806158522508991542013-01-17T19:42:00.000-05:002013-01-17T19:42:17.249-05:00The Second Amendment Is Not About HuntingFuck Obama's gun regulations. We all know the reason he is doing this. Hell James Madison knew this over 200 years ago. Fuck you Mr. D-Bag president. <br />
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January 11, 2013<br />
Michael Geer<br />
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You know it. I know it. The unspoken truth is the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is about citizens resisting and overcoming tyranny. A common law and natural law right considered for 200+ years as an inalienable right. Speaking plainly, the 2nd is our bulwark against government which becomes despotic.<br />
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Armed free citizens are the final bulwark against tyranny by local, state or federal government.<br />
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When the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights committed our people to founding a new Nation guns were natural and necessary. For putting food on the table and, wait for it, personal defense against hostilities.<br />
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Armed citizens have a long history of taking action to correct despotic governments. Feudal economies faded away due in no small part to enough peasants acquiring arms. And the will to use them.<br />
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Federalist 46. James Madison, known as the author of most of the Bill of Rights said of arms and the common man ...<br />
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(excerpt) The only refuge left for those who prophesy the downfall of the State governments is the visionary supposition that the federal government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. The reasonings contained in these papers must have been employed to little purpose indeed, if it could be necessary now to disprove the reality of this danger. That the people and the States should, for a sufficient period of time, elect an uninterrupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should, throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures which must precede and produce it. (end excerpt)<br />
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Note Madison addressed Federalist 46 to the citizens of the state of New York. Whose Governor even now is posturing to further reduce citizen rights clearly illumined by the author of the Second Amendment, James Madison. <br />
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The Second Amendment exists for the citizen. For whatever lawful purpose the citizen deems. Personal safety, hunting, and even unto "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation..."<br />
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Our Founders secured for us this Right at the risk of their lives, and most certainly their comforts, property, honor and families.<br />
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The Second Amendment stands as the final say against government grown unbearably despotic. It is not about hunting.<br />
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Go here for perhaps the best exposition on the Second you will read.<br />
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Michael Geer welcomes comments at geer.michael@gmail.com. He is an author and publisher www.priceriverpublishing.weebly.comhttp://www.aintnotruthlikeit.com/index.html<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-23608291622588245322013-01-17T01:12:00.000-05:002013-01-17T01:12:21.342-05:00Self Governance is Under Attack, not just the Second AmendmentWill YOU let them?<br />
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January 11, 2013 <br />
Neil Snyder<br />
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On Wednesday, Rasmussen Reports released the results of a poll revealing that only "74% of American Adults continue to believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun." This finding is perplexing because the Constitution hasn't changed. You can actually see it in the National Archives, and right there in the Bill of Rights you will find the Second Amendment. It reads as follows:<br />
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A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.<br />
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The language in the Second Amendment isn't vague or confusing. Since only 74% of our fellow citizens believe that we have a constitutional right to own guns, it's safe to conclude that roughly a quarter of our population isn't familiar with our founding document and the principles that it sets forth. That's disheartening because our forefathers fought and died to secure those rights for us, and we're in the process of frittering them away. <br />
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The Bill of Rights was included in the Constitution because the people demanded it. They were fearful that the United States of America would become something altogether different from the nation that they fought to create unless those rights were specifically enumerated in the Constitution itself. <br />
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As it turns out, their fears were justified. One-by-one, our founding principles are coming under attack, and one-by-one, they are being abrogated. For example, something as seemingly innocuous as healthcare has pitted the United States government against Christians throughout the nation thanks to Obamacare, and our First Amendment rights have been trampled upon.<br />
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The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 essays that were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the people of our fledgling country to support the Constitution. They lay out the arguments for the creation of a form of government that Abraham Lincoln referred to as "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in his Gettysburg Address.<br />
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In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:<br />
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes...<br />
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The constitutional issues being decided upon today threaten to remake this nation into something that our Founding Fathers would not have tolerated, much less supported. It's time for us to decide if we still believe in self governance. If we do, are we willing to defend that governing principle? Stated another way, is our country's government still of the people, by the people, and for the people, or is it a dictatorship? The answer to those questions will determine the kind of nation that we leave to future generations.<br />
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History teaches that the world is full of tyrants who would like to control us. <br />
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Will we let them?<br />
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Neil Snyder is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-17625890927044947222013-01-15T21:20:00.001-05:002013-01-15T21:20:40.723-05:00Hitler vs Obama - 25 Signs That America Is Rapidly Becoming More Like Nazi Germany From the Worth-Reading-Blog. Dead-on-Balls accurate. Enuff said. <br />
Monday, May 14, 2012<br />
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The United States of America is becoming more like Nazi Germany every single day. In fact, the Nazification of America is almost complete. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the United States of today are going to absolutely shock many of you. Most Americans simply have never learned what life was really like back in Nazi Germany. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany was a Big Brother totalitarian police state that ruthlessly repressed freedom and individual liberty. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany adopted socialism, dramatically increased government spending and raised taxes to astronomical levels. Under Adolf Hitler, abortion became legal in Germany, the government took over health care and Christianity was pushed out of the public schools and out of public life. To prove all of these points, I am going to use extensive quotes from two sources. Kitty Werthmann was a child living a peaceful life in Austria when Hitler took over her nation. Her eyewitness accounts about what life was like under Nazi Germany are invaluable. In addition, I will also be quoting extensively from author Bruce Walker. He is the author of a book entitled "The Swastika Against The Cross: The Nazi War On Christianity", and during his years of research he has uncovered some absolutely jaw dropping stuff. After reading the information in the rest of this article, there should be no doubt that the United States is becoming just like Nazi Germany.<br />
Nazi Germany shows us what happens when the state becomes god. Adolf Hitler was certainly more racist than the leaders of America are today, but other than that there are very few differences between the road that Adolf Hitler led Germany down and the path that the United States is being led down.<br />
The following are 25 signs that America is rapidly becoming more like Nazi Germany....<br />
#1 Nazi Germany was a totalitarian Big Brother police state that constantly monitored everything that German citizens did.<br />
Today, the bureaucrats that run things in the United States are also absolutely obsessed with constantly trying to monitor us. For example, there are now control freaks that inspect the lunches of preschool students in certain areas of the country in order to make sure that they contain the "right" foods....<br />
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.<br />
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.<br />
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.#2 Nazi officials often used their positions of power to force others to do dehumanizing things.<br />
This is exactly what the TSA is doing today. It would be really easy to imagine some Nazi military officers forcing a young woman to walk back and forth in front of them several times so that they could admire her form. Well, that is what TSA agents are doing to American women today. The following comes from a recent Wired article....<br />
TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.<br />
One woman who flew out of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport several months ago said a female agent sent her through a body scanner three times after the agent commented on her “cute” body.#3 In Nazi Germany, even women and children were treated like dehumanized cattle.<br />
Well, today schoolchildren are being strip-searched all over the United States. Down in Georgia, one student was recently strip-searched by public school officials after another student falsely accused him of having marijuana.<br />
Another student down in Albuquerque was recently forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.<br />
#4 In Nazi Germany, authorities could stop you and search you at any time and for any reason.<br />
In America that is not supposed to happen, but it is happening. Last year, TSA "VIPR teams" conducted approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" at subway stations, bus terminals, seaports and highway rest stops.<br />
If you are not able to produce "your papers", there is a good chance that you will get thrown into prison in America. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.<br />
#5 Under Adolf Hitler, there were massive increases in government spending.<br />
According to eyewitness Kitty Werthmann, just about everyone was getting some sort of a handout from the German government....<br />
Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.Of course, as I have written about so many times before, this is the exact same thing that we are seeing in the United States today.<br />
#6 Under Hitler, taxes were raised dramatically in order to pay for all of these social programs.<br />
Kitty Werthmann says that "our tax rates went up to 80% of our income."<br />
In the United States our tax rates have not gotten that bad yet, but when you total up all federal taxes, all state taxes, all local taxes, all property taxes and all sales taxes, there are a significant number of Americans that do pay more than 50% of their incomes in taxes.<br />
#7 The economy of Nazi Germany was very highly socialized. <br />
As Ludwig Von Mises once correctly observed, the German economy under Hitler was not capitalist at all....<br />
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.The United States has not gotten to the level of Nazi Germany yet, but we do have a socialist president and back in 2009 the cover of Newsweek boldly proclaimed that "We Are All Socialists Now".<br />
#8 In Nazi Germany, if you conducted business outside of the socialist paradigm you were heavily punished.<br />
Well, the same thing is happening in the United States today. For example, the FDA has been runningelaborate entrapment schemes that are designed to entrap producers of raw milk. Any "unauthorized commerce" is dealt with very strictly by the U.S. government these days.<br />
#9 In Nazi Germany, government regulation of business got wildly out of control.<br />
The following is eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....<br />
My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn't meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business.<br />
If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.<br />
We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.Of course we all know about all of the ridiculous regulations that the U.S. government is burdening businesses with today. In every day and age control freaks love to stick it to business people that are just trying to make a living.<br />
#10 Under Hitler, free market capitalism was absolutely hated. <br />
National Socialist theologian Gregor Strasser once stated the following....<br />
We National Socialists are enemies, deadly enemies, of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak … and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system.And as I have written about previously, a lot of Barack Obama's strongest supporters are socialists and communists, and an increasing number of Americans are showing disdain for capitalism. In fact, some recent polls show that young adults in America actually have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism.<br />
#11 In Nazi Germany, the health care system was taken over by the government.<br />
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....<br />
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.Of course we all know what is going on in America today. The government spends nearly half of all health care dollars and Obamacare is going to mean more government control over the health care system than ever before.<br />
#12 Under Adolf Hitler, abortion was made "safe and legal" in Germany.<br />
It turns out that Hitler was a huge fan of the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. And as I wrote about recently, it was Sanger that once said the following....<br />
"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."Hitler echoed this sentiment when he wrote the following in Mein Kampf....<br />
"The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring. . . represents the most humane act of mankind."After the Nazis came to power in 1933, abortion was very quickly legalized. By 1935 there were approximately 500,000 abortions being performed in Germany every single year.<br />
Yes, Hitler very much encouraged Aryan women to have as many children as possible. But he also very much viewed abortion as a way to reduce "undesirable" populations.<br />
Unfortunately, something very similar is happening today. Abortion clinics are often located in the "poor" part of town, and a staggering 72 percent of Planned Parenthood's "customers" have incomes that are either equal to or beneath 150 percent of the federal poverty level.<br />
#13 In Nazi Germany, killing the "defective", the "weak" and the "disabled" was considered to be a good thing because it made the German people "stronger".<br />
Unfortunately, many in America today have fully embraced the eugenics principles which were so dominant in Nazi Germany.<br />
A 3 year old girl named Amelia was recently denied a kidney transplant because she is considered to be "mentally retarded", and we all remember what happened to Terri Schiavo.<br />
Not only that, the editorial page editor of the Detroit News recently proposed putting contraceptives into the drinking water in Michigan because the state has become a "breeding ground for poverty".<br />
This kind of sick thinking is rapidly spreading in America, and that is a very frightening thing.<br />
#14 In Nazi Germany, education was nationalized and God was kicked out of the schools.<br />
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....<br />
Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler's picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn't pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles, and had physical education.Unfortunately, the exact same thing is happening to U.S. public schools.<br />
#15 Under Adolf Hitler, God was mocked and religion was pushed out of every corner of public life.<br />
Just check out the following information uncovered by author Bruce Walker....<br />
The Nazi tract Gott und Volk was distributed in 1941, and it describes the life cycle of German youth in the future, who would: “With parties and gifts the youth will be led painlessly from one faith to the other and will grow up without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments… The education of the youth is to be confined primarily by the teacher, the officer, and the leaders of the party. The priests will die out. They have estranged the youth from the Volk. Into their places will step the leaders. Not deputies of God. But anyway the best Germans. And how shall we train our children? Thus, as though they had never heard of Christianity!”Once again, this parallels what we are seeing happen in America today. Last year, a high school student in Southern California was suspended for two days because he had private conversations with his classmates during which he discussed Christianity. He was also banned from bringing his Bible to school ever again.<br />
For many more examples of this phenomenon, please see this article: "18 Examples Of How Christians Are Being Specifically Targeted By Big Brother".<br />
#16 Adolf Hitler fully embraced the theory of evolution, and Darwinism provided the intellectual foundation for much of Nazism.<br />
At a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in 1933, Hitler declared that "higher race subjects to itself a lower race . . .a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right".<br />
Hitler was obsessed with the "survival of the fittest" and he took this theory to its logical extremes. The following is how one author put it....<br />
"Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses towards a planned society. He was convinced that the race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood. And this led to the establishment of a catalogue of ‘positive’ curative measures: racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other"But of course we have no problem with teaching this flawed theory to our children in the public schools of America today.<br />
Haven't we learned anything from history?<br />
#17 Under Adolf Hitler, the state started taking over the job of child care.<br />
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....<br />
When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology.Of course this is exactly what is happening in America today. Children are raised by day care centers and public schools, and most parents spend very little time with their own children.<br />
#18 In Nazi Germany, it became fashionable to mock Christians and the Christian faith.<br />
The following is more from author Bruce Walker....<br />
By 1935, the virulently anti-Christian leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Shirach issued a regulation that prohibited any child from belonging simultaneously to a church youth group and the Hitler Youth, and gradually membership in the Hitler Youth became almost obligatory – parents were told that their children would not get jobs in the civil service unless they belonged to the Hitler Youth and employers were told not to hire children who did not belong to the Hitler Youth. Christian schoolchildren who did not belong to the Hitler Youth or its female counterpart were routinely beaten up by young Nazi thugs.<br />
Boys inducted into the Hitler Youth were required to explicitly reject Christianity by oaths like this: “German blood and Christian baptismal water are completely incompatible.” At Hitler Youth center at Halle, was the following prominent statement: “The Faith fanatics, who still to-day slide down on their knees with faces uplifted to heaven, waste their time in churchgoing and prayers, and have not yet understood that they are living on the earth and that therefore their task is of a thoroughly earthly kind. All we Hitler people can still only look with the greatest contempt on those young people who still run to their silly Evangelical or Catholic Churches in order to vent their quite superstitious religious feelings.” Those that believe that the Nazis embraced Christianity are delusional. The following are direct quotes out of Hitler Youth training manuals....<br />
“Christianity is a religion of slaves and fools.”<br />
“How did Christ die? Whining at the Cross!”<br />
“The Ten Commandments represent the lowest instincts of man.”<br />
“Christianity is merely a cloak for Judaism.”<br />
This is definitely where things are going in America today. Our television shows and our movies regularly mock Christians and they are always portrayed as the "bad guys".<br />
In addition, the name of Jesus is rapidly becoming a forbidden word. Some U.S. courts have even ruled that it is unconstitutional to use the name of "Jesus Christ" during any official government meeting. The following comes from a recent WorldNetDaily article....<br />
But the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are standing by their victory in a U.S. circuit court decision that states even "a solitary reference to Jesus Christ" in invocations before the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners' meetings could do "violence to the pluralistic and inclusive values that are a defining feature of American public life."#19 Under Adolf Hitler, sexual promiscuity was actually encouraged.<br />
The following is more eyewitness testimony from Kitty Werthmann....<br />
My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn't do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn't exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.Of course the exact same thing is happening in America today. If you doubt that your tax dollars are going to promote sexual promiscuity, then I have a video for you to watch. It is a video from the American Life League, and you can view it right here. DO NOT let any children watch this video. It is done by a pro-life organization but it is very graphic. I have posted a link to it because it is imperative that parents understand what is really going on out there. But please be warned that it is very, very graphic.<br />
#20 Once the Nazis took power, they rapidly implemented gun control legislation and later on they took all of the guns away from the populace.<br />
Kitty Werthmann remembers very well what happened in Austria under the Nazis....<br />
Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.Last year, more than 10 million guns were sold in the United States, but gun control legislation continues to become even more strict, and it is only a matter of time before the federal government tries to disarm the U.S. population completely.<br />
#21 Under the Nazis, large numbers of children were taken away from good families.<br />
The following is more from author Bruce Walker....<br />
Parents who resisted Nazi anti-Christian indoctrination too strongly simply had their children taken away from them. The Nazis even forbade parents to give their children Christian names and ordered babies instead to be given names like Dietrich, Otto or Siegfried. The home teaching of Christianity by parents in the home was forbidden. Not content with simply driving Christianity out of public schools, Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction in 1937 and he closed all private religious schools two years later.Doesn't this sound exactly like where America is headed?<br />
In many states, CPS ("child protective services") has become one of the most feared government agencies. All over the nation, thousands upon thousands of children have been removed from good homes because the parents were not raising them "correctly".<br />
You can read about one particularly bad CPS horror story right here.<br />
#22 Under Adolf Hitler, society became very highly militarized.<br />
Of course we are seeing the same thing in the U.S. right now.<br />
Sadly, this is even happening to our public schools. According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....<br />
Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.This is the kind of thing that a sicko like Adolf Hitler would try to do, and it is not good for our children.<br />
#23 In Nazi Germany, the prisons were absolutely packed.<br />
Right now, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world by far and the largest total prison population on the entire globe by far.<br />
Even children are being arrested in alarming numbers. In a previous article, I described how one 12-year-old girl down in Texas was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume and how police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl in Massachusetts.<br />
#24 Under Adolf Hitler, there was basically no freedom of speech.<br />
In the United States today we are told that we still have freedom of speech, but that freedom is being "chilled" in thousands of different ways.<br />
For example, the FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com....<br />
If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.<br />
The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.<br />
The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.So please speak freely on talk radio. Just realize that the feds will be recording every single word.<br />
#25 Under Adolf Hitler, paranoia was standard operating procedure.<br />
In Nazi Germany, every citizen was a potential threat and everyone had to be constantly watched for suspicious activity.<br />
Of course the exact same thing is happening in America today. Just about anything you do can get you labeled as a "potential terrorist" by the government.<br />
According to a new DHS report, the following are some of the beliefs and ideologies of potential terrorists....<br />
-"fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)"<br />
-"anti-global"<br />
-"suspicious of centralized federal authority"<br />
-"reverent of individual liberty"<br />
-"believe in conspiracy theories"<br />
-"a belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack"<br />
-"a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism"<br />
-"impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)"<br />
-"insert religion into the political sphere"<br />
-"those who seek to politicize religion"<br />
-"supported political movements for autonomy"<br />
-"anti-abortion"<br />
-"anti-Catholic"<br />
-"anti-nuclear"<br />
And the definition of "suspicious activity" has become so broad in America that it pretty much covers 100% of us. In 2012, the following activities are considered to be "suspicious" by the FBI....<br />
-shielding your computer screen from others<br />
-paying with cash<br />
-acting "nervous"<br />
-using multiple cell phones<br />
-requesting a specific room at a hotel<br />
-traveling with a large amount of luggage<br />
-refusing maid service at a hotel<br />
-staying in your room for too long<br />
-changing your appearance<br />
In addition, the U.S. government has decided that it would be a really good idea for all of us to spy on one another. The "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign looks like it could have been pulled right out of a Gestapo security handbook.<br />
But America is not supposed to be about spying on one another and reporting each other to the secret police.<br />
America is supposed to be about liberty and freedom.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-54067354299069184462013-01-14T18:58:00.000-05:002013-01-14T18:58:34.910-05:00Gun Control and the Paradox of LibertyPerfection. Truth. Just plain awesome. Everything I have been saying for years. <br />
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January 8, 2013 <br />
By Christopher S. Brownwell<br />
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The hatred of people leads to gun control. I am talking about not the shooter's hatred, but the gun controller's hatred.<br />
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Liberals have a reputation for caring about people -- an undeserved reputation. They don't believe that people ought to live free and govern themselves. Liberals like Harry Belafonte, Woody Allen, and Bill Maher have openly advocated that President Obama take the authority of a dictator. Observe how liberal celebrities such as Sean Penn gush over foreign dictators like Hugo Chávez. How many of your liberal friends own a Che Guevara t-shirt or poster? Liberals hate people so much that they do not trust them to govern themselves.<br />
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The dirty little secret that everybody knows is that gun control is not about stopping the bloodshed. Even though an automobile does not have the specific purpose to kill, it has more killing power than a firearm. According to the Center for Disease Control, cars kill more people than firearms. Where is the support for an automobile ban? Liberals do not support one. You see, a ban of firearms is not about concern for murder victims.<br />
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Liberals are so irrationally attached to gun control because they love government more than they love people. They love government more than they love liberty. They seek government handouts, whether for themselves or for those they think deserve forced charity from the "rich." They adore government over-regulation of things they hate, like guns, logging, drilling for oil, and 20-oz. sodas. They love government regulation of people, like forcing us to purchase health insurance, pay for abortions, provide contraception, eat "healthy" foods.<br />
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Government is the sovereign god to liberals. They worship at its altar and support their priests every election despite their crimes and scandals. Liberals demand that their religious morality be forced on the rest of us. Carbon emission regulations, "sin" taxes, and public school lunches are just a few examples of the imposition of liberal morality.<br />
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Liberals do not see a need for the people to have firearms because they do not see a need to fear their government. They worship it. Banning automobiles is not on the table because automobiles do not threaten government authority like the firearm does. (But just you wait: when liberals continue to implement their utopian "fundamental transformation of America," the freedom to travel will be taken. Liberals then will support a ban on automobiles.)<br />
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The right to individually bear firearms is not about hunting or personal self-defense, although those are subsumed in the 2nd Amendment. The right to bear arms is about securing an arsenal in the hands of the sovereign people in order to strike fear in government officials of the possibility of violence by a well-regulated militia under the guidance and control of an accountable civil authority. We the people have a collective right in our state governments to put our federal government officials in fear of violence for their "long train of abuses and usurpations." This God-given, natural right is embodied in our nation's Declaration of Independence.<br />
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I am talking not about wanton, reckless individuals or unaccountable paramilitary groups. Violence has to be accountable to and restrained by a civil authority. But if we truly believe in the sovereignty of the people, if we are truly classical liberals, the fear of proper, organized, accountable violence is a necessity for a free republic. Thomas Jefferson affirmed that "[w]hen governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."<br />
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Liberty is a paradox. Unrestrained liberty is not freedom, but anarchy. The liberty to do anything you want to do destroys liberty. G.K. Chesterton stated of social and political liberty in his timeless work Orthodoxy, "The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the 'Odyssey.' He is free from national prejudices and outside of patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside 'Henry V.' ... For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out."<br />
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What satisfied Chesterton about the Christian paradox is that Christianity achieved the balancing of parallel passions. "[T]he more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." Therefore, liberty is not the freedom to do anything we want to do. Liberty is the freedom to do what we ought to do.<br />
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The paradox of liberty extends to its defense and preservation. If force can take away liberty, force is necessary to preserve it. It is the hatred of violence alongside the willingness to use violence that preserves liberty. In order for us to live as free men, we have to hate the violence that takes away liberty, yet at the same time, we must embrace the violence that preserves it. That is the paradox our founders appreciated and made work for over 200 years. <br />
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Modern liberals, however, do not fear the "long train of abuses and usurpations" because they do not believe in popular sovereignty. They worship tyrannical authority. Liberals show affection to and apologize for evil men like Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, Bill Ayers, the Muslim Brotherhood. They show disdain for patriots like John Adams, Patrick Henry, Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, and the Tea Party. Liberals fear their liberty-loving neighbors more than they do their power-hungry politicians. Liberals would rather shackle their neighbors than let them live in liberty.<br />
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In a fiery speech on August 1, 1776, Samuel Adams bellowed, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom -- go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!"<br />
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Liberals prefer shackles to the wild adventure of liberty. Because they prefer shackles, they cannot bear others having liberty. In their bleeding hearts is not love for people, but a will to dominate them and to be dominated. Our Founders knew that taking away firearms from the citizen was essentially to turn him into a subject, a slave. Congressman Allen West affirmed this sentiment when he said, "An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a subject." <br />
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Turning men into slaves is not love. But that is what gun control is all about: turning men into slaves. Love for mankind is not in taking care of him, but in letting him be free to take care of himself. With gun control, liberals want to take away the means for men to preserve their liberty.<br />
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Liberals say they want gun control because they want to end the bloodshed. But beware. What is at the heart of support for gun control is not love of men, but hatred for them.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-49977630612438384452013-01-13T22:31:00.002-05:002013-01-13T22:31:44.091-05:00When seconds count...Some of us already knew/know this. Who is going to protect your family?<br />
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January 7, 2013 <br />
Cliff Thier<br />
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We learn today from CNN:<br />
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At the police station, dispatchers began to take calls from inside the school. Authorities say the first emergency call about the shooting came in at "approximately" 9:30 a.m.<br />
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"Sandy Hook school. Caller is indicating she thinks someone is shooting in the building," a dispatcher told fire and medical personnel, according to 911 tapes.<br />
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Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.<br />
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Police report that no law enforcement officers discharged their weapons at any point.<br />
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The gunman took his own life, police said. He took out a handgun and shot himself in a classroom as law enforcement officers approached, officials said.<br />
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The police station is 2 miles from the school. <br />
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Might it be fair to speculate that if the police arrived in 5 minutes, 15-20 of the 26 killed might still be alive?<br />
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If we expect the police to arrive in time to save us from a gunman, we're deluding ourselves.Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-90305398200211841962013-01-12T11:46:00.000-05:002013-01-12T11:46:52.409-05:00Obama's Disarming HasteNo different than Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Wake up America!<br />
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January 7, 2013 <br />
By Daren Jonescu<br />
<br />
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According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, President Obama is committed to moving quickly on gun violence legislation. Reported as good news, in truth this carefully projected haste and urgency ought to be regarded -- and would be reported, by a media that did not have a stake in leftist authoritarianism -- as the gravest warning sign.<br />
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"A warning sign of what?" asks the scoffing useful idiot. "Of the end of even the pretense of liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, or any other form of government answerable to the governed."<br />
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It became a cliché during the last century to say that tyranny has the advantage over freedom in a crisis, because while the legitimate government must follow its own internal processes for assuring the consent of the people (or of their representatives) prior to acting, the tyrant may simply issue a decree, irrespective of anyone's objections.<br />
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It is true that legitimate governments comprised of co-equal branches, or of deliberative bodies, are somewhat limited in their power to act precipitately. And that limit is precisely the source of their legitimacy.<br />
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In almost all circumstances, sometimes even including the most grave and pressing, legitimate governments are compelled to engage in some measure of deliberation. That is, they are restricted in their actions and responses to what can be agreed upon through a process of reasoning. If there are disagreements about the need for action, they must be heard. If there are quibbles about the course of action to be pursued, they must be heard.<br />
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Churchill argued vehemently and repeatedly in and out of the British parliament against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and in favor of forceful action. Through this process, his case, which was initially unpopular both in parliament and among the British people, grew in force and effect, and Churchill himself was chiselled by it into a greater leader of men -- precisely when Britain, and the world, needed such a leader. His path to action was longer and more laborious than Hitler's, but he had right on his side -- and he won.<br />
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Churchill was forced to these extremes of patient argumentation in the face of an immediate threat to his nation's survival by a tyrannical lunatic commanding the most powerful military in Europe. That is a case study in what I am calling "legitimate government." Illegitimate government, by contrast, would follow the opposite trajectory: pursue the most radical policy proposals while circumventing or avoiding patient argumentation and debate, even in matters of relatively little urgency.<br />
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To state this contrast differently, a free nation thinks before it acts in its own best interests, even in a genuine crisis, while an unfree nation is dragged into unthinking action against its own interests, in response to an illusory crisis.<br />
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When Rahm Emanuel described the Obama administration's modus operandi as "never let a serious crisis go to waste," many conservatives latched onto this supposed revelation as Exhibit A against the administration's integrity. In truth, Emanuel was putting the idea out there early, in the first weeks of the administration, so that, through repetition, it could be transformed, over the course of Obama's first term, from evidence of alarming cynicism into the definition of responsible governance.<br />
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Thus it is that mainstream reporters can now matter-of-factly describe the White House's mission on gun control this way:<br />
<br />
Obama's advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.<br />
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"This is not something that I will be putting off," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview broadcast last Sunday.<br />
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At the White House meeting, [Sheriff Richard] Stanek said, "the vice president indicated that there was a very short timeline for him to get back to the president with his recommendations because the American public has a short memory."<br />
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Think about that. The president and vice president of the United States are urging immediate action on gun control, pre-empting all debate about the measures' constitutionality; and their justification for this urgent, anti-constitutional action is that "the American public has a short memory." In other words, this is not a real crisis (i.e., an ongoing threat), and the public will soon realize that, and carry on with life as usual; therefore, we must act before that happens.<br />
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Here is Rucker's account of the administration's intentions:<br />
<br />
A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.<br />
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As for where the federal government would get the authority to require "universal background checks," monitor the "movement" of private property, impose "stronger" mental health checks (on whom?), or punish private citizens for "giving" guns to minors (teaching your son to shoot?), these are precisely the kinds of questions for which the normal process of legitimate government would be in order -- deliberate, debate, reason. But the administration is unwilling to accept the likely outcome of such a process, and therefore wishes to foist its illiberal ideas on the public without open discussion. We all know the pattern now: in place of the deliberative process designed to protect the public from unjust government, Obama, Feinstein, et al will rush through legislation and executive orders, and then "lead a public relations offensive to generate public support."<br />
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There is a striking dissonance between the alleged need to act immediately, and the nature of the measures proposed. Rucker repeatedly tells us the government's response will be "comprehensive"; Biden's working group has "expanded its focus" to areas in which the president may act without congressional support, such as "changes to federal mental-health programs"; the administration is "quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups"; they are "developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association," such as "rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses" (i.e., crony capitalism in the name of restricting gun sales); their proposals constitute a "deeper exploration than just the assault-weapons ban"; and the discussions include the secretaries of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.<br />
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These are strategies for radical change in the nature and order of American society. One does not solve an immediate crisis by abandoning the entity undergoing the crisis. A man whose kitchen is on fire does not respond by calling a real estate agent to discuss buying a new house; he calls the fire department, and tries to save his property. A nation in a crisis does not abandon its laws and principles; it tries to shore them up with some form of corrective action. Conservatives were rightly disdainful of George W. Bush's nonsense about "abandoning the free market in order to save it." Now, the Obama administration's response to a violation of individual rights (gun violence) is to abandon individual liberty and the right of self-preservation.<br />
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A government that responds to a genuine crisis -- such as foreign attack, or wide-scale insurrection -- in a precipitate fashion is acting irresponsibly. A government that manufactures a crisis in order to justify acting precipitately is behaving tyrannically. A government that follows this pattern as its normal method of operation is not merely behaving tyrannically - it is a tyranny.<br />
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"Never let a crisis go to waste" is cynical politics of the highest order. "Never let an opportunity to create the illusion of a crisis go to waste" is worse than cynical; it is diabolical. It is also fundamentally delegitimizing of the government that pursues this policy. A health care "crisis" necessitates immediate passage of a bill that no one has read, let alone debated. A student loan "crisis" necessitates a federal government takeover of the loan industry. A fiscal "crisis" necessitates the passage of a bill that was presented to the U.S. Senate -- "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- six minutes prior to the vote. And so on.<br />
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Now, a gun violence "crisis" -- which has been cleverly expanded into a mental health "crisis" -- requires immediate, undeliberated measures to begin the final process of ending private gun ownership, while extending the federal government's power to assess, label, restrict, and/or detain private citizens as "mentally unstable," according to guidelines that will be written by the leftist authoritarians at HHS, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum!<br />
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The only real crisis at play here is a crisis of liberty; the U.S. federal government has become unmoored from any notion of legitimate representative government, and its illegitimate practices have become broadly acceptable to the American public. Corrective measures are certainly in order, but these will not come from the government. They will come, if they come, from the people.<br />
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Here, from the Washington Post article, is the sensibility now governing America's public policy, in a nutshell:<br />
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"As we get involved in these ad nauseam debates over the Second Amendment, our children are still at risk," said Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "Debating is not the action verb we need to protect our children."<br />
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Actually, Mr. Adler, it is. Debating -- discussing the appropriateness of proposed policy in light of the nation's interests and fundamental principles -- is what legitimate governments do, as long as they wish to represent the will, rather than exploit the ignorance and fear, of the people.<br />
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While we're at it, Americans might like to consider a few other action verbs pertinent to this moment, and to "protecting their children": resisting, debunking, teaching, thinking, and fighting.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-79185004117807299902013-01-11T18:42:00.001-05:002013-01-11T18:42:31.173-05:00An opinion on gun controlThe most sensible thing I have read on the internet about guns. Long but worth it. <br />
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Posted on December 20, 2012 by correia45 <br />
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I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).<br />
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Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.<br />
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A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.<br />
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I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.<br />
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I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.<br />
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I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.<br />
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I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.<br />
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I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.<br />
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Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.<br />
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Armed Teachers<br />
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So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.<br />
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Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!<br />
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No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.<br />
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Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.<br />
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However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.<br />
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So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?<br />
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The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.<br />
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The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.<br />
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But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.<br />
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But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.<br />
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Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.<br />
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Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.<br />
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When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.<br />
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I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.<br />
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After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless? None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.<br />
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Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of defense. It was the least I could do.<br />
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Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use lethal force against them.<br />
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As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.<br />
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For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.<br />
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Gun Free Zones<br />
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Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.<br />
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Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.<br />
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In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.<br />
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The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.<br />
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I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.<br />
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The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.<br />
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There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.<br />
1.Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.<br />
2.Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.<br />
3.Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.<br />
4.China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.<br />
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And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.<br />
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The Media<br />
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Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed here before.<br />
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Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.<br />
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But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.<br />
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Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.<br />
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The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group.<br />
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These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose.<br />
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If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.<br />
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You are a star.<br />
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Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles.<br />
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And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.<br />
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They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.<br />
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Mental Health Issues<br />
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And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better.<br />
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So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.<br />
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Gun Control Laws<br />
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As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.<br />
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The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.<br />
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I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.<br />
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We need to ban automatic weapons.<br />
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Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.<br />
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Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.<br />
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Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.<br />
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When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.<br />
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Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!<br />
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Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.<br />
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Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.<br />
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Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.<br />
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We should ban handguns!<br />
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Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.<br />
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Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.<br />
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For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.<br />
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As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.<br />
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I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.<br />
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We should ban Assault Rifles!<br />
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Define “assault rifle”…<br />
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Uh…<br />
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Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).<br />
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To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later) infantry weapon.<br />
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The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary.<br />
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I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to legislate it, DEFINE IT.<br />
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And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon.<br />
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Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.<br />
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One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide mission.<br />
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For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.<br />
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Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!<br />
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It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime, but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.<br />
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Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though, because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.<br />
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Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.<br />
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Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.<br />
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http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/<br />
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I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.<br />
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When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot them to begin with.<br />
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The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2nd Amendment below.<br />
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We should ban magazines over X number of shots!<br />
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I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.<br />
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Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.<br />
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First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.<br />
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The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.<br />
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Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”<br />
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So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.<br />
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Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.<br />
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In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.<br />
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A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.<br />
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Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was a felony to possess those.<br />
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Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.<br />
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Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This could’ve been done out of my garage.<br />
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Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.<br />
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Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that below).<br />
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I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.<br />
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So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.<br />
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One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.<br />
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You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!<br />
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Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.<br />
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Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.<br />
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Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!<br />
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It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.<br />
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I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.<br />
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Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.<br />
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So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.<br />
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So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html<br />
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On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.<br />
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But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.<br />
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So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.<br />
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Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.<br />
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Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.<br />
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Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.<br />
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And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.<br />
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So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?<br />
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And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.<br />
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Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened America.<br />
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Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.<br />
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That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.<br />
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The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be evil.<br />
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And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.<br />
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You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.<br />
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Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.<br />
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We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.<br />
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They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.<br />
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Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.<br />
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But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.<br />
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So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.<br />
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Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.<br />
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However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.<br />
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And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.<br />
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So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?<br />
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Boo Evil Gun Culture!<br />
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Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.<br />
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The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who tries to victimize them.<br />
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The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the gun culture.<br />
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The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they wanted.<br />
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Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.<br />
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That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and completely fell apart.<br />
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In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary to do the job.<br />
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Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.<br />
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What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.<br />
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So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.<br />
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Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training! <br />
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And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.<br />
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Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.<br />
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http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/<br />
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In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.<br />
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If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.<br />
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They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal apparatus?<br />
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Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually changes to protect our kids.<br />
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If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-38133692681765314282013-01-09T19:17:00.002-05:002013-01-09T19:17:32.357-05:00A Marine Tells it to Sen. FeinsteinYEAH BITCH! Go fuck yourself. Just in case you missed this story.<br />
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January 4, 2013 <br />
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Jack Kemp<br />
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Shortly after the Sandy Hook shootings, Sen. Diane Feinstein proposed a new version of the 1994 assault weapons ban to be introduced at the beginning of this new 2013 Senate session. The new bill requires universal gun registration, banning of ammo clips greater than 10 bullets for rifles and handguns, and banning rifles with "one or more military characteristics." But her bill allows for "legitimate hunters."<br />
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What is a "military" characteristic? Being able to march on a parade field with it, holding the gun stock? What is a "legitimate" hunter? Food markets are found in all fifty states, so who needs to hunt for food, anyway? And we haven't even gotten to see the fine print of a bill authored by the same political party that gave us ObamaCare's thousands of pages -- an over one million word monstrosity. The fact is these two benign sounding terms, and the ambiguous term "assault rifle" are really vague weasel words to placate the gullible. But most gun owners are not gullible when it comes to new gun legislation introduced by Sen. Feinstein, a politician with a long public record of being very much against gun rights.<br />
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In 1995, Diane Feinstein created quite a furor as she stood at a microphone to say she wished she had the votes in the U.S. Senate for a total confiscation of every gun in America. That same year, Feinstein admitted at a Senate hearing that she had a concealed carry permit to protect herself from "The New World Liberation Front" which had shot out her windows and placed a bomb (which didn't detonate) at her home. Despite what seems to be a hypocritical contradiction, there is no conflict in Sen. Feinstein's thinking. She is strongly in favor of herself being well armed for self-protection. The rest of us, well, not so much. The rest of us can wait for the police to arrive. Or the ambulance. Or the hearse.<br />
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Recently, a retired U.S. Marine decided to answer Senator Feinstein's call for radically restrictive new gun legislation in a public letter stating his objections. The Corporal's words are a stirring reaffirmation of our rights as Americans that makes the case against the government's attempt to make us less than free citizens in our homes and homeland.<br />
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Corporal Joshua Boston's January 3rd letter has been going viral from one social network site to another and then on to many websites. It's 219 words, seen at the Family Security Matters political news website, Family Security Matters is reproduced below:<br />
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January 3, 2013<br />
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Senator Dianne Feinstein,<br />
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I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma'am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.<br />
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I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.<br />
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I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.<br />
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I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.<br />
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We, the people, deserve better than you.<br />
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Respectfully Submitted,<br />
Joshua Boston<br />
Cpl, United States Marine Corps<br />
2004-2012 <br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-89774242420023388702013-01-08T19:13:00.001-05:002013-01-08T19:13:21.956-05:00Why Does Anybody Need a 30-Round Magazine?Amen brother, and pass the ammunition. But in my state 30 round mags are illegal. so I will have to do with 15 round mags. What a pain in the ass. <br />
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By William A. Levinson<br />
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Senator Dianne Feinstein's latest divide-and-conquer attack on the Second Amendment has made even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a sucker for the argument that private citizens do not need high-capacity magazines. These include not only 30-round rifle magazines, but 17-round magazines for handguns like the Glock. <br />
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Why does anybody need a high capacity magazine? If Senator Manchin were to educate himself by, for example, attending Front Sight's four-day defensive handgun class, he would learn the two primary answers: <br />
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(1) Failure to stop the aggressor, and <br />
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(2) Multiple aggressors <br />
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Failure to Stop <br />
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The classic .38 caliber revolver, with a capacity of six rounds, was the standard sidearm of the United States Army during the Moro insurrection in the Philippines. The Army found at least one dead Army officer with an empty sidearm, and his head split open by a machete or similar weapon. They also found the soldier's killer, who had finally bled to death. Six rounds of .38 were therefore not enough to convince even one determined attacker.<br />
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Police instructor Masaad Ayoob's The Truth About Self Protection adds an incident in which a female police officer saw a crazed gunman murder a woman, who then shot her as well before she could do anything. "She lay helpless as she watched a neighbor empty a .22 rifle into the killer; the neighbor then had to club the madman down with the empty rifle, again and again, before he succumbed." <br />
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Ayoob does not report the size of the .22's magazine, but the Moro insurrection exemplifies why even a 30-round rifle clip might not be enough to stop a crazed and determined attacker, such as one hopped up on a drug like PCP. "He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet -- a Colt .45 slug through both ears." The Krag-Jorgensen's 30-caliber cartridge was far more powerful than the .22 in Ayoob's example, but not sufficiently powerful to civilize this particular attacker even when fired in mass.<br />
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Colonel Jeff Cooper's To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truthadds the case of a man who was prosecuted for shooting his attacker eight times with a .380 automatic pistol. The prosecutor admitted that the dead man had been the aggressor, but argued that the shooter had taken the law into his own hands by continuing to shoot an adversary who had "obviously" been disabled. Cooper, whom the defense called as an expert witness, cited a suicide in which "the deceased shot himself amidships four times with a .380 Webley. Presumably the first three hits did not convince him."<br />
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The .45-caliber Automatic Colt Pistol was the Army's specific solution to the "failure to stop" problem in the Philippines. A single hit from a .45 caliber bullet will (per Cooper) stop the aggressor 95 percent of the time. This does not mean, however, that 7 or 8 rounds are enough for all conceivable defensive scenarios. Front Sight teaches students to change magazines in (ideally) less than two seconds. The other issue that Senator Manchin fails to recognize is that of multiple attackers. <br />
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Gang Bangers and the Knockout Game <br />
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Front Sight's 4-day defensive handgun class included scenarios with multiple aggressors, including four gang bangers on a street and five or more in a house (along with innocent bystanders). Front Sight's standard doctrine is to fire a controlled pair into an aggressor's thoracic cavity and, in the event of failure to stop, another into his cranio-ocular cavity to take out his central nervous system.<br />
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In the street gang situation, though, one shot is fired into each gang member due to the need to economize on both time and ammunition; only those that don't go down (or flee) then get "seconds." You might conceivably stop four gang members with seven or eight rounds of .45 ACP; that is what the cartridge was designed to do. A small man or woman who can handle only a 9 mm comfortably might not be able to end the incident even with 15 or 17 rounds, unless he or she can make the far more difficult head shots. It is particularly telling that most police officers carry either .45s or high-capacity 9 mm sidearms. <br />
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Then there is the knockout game, in which a street gang selects a victim at random, knocks him or her down, and then maybe beats him or her to a pulp. Here is an example that involved six individuals; only one struck a blow, but the others seemed to approve. Although the Web page and the book it promotes focuses on black racial violence, there is similar Caucasian-on-black crime, such as that perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. In any event, if there are six (or more) bad guys, you are obviously going to need far more than six bullets. <br />
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The anti-Second Amendment camp may argue that the teacher who was assaulted in this video would not have had time to defend himself with a firearm or anything else, because his attacker hit him by surprise. (While use of a firearm in response to a fist might normally be considered excessive force, multiple aggressors, even unarmed ones, create a disparity of force situation that might indeed justify a lethal response. The same applies if a single unarmed aggressor is much younger, bigger, and/or stronger than the victim, e.g. a teenage punk against a senior citizen or woman.) This is where the five conditions of mental awareness, as taught by Front Sight, come into play. <br />
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States of Mental Awareness <br />
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The knockout game victim was in what Front Sight calls Condition White, which means he was not paying attention to his surroundings. Front Sight recommends living in Condition Yellow. This does not mean a state of paranoia but it includes, for example, not getting too close to alleys or other positions from which you can be ambushed. It also means looking around you when you are handling your car keys in a parking lot. Violent criminals often avoid people who are clearly alert; they, like all predators in the animal kingdom, don't want to take a chance with anybody or anything that might hurt them.<br />
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Condition Orange means you have identified a potential threat. Had the teacher been in Condition Yellow, he would have seen the six young males in time to recognize them as such. Condition Orange can prevent a confrontation before it even becomes a confrontation. You don't get hurt, and you don't have to explain to the police why you hurt somebody else. <br />
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Condition Red means a known threat is in front of you. In the case of an imminent "knockout game," you have laid out in your mind how you are going to put the gang bangers down if they escalate to Condition Black by initiating hostilities.<br />
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Senator Feinstein's latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses, and this ignorance extends even to many people who support the principles of the Second Amendment. Education is the cure for ignorance and Front Sight, along with Gunsite (founded by Colonel Cooper) offers some of the best.<br />
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William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-79404642905598482902013-01-07T21:51:00.001-05:002013-01-07T21:51:38.854-05:00Feinstein's New Gun-Ban Bill Likely to be Introduced January 22 Rights stealing scum bag assholes. Everyone that cashes a government paycheck. Maybe the anarchists are right. No government is best. Hell, limited government doesn't work here anymore because those in it will not let it. <br />
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)--author of the federal "assault weapon" and "large" ammunition magazine ban of 1994-2004--has said for weeks that she will soon introduce an even more restrictive bill. Leaders in the U.S. Senate have stated that January 22 will be the first day on which new Senate legislation can be proposed, so that is the most likely date for the new, sweeping legislation to be introduced. <br />
On Dec. 17th, Feinstein said, "I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation" and "It will be carefully focused." Indicating the depth of her research on the issue, she said on Dec. 21st that she had personally looked at pictures of guns in 1993, and again in 2012. <br />
According to a Dec. 27th posting on Sen. Feinstein's website and a draft of the bill obtained by NRA-ILA, the new ban would, among other things, adopt new definitions of "assault weapon" that would affect a much larger variety of firearms, require current owners of such firearms to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act, and require forfeiture of the firearms upon the deaths of their current owners. Some of the changes in Feinstein's new bill are as follows:<br />
* Reduces, from two to one, the number of permitted external features on various firearms. The 1994 ban permitted various firearms to be manufactured only if they were assembled with no more than one feature listed in the law. Feinstein's new bill would prohibit the manufacture of the same firearms with even one of the features.<br />
* Adopts new lists of prohibited external features. For example, whereas the 1994 ban applied to a rifle or shotgun the "pistol grip" of which "protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon," the new bill would drastically expand the definition to include any "grip . . . or any other characteristic that can function as a grip." Also, the new bill adds "forward grip" to the list of prohibiting features for rifles, defining it as "a grip located forward of the trigger that functions as a pistol grip." Read literally and in conjunction with the reduction from two features to one, the new language would apply to every detachable-magazine semi-automatic rifle. At a minimum, it would, for example, ban all models of the AR-15, even those developed for compliance with California's highly restrictive ban.<br />
* Carries hyperbole further than the 1994 ban. Feinstein's 1994 ban listed "grenade launcher" as one of the prohibiting features for rifles. Her 2013 bill goes even further into the ridiculous, by also listing "rocket launcher." Such devices are restricted under the National Firearms Act and, obviously, are not standard components of the firearms Feinstein wants to ban. Perhaps a subsequent Feinstein bill will add "nuclear bomb," "particle beam weapon," or something else equally far-fetched to the features list.<br />
* Expands the definition of "assault weapon" by including:<br />
--Three very popular rifles: The M1 Carbine (introduced in 1941 and for many years sold by the federal government to individuals involved in marksmanship competition), a model of the Ruger Mini-14, and most or all models of the SKS.<br />
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," except for tubular-magazine .22s.<br />
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches," any "semiautomatic handgun with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," and any semi-automatic handgun that has a threaded barrel.<br />
* Requires owners of existing "assault weapons" to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The NFA imposes a $200 transfer tax per firearm, and requires an owner to submit photographs and fingerprints to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), to inform the BATFE of the address where the firearm will be kept, and to obtain the BATFE's permission to transport the firearm across state lines.<br />
* Prohibits the transfer of "assault weapons." Owners of other firearms, including those covered by the NFA, are permitted to sell them or pass them to heirs. However, under Feinstein's new bill, "assault weapons" would remain with their current owners until their deaths, at which point they would be forfeited to the government.<br />
* Prohibits the domestic manufacture and the importation of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The 1994 ban allowed the importation of such magazines that were manufactured before the ban took effect. Whereas the 1994 ban protected gun owners from errant prosecution by making the government prove when a magazine was made, the new ban includes no such protection. The new ban also requires firearm dealers to certify the date of manufacture of any >10-round magazine sold, a virtually impossible task, given that virtually no magazines are stamped with their date of manufacture.<br />
* Targets handguns in defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right to have handguns for self-defense, in large part on the basis of the fact handguns are the type of firearm "overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose." Semi-automatic pistols, which are the most popular handguns today, are designed to use detachable magazines, and the magazines "overwhelmingly chosen" by Americans for self-defense are those that hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, Feinstein's list of nearly 1,000 firearms exempted by name (see next paragraph) contains not a single handgun. Sen. Feinstein advocated banning handguns before being elected to the Senate, though she carried a handgun for her own personal protection.<br />
* Contains a larger piece of window dressing than the 1994 ban. Whereas the 1994 ban included a list of approximately 600 rifles and shotguns exempted from the ban by name, the new bill's list is increased to nearly 1,000 rifles and shotguns. But most of the guns on the list either wouldn’t be banned in the first place, or would already be exempted by other provisions. On the other hand, the list inevitably misses every model of rifle and shotgun that wasn’t being manufactured or imported in the years covered by the reference books Sen. Feinstein’s staff consulted. That means an unknown number of absolutely conventional semi-auto rifles and shotguns, many of them out of production for decades, would be banned under the draft bill. <br />
The Department of Justice study: On her website, Feinstein claims that a study for the DOJ found that the 1994 ban resulted in a 6.7 percent decrease in murders. To the contrary, this is what the study said: "At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders. Our best estimate is that the ban contributed to a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders between 1994 and 1995. . . . However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban. Nor can we rule out effects of other features of the 1994 Crime Act or a host of state and local initiatives that took place simultaneously."<br />
"Assault weapon" numbers and murder trends: From the imposition of Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban (Sept. 13, 1994) through the present, the number of "assault weapons" has risen dramatically. For example, the most common firearm that Feinstein considers an "assault weapon" is the AR-15 rifle, the manufacturing numbers of which can be gleaned from the BATFE's firearm manufacturer reports, available here. From 1995 through 2011, the number of AR-15s--all models of which Feinstein's new bill defines as "assault weapons"--rose by over 2.5 million. During the same period, the nation's murder rate fell 48 percent, to a 48-year low. According to the FBI, 8.5 times as many people are murdered with knives, blunt objects and bare hands, as with rifles of any type. <br />
Traces: Feinstein makes several claims premised on firearm traces, hoping to convince people that her 1994 ban reduced the (already infrequent) use of "assault weapons" in crime. However, traces do not indicate how often any type of gun is used in crime. As the Congressional Research Service and the BATFE have explained, not all firearms that are traced have been used in crime, and not all firearms used in crime are traced. Whether a trace occurs depends on whether a law enforcement agency requests that a trace be conducted. Given that existing "assault weapons" were exempted from the 1994 ban and new "assault weapons" continued to be made while the ban was in effect, any reduction in the percentage of traces accounted for by "assault weapons" during the ban, would be attributable to law enforcement agencies losing interest in tracing the firearms, or law enforcement agencies increasing their requests for traces on other types of firearms, as urged by the BATFE for more than a decade. Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-92219319942650222532013-01-06T15:17:00.000-05:002013-01-06T15:17:48.447-05:00White House Plans To Overwhelm NRA With Rapid VictoryNever let any "crisis" go to waste. Some people think this is just about guns. No no no my dear readers this is about power over the masses. Those who live in the cities have already surrendered their freedoms (see Mayor Bloomberg et al). But for those of us who actually enjoy our freedom better wake the hell up and do something! <br />
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The White House and gun control supporters are gearing up for a whirlwind month, with plans to pass reform legislation before outrage over the Sandy Hook massacre has a chance to fade. . . <br />
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While the fiscal cliff has dominated Washington’s attention in recent weeks, lawmakers and activists are laying the groundwork for their big push. Vice President Joe Biden, tasked with heading a commission to investigate gun violence, has been quietly meeting with experts, interest groups, and public officials and is expected to release a set of recommendations within weeks. Boston mayor Thomas Menino, co-chair of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told the Boston Herald this week that an optimistic Biden had assured him that Obama would sign legislation “by the end of January.”<br />
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“We had been led to believe their report would come by end of January, but we’re hearing they may want to have something out by January 15, even quicker than expected,” Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told TPM. <br />
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There are political countermeasures to this blitzkrieg being discussed by a number of folks of national stature. Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-54673220591921263472013-01-04T20:32:00.001-05:002013-01-05T18:25:31.219-05:002013: Resist or Disarm. Start deciding now what form your resistance will take.See I told you other people were thinking this way. Posted by Dutchmann6 at Sipsey Streeet Irregulars one of the best things I have ever read on the net. I agree totally and whole heartedly. I have been saying stuff like this for years. So good to see it elsewhere. <br />
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2013: Resist or Disarm. Start deciding now what form your resistance will take. <br />
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"The meek, he had been told, would inherit the earth, but only when the last soldier left it to them in his will." -- Captain Richard Sharpe, in Sharpe's Company by Bernard Cornwell, Chapter 10. <br />
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Piece of Mind.<br />
Sebastian, the ultimate pragmatist, has presented his read on the bills now entered, or about to be entered, into Congress: "We have a lot of work to do on the magazine issue. Most people, at this point, even pundits and elites, know the “assault weapons” issue is a crock of shit. The magazine issue is a different story." I left this comment on his blog which was not approved: <br />
It doesn't matter what they pass, enough of us will defy it to make the choice mandatory for the rest of you. Fight or disarm.<br />
Sebastian and other Fudd "pragmatists" may continue to hide from this reality if they choose, but J.D. Longstreet understands this in his piece The Next American Civil War:<br />
At first glance it appears to be lunacy of the highest order—and yet—here we are on the cusp of violence to defend something the political left, an authoritarian cabal itself, cannot abide, AT ALL: personal freedom, individual freedom. . .<br />
And now they intend to disarm us.<br />
Look. There is so much pent-up anger in America today that if this argument over gun control ever gets beyond the talking stage it is reasonable to believe there will be violence on a scale not seen since the 1860’s in this country. <br />
These fears are reinforced by the promises of the antis to 'pry guns from cold, dead fingers'.<br />
But the time has not come to begin shooting -- yet. Feinstein's Intolerable Act has not yet passed, let alone begun to be enforced. The raid parties are not yet forming. However, the time HAS come for each of us to decide what form our resistance will take.<br />
Some of us, myself included, are already on the public stage so we might as well dance. For us, the struggle will be a political one of letters, demonstrations, passive and active resistance designed to put the regime on notice that this line they have drawn will not be crossed without further resistance, even righteous, justifiable self-defense of our lives, liberty and property. We shall be the rattlesnake's rattle, the low growl of the wolverine, saying "Don't tread on me." Our job is to put them on notice so that they don't blunder uninformed into this civil war that the unintended consequences of their actions will spark. Our job will be to get in their faces and say plainly, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you." This is the same moral requirement that we would be under if a convicted home invader and rapist out on parole met us in the street and announced that he was coming to our home that night to rob, rape and kill. Would we be justified in killing him on the spot? No. But we would be obligated to warn him that if he attempts it we will kill him. Those who also have a record of robbing and raping the Founders' republic and killing its citizens to work their will upon them deserve the same sort of warning.<br />
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Some of us will also be doing political work, but behind the scenes, doing such things as privately putting each of our county sheriffs and other politicians on the spot -- here is the Intolerable Act, will you enforce it or help us resist it?<br />
Others of us, the majority I suspect, will simply be the hidden core of resistance, using the intervening time by seeing to their own training and logistics, awaiting the day when the Feds, having lost patience with those of us who publicly defy them, finally begin killing us. These will be the folks who will execute a Fourth Generation civil war upon the tyrant's leadership -- and only them to the greatest extent possible -- with the target of breaking their will as they prosecute their treasonable war against the Founders' republic. They are willing to fight to the last ATF agent and local policeman to enforce their will. But it will be by their own aggression, and the 4GW reaction to it, that we will then discover if they are willing to fight to the first Senator, the second congressman, the third White House aide, the fourth editor, the fifth Hollywood propagandist using Bill Clinton's revised rules of engagement against the Serb's in 1999. Unintended consequences indeed.<br />
It will be the time of One Hundred Heads, may God spare us all from its horrors.<br />
The point is that each of us must decide now what form our resistance will take. Either that, or prepare to disarm. Time is just about up. Those who are busy subverting the Founders' republic have told us so.<br />
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"Son, you don't poke a wolverine with a sharp stick unless you want your balls ripped off." -- Grandpa Vanderboegh. Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-31347931544738969002013-01-04T19:52:00.000-05:002013-01-04T19:52:39.785-05:00Outing the Gun Owners and the Left's New SavageryThe left is getting dangerous. It is getting near the time to make it extremely dangerous for them. They threaten and try to scare us 'til no end. What is the next step? What is the answer? Civil war? Revolution? Just sayin...If Im thinking it someone else must be also. What are you thinking about? <br />
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January 4, 2013 <br />
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By Robert Spencer<br />
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As Michael Walsh noted last week at PJ Media, the Westchester Journal News has published the name and addresses of legal gun owners in Westchester County, New York. While many have rightly upbraided the paper for endangering innocent people and giving criminals a map of homes without guns, the paper has stuck to its guns (so to speak!), not only defending its action but warning that more gun owners will soon be outed. And thus in a nutshell we see the Left's narcissistic, solipsistic and savage new moralism.<br />
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The Journal News editors believe that they are in the right to victimize Westchester gun owners, making them subject to possible vigilante attacks, legal harassment, and who knows what else, because they think they have the moral high ground, and are so morally obtuse as to assume that since they have that high ground, any action in its service is justified.<br />
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The American Left, which thoroughly dominates the mainstream media, no longer believes, if it ever did, in the concept of reasonable and respectable people disagreeing in good faith on core issues; it increasingly demonstrates that it believes all opposition to its own outlook and policies must never be tolerated, but only eradicated. Its opposition is never to be engaged on the level of ideas, but only ridiculed and held up as evil. The Left has done nothing but demonize its opposition for years. Organizations like Media Matters routinely repeat remarks made by conservative politicians and commentators as if they were obviously risible and/or morally offensive, without ever bothering to explain why or to offer a substantive refutation of any kind. They and others like them never debate or discuss issues, but only deal with their opposition with endless games of "gotcha" and searches for "gaffes."<br />
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After the Left has played such games for so long, this new level of savagery was perhaps inevitable. For the Westchester Journal News, owners of legal guns are evil, and thus have no rights they are bound to respect. For the Left in general, their opponents are evil, and so can and should even be put in physical danger if that is what is needed in order to bring about its silence and submission.<br />
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This savagery grows more common by the day, and doesn't extend only to gun owners. I myself have been on the receiving end of this thuggery because of my work in opposing the global jihad and Islamic supremacism -- as has my colleague Pamela Geller and other defenders of the freedom of speech and equality of rights for all people. A Leftist journalist named Nathan Lean, the editor-in-chief of Aslan Media, who has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and New York Daily News, has sent me several tweets and emails containing personal information about myself: where he thinks I live, who he thinks my wife is, and more.<br />
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The purpose of these messages was unmistakable: Lean was signaling to me that he thought he knew my whereabouts (and that of my family), despite my attempts to conceal them because of the many death threats I receive. And why would he want me to think that he knew where I was? So that I would be frightened into silence, afraid that one of his many violence-inclined allies might do me in if I continued to speak out for freedom and human rights. Yet despite his appetite for menace, Lean had no trouble getting published in flagship mainstream media outlets -- which tells you a great deal about them.<br />
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In the 1930s, when the National Socialist German Worker's Party, aka the Nazi Party, was consolidating its power in Germany, its storm troopers regularly terrorized its opponents: showing up when they spoke to shout them down and intimidate them, vandalizing their messages, and sometimes attacking them outright. We are rapidly approaching the same situation in America today, as the Left's demonization of its opponents descends to this menacing new level.<br />
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The Westchester Journal News does not have the moral high ground, and never did. Any doubt about that was removed when it published the addresses of the gun owners. But soon thuggish demonstrators outside the homes of those gun owners and others targeted by the Left will be a commonplace of American life. And the next step after that will be even worse: it is only going to get more dangerous -- physically and in other ways as well -- to oppose the policies of those who style themselves our moral superiors. With four more years of Obama coming, there is no stopping them now.<br />
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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-24389708326353144552013-01-03T18:35:00.000-05:002013-01-03T19:47:05.720-05:00Senator Feinstein's Constitutional End-run Senator Feinstein's Constitutional End-run <br />
By Alan P. Halbert<br />
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There's more than a touch of hypocrisy in the recent exploitation of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy by the MSM, Obama, and the Democrats. All the wanton murders due to Fast & Furious (estimated at 300 or more) do not appear equal to one life lost at Sandy Hook. The administration paid criminals to illegally arm drug cartels in Mexico, choosing to supply them with none other than "assault weapons", mostly AK-47's with some Barrett .50 caliber BMG rifles and a few hand grenades thrown in for good measure.<br />
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The result was the deaths of federal agents Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, along with another thirteen American citizens, and several hundred Mexicans. Another disgusting milepost for 2012 is the 500th homicide in Chicago, Obama's and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's hometown. This sad statistic was achieved when Nathaniel Jackson was shot and died at the scene on December 27th at 9:00 P.M. as he stood on a street corner.<br />
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The MSM has largely been silent about these tragedies, choosing instead to concentrate on the victims at Newtown. In the process they overlook at least 466 child gunshot victims with 68 fatalities in Chicago this past year alone.<br />
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This brings us to Senator Feinstein's attempt to revive the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 with her recently drafted gun control legislation. She will introduce this revamped legislation to the Senate in January in an effort to resolve our supposed epidemic of violence as revealed by Obama in his Sandy Hook speech to the nation. In effect, what this darling of the left has done is reintroduce all of the weapons that were not subject to registration initially.<br />
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This is simply a national gun-registration scheme; a synopsis of the NFA follows:<br />
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The National Firearms Act ("NFA"), 72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236, enacted on June 26, 1934, currently codified as amended as 26 U.S.C. ch. 53, is an Act of Congress in the United States that, in general, imposes a statutory excise tax on the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms and mandates the registration of those firearms. (Note: bold emphasis is mine)<br />
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Originally, pistols and revolvers were to be regulated the same as machine-guns, though they were exempted as the legislation moved its way through Congress. Feinstein's expansion of the NFA will include all of the weapons they had the intelligence to exclude previously.<br />
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It is interesting to note that the NFA became law right after the repeal of Prohibition. Congressmen of the day were intimately familiar with how unintended consequences play out from their legislative intent. Prohibition released a murderous rampage of gang-related violence on this nation dwarfing anything we have seen since, leading to the expansion of the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates that are still with us today, another testament to a benevolent Congress.<br />
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Owning an NFA weapon subjects the owner to loss of certain constitutional rights, chief amongst them the surrender of our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to due process. The possession of an NFA weapon allows the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) to demand inspection of these weapons any time they appear at your door, usually unannounced, all without a search warrant of course.<br />
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These weapons are individually registered to the owner. You are not allowed to transfer them without the express permission of the government. Transporting the weapon across state lines for any purpose without government approval beforehand is illegal. This is also applicable to each weapon you currently own. Senator Feinstein's draft does not discuss the waiver of the $200.00 dollar fee to register "grandfathered" weapons in the NFA database.<br />
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To legally posses an NFA weapon requires that the chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) in your area of residence sign a BATF form that expressly allows the citizen to possess such weapons. You will also need to submit photographs of yourself, a fingerprint card, and of course, pay the $200.00 fee and possibly a registered Class III Transfer Agent, with his fee as well.<br />
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Imagine a harried rural or county sheriff overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests made to his office. This will probably place many weapons in limbo while the documents are in process. No doubt they will enact some method of holding these weapons while this plays out; probably leading to many lost, stolen, or outright confiscated weapons by attrition.<br />
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Not to mention how many LEOs will be required to perform the background checks on individuals for weapons that are already legally owned, taking them away from legitimate law enforcement duties. This will probably lead many local law enforcement agencies to throw up their hands and refuse to comply with these new requirements; again leaving law-abiding citizens in limbo with lawful weapons in their possession subjecting them to arrest and prosecution, leaving many weapons surrendered by default.<br />
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I have to wonder how many leftist CLEOs will choose this route? Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Chicago to name just a few cities play host to such officials. Of course, they will excuse themselves with "legitimate budget" busting cover story(s)... if only we had the funds....<br />
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You get the idea.<br />
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These tactics are nothing short of a backdoor scheme to render legal weapons illegal by redesignating them through the NFA as equivalent to automatic weapons. The result will be a national gun registration database for conventional arms. At the same time, these very same legislators (along with Obama) have encouraged untold carnage and mayhem through policies of looking the other way as regards the inner cities of this nation, Mexico, South America, and the Middle East as our government willingly supplies criminals, jihadists, and cartels with weapons.<br />
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Now in their ultimate wisdom, they wish to make pariahs and criminals out of law-abiding citizens by means of an act of Congress that will force us to reapply for our lawful and legally owned weapons for a false premise of security from ourselves.<br />
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Discussing the real reason for the Sandy Hook tragedy is beyond the gun control mentality of the leftists currently ensconced into the media, educational institutions and seats of power in this nation. It is simply about power and control... not guns. The action of our president in Fast & Furious and the arming of Al Qaeda in Libya, Syria and the pipeline of illegal weapons funneled by the Mexican drug cartels back into our nation renders this clear enough.<br />
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We are in far more danger from these actions of our own government than from another Sandy Hook atrocity by a crazed killer.<br />
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The Second Amendment's purpose is to provide for the citizens' defense from all who would deny their natural God- given right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" against a criminal, a foreign or domestic enemy, or our own government. We will witness the end of the Republic if this proposed legislation is passed, since all of our rights flow from the citizen's ability to defend them.<br />
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As for this citizen, I will never disarm or surrender my Second Amendment rights, much less willingly comply with such a traitorous act of Congress if enacted... it is actions like these that light revolutionary fervor in a nation and its citizens. It did so in 1776 and it will do so again. <br />
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Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6598350976738028438.post-75057100422281868682013-01-02T19:40:00.000-05:002013-01-02T19:41:58.071-05:00Sam Colt and the Law of Self-PreservationSam Colt and the Law of Self-Preservation<br />
By Glenn Fairman<br />
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"God made man but Sam Colt made them equal."<br />
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It is said that the 2nd Amendment follows hard upon the 1st so as to serve as its bodyguard -- providing the added incentive of coercive force by a wary citizenry to guarantee that those initial cherished liberties, expounded by our Founders, did not go the way of the 10th Amendment. The 2nd Amendment, interpreted as the right to bear arms by a free people, has not escaped that yawning chasm that has opened up between the political Right and Left, and the rationale behind this stratification falls along the same familiar tensions of individual vs. collective. The nature of men, having proved insufficient in wisdom for the eradication of evil, must then paradoxically utilize the equalization of deadly force to not only suppress the jaundiced glint in our neighbor's eye but the tyranny that arises when men esteem the chimera of ordered equality over liberty.<br />
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Of all laws that are deemed to have their origin in nature, the Law of Self-Preservation is indeed the most fundamental. Each person, ceteris paribus, has been deemed to have an a priori right to guard the sanctity and value of their life through any means necessary, assuming their attitude is one of general peace with men and not of the character of brigands. The friction arises with the inherent inequality of humanity, evidenced in their disparate size, strength, and stature. Now, while defensively brandishing a knife or cudgel poses a strong inducement in mounting one's stout defense of life or property, the use of a firearm has irrevocably changed the dynamic relationship between both predator and victim. Since criminals, from the dullest to the most sophisticated, are deeply concerned with maintaining both their own freedom and their "skin," more than a passing thoughtful consideration is generally weighed within a criminal's nefarious equation when deciding whom he shall next fall upon. <br />
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Assuming that the above statement is true, it would seem logical that municipalities or states whose concealed and open carry gun laws were the most relaxed would be the same areas which would have the lowest rates per capita of crimes either committed with force, or through the threat of deadly force. Therefore, should we be surprised that national statistics bear this position out? Conversely, regions that have severely forbidden either the sale of handguns or the lawful concealment thereof should reflect elevated levels of crimes against both property and life. And generally, we find that this premise, especially true in the major urban centers, to be consistently affirmed.<br />
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Accordingly, the current murder and violent crime rates in the Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia areas are astronomical, despite having hardened laws against concealed carry. These misdirected laws have indeed the net effect of proscribing their citizenry from effectively protecting themselves from criminals--miscreants who care not a whit for the asphyxiating legal technicalities that burden and condemn honest citizens. And as governments have increasingly sought to regulate the sale, transportation, and use of handguns and "assault rifles," they have increasingly begotten a nation of sheep by laying bare their population's throats to packs of increasingly dangerous and feral werewolves. Can it be any longer doubted that the same misplaced compassion that would outlaw firearms has willed these darkened hearts through government's calculated legislation of filial destruction and subsequent moral anarchy?<br />
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In the concrete jungles of our urban cities or in our seemingly tranquil suburbias with their flaccid social disintegration, many Progressive-minded levels of government have made the considered decision that in lieu of a debauched and malicious portion of its citizenry, it is far better to effectively disarm their constituent fiefdoms in order to show them that superficially they have their best interests at heart. All the while, and with their fingers testing the winds, those same politicos are deftly side-stepping the fact that those cretins with pernicious intent will handily acquire guns elsewhere, or commit their menacing acts with a baseball bat or a lawnmower blade if necessary.<br />
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We now see in Great Britain, a country that has elevated to the status of fetish the disarmament of its society, a towering crescendo in property and violent crimes, as men and women even possessing rifles and shotguns are fearful of using them for fear of being charged for killing or maiming thugs in self-defense. Within the milieu of such a nation of rabbits, the fabric of trust and safety erodes and sends a subliminal message to society that emboldens the brazen and terrifies the weak and defenseless.<br />
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America's 2nd Amendment, once thought to be the most secure of our organic rights, has come under assault by forces that believe that the monopoly on significant coercive force should be limited to the agents of the State; and as Dennis Prager has wisely said: "As the State grows larger, the individual in fact grows smaller." Our government exists to guarantee our lives, liberties, and our properties. Not only has it proven itself insufficient to this foundational task, but it has actively conspired to disrespect our personal sovereignty and safety, having wandered far afield of its fundamental mandate. Meanwhile, tireless energy is spent attempting to instead equalize and homogenize us---mandates that had never once entered into the minds of the Founders.<br />
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Perhaps the best indicator of where the 2nd Amendment is the booming sale of handguns; this barometer is rooted in the anxiety and trepidation that Americans feel for both the safety of their families in perilous economic time, while it is a hedge against the predations of a regime that has forgotten its minimalist confines and spilled over into the imperial, the unilateral, and the arbitrary. Gun manufacturers have mockingly named Barack Obama as their Man of the Year for his contribution to a veritable tsunami of firearm sales. This, in itself, might evoke a good belly laugh if the stark implications of it weren't so damn depressing.<br />
Always America Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03982881531349016309noreply@blogger.com0