Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

There is an X post in this link, but that’s not what interested me. The weird cacophony of comments were just as strange as anything I could have imagined.

I am an old man now. I’ve boiled away all the BS. Gun control is my litmus test. If you support gun control you are a fascist. Period. End of story.

If you support fascism there is already a party for you. The Democrats.

[ … ]

Litmus test you say?

“If you support gun control you are a fascist. Period. End of story.“

So you agree with me that Vladimir Putin is a fascist, good to know.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill tightening gun controls in response to a deadly school shooting earlier this year.

The law, signed into force on June 28, raises the minimum age for buying hunting rifles and long-barreled guns from 18 to 21.
It also provides for additional restrictions on owning weapons.“

https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-gun-ownership-law/31331101.html

It all goes downhill from there and apparently these commenters know each other (at least, over the interwebz) and one thinks he has something on the other. I’m glad I don’t deal with these commenters. I’d just delete them. I have no patience for things like that in my house.

Let me answer the question for you. Yes, if you support gun control, you are a communist. You may be a communist with a little ‘c’ who pretends to love liberty, or you may be a communist with a big ‘C’ who admits it all. But either way, you are a communist.

That’s why I didn’t like GWB who wanted to renew the Clinton era AWB. That’s why I didn’t like Clinton (among many other things). That’s why I didn’t like Obama (among many other things). And if Trump continues to make claims that he is the best friend gun owners have and then ignores our demands, I won’t like him very much by the end of all of this.

The same thing goes for Putin. I don’t like him because he is a gun controller (among many other things). Gun control is a signal issue that indicates to me where your heart is.

And note well that both the senate and the house let 2A advocates, sports shooters, hunters and gun owners down in their promise to undo suppressors and SBRs as NFA items. This will come back to haunt them.

I know that there is a flurry of lawsuits now over the NFA given the fact that there is now a registry without a tax which folks purport to violate other laws passed by congress.

So what? All a court has to do is decide that if congress this term had wanted to remove suppressors and SBRs from the NFA, or that they were worried about running afoul of other things they had done, they could have easily removed them from the NFA altogether or not rescinded the tax.

As it is, the $200 tax has stood for almost 100 years. Now that we’ve made it fair game, who knows what the democrats will do when they control things (as they are bound to)?

They’ve opened a can of worms by doing what they consider to be a halfway house. A court will never side with us, and even if so, the SCOTUS will never grant it certiorari. The Pollyanna posts and videos about how this is a win annoy me. It’s a fantastical and abject loss and failure.

Finally, I suspect John Thune was worried about losing the senate by exposing Cornyn and others as gun controllers. He doesn’t have his chamber in order, and I suspect that’s why he didn’t overrule the parliamentarian.

So before Elon or anyone else gets his head straight about the second amendment, we need to first focus on the senate and house, if there is really any further point to doing so. I suspect all is lost and there is no longer any purpose in politics. It’s all just one uniparty.

And we had a once in a hundred year chance to remove suppressors from the NFA. But you didn’t have your chamber in order. There are gun controllers among you that you decided to protect rather than do the people’s work. You served fellow senators instead.

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) July 5, 2025

The House and Senate versions of the reconciliation bill will have to be themselves merged and reconciled, but at least in the senate, gun owners have been thrown under the bus.

It begins with the House version of the bill, which not only repeals the $200 tax stamp for suppressors but also removes them entirely from the NFA. We had to push very hard to get this through committee and the house.

On to the senate. The senate version initially had the same language, but the senate parliamentarian judged removal of suppressors from the NFA to be outside the scope of what can be done in the bill. John Thune, ever the GOP wallflower, has said that he will not overrule or discharge the senate parliamentarian.

When this came to light, as if clockwork, a number of gun “influencers” and YouTubers came out with the same language. Removal of the $200 tax is the “next best win.” Surprisingly and disappointingly, I also saw a post on X by Gun Owners of America using the same language. It was everywhere I looked and listened – “next best win.”

Someone, somewhere, was in charge of this push to get gun owners to accept less than perfect but still a win. These talking points came from someone, but I don’t know who. I will neither embed nor link the posts or videos with “influencers” uttering this phrase. I find the phrase and the posts and videos to be disgusting and repulsive. I do so for a number of reasons.

Gun owners have been used and abused for decades now, and our support has always been presumed and taken for granted. Once again into the breach, the pols must have figured. We can pass this one off to the proles as a “next best win.” But moreover, this tactic assumes that gun owners are an impressionable monolith. Have some influencers says some things and they’ll be fine.

But anyone who reads the comments on posts or videos knows that gun owners are the first to point out stupidity, waste and shilling for companies. We aren’t a monolith, and we don’t influence easily. Actually, we’re a rather disagreeable bunch.

As to the bill, it may be even more complicated that what I just outlined. John Thune has said he won’t overrule the senate parliamentarian. But he (and the GOP) already has. They did it for the California EV mandate, which the parliamentarian also said is outside the bounds. The vote was 51 – 44. They didn’t do it by 2/3 of the senate. So that excuse is clearly a lie.

There are two possible reasons for this, and perhaps they both apply. First, the GOP is not as quick or willing to protect your second amendment rights as they seem. They usually feign support and then buckle at the last minute, finding some political reason why whatever they proposed couldn’t really be done.

The second reason, while a bit more difficult to prove, is a likely reason (or at least outcome) of their feigning support for the Hearing Protection Act right up until the last minute.

John Cornyn is going to be in the fight of his career against a strong challenger in Texas, Ken Paxton. Cornyn played gun controller himself in his support for the Safer Communities Act. The democrats needed the support of two GOP senators, and they got them with Cornyn and Thom Tillis.

So Cornyn’s reputation needed to be repaired in his upcoming fight. Enter Thune and Cornyn in reinserting the $200 tax stamp repeal in the “big beautiful bill.” Not removal from the registry, mind you, but repeal of the $200 tax, as if that’s what the problem is with having suppressors in the NFA.

This way, not only has the senate effectively killed the repeal of suppressors as NFA items, but Thune has given Cornyn talking points back home. Or so he thinks he has. Rather, I think what will happen is voters will remember this treachery. This will become yet another ball and chain around Cornyn’s neck. John Thune will go down as one of the weakest and most treacherous senate leaders in history, at least with gun owners.

We have never had an opportunity as good as this one, with a GOP president, house and senate. Thune has thrown this away under the guise of not overruling the parliamentarian, when in fact he has done this before.

In Pennsylvania, gun owners were mostly silent in elections and hadn’t made their voices heard. That was true up until 2024 when they came out in droves. It handed Pennsylvania to the GOP. I wouldn’t expect that to happen again. John Thune may have just single handedly and forever handed Pennsylvania to the democrats.

The big beautiful bill is a dud to gun owners and second amendment advocates. There is nothing whatsoever in it for us. And the influencers who used the phrase “next best win” have to live with the shame of having used talking points handed to them by someone, we still don’t know who.

Either Thune was pushed around like an Afghan dancing boy by the senate parliamentarian, or he didn’t really want suppressors removed as an NFA item and used all of this to help his buddy, John Cornyn. There is plenty of shame to go around.

@BrutusMaximus50 Halo! the unroll you asked for: https://t.co/oLSoTiDn3y Talk to you soon.

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) June 29, 2025

It’s dead. Allowed to be killed by the cowardly senator John Thune because of a parliamentary trick.

So much for honesty and integrity in politics. They hate you. The democrats hate you, and the republicans hate you.

@JDVance @dcodrea @StephenGutowski @GunOwners @gunpolicy @Stambo2A @2Aupdates @SenJohnThune

No. Removal of the $200 tax for suppressors is not the "next best thing" to removal from the NFA. It is an abject failure and the GOP has lost my support in perpetuity. I don't want to…

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) June 28, 2025

Via an email from long time 2A warrior Dave Hardy.

Because you can’t have those proles having the means to enforce their vote, can you? Channeling Mike Vanderboegh, if someone comes to your door and demands that you turn over your guns to the government, shoot them in the face.

Source.

The themes of grief sometimes bubble over into righteous rage. In 2018, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Fla., Leckey began working on the song “Can’t Pray to Me.” In the bluesy, boisterous track, Leckey sings from the perspective of Mother Mary. “I am the mother of all children / I am the lady keeping watch,” she sings, imagining how Mary might react to gun violence in the U.S. today. “You can’t pray to me and keep your guns.”

[ … ]

Instead, Hell Gate is “not about being queer in the church — it just is queerness in the church,” she said. “There are so many ways to be Catholic. And being a queer person is inherently creative. God delights in our creativity.”

That last paragraph is a lie. Mary isn’t the person she described, and I’m not Roman Catholic anyway and I only pray to the Father through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So in a short missive, she missed on all cylinders. I’ll keep my guns, thank you.

Sheesh. How does society produce imbeciles like this?

Nice try, Grace. Come back after you’ve studied a bit and we’ll talk.

Source.

Citigroup on Tuesday ended a seven-year-old policy restricting how it provides banking services to firearm manufacturers, sellers and resellers.

The bank launched the policy in March 2018 after a teenage gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14 that year.

Citi said at the time that it would require clients to “adhere to these best practices: (1) they don’t sell firearms to someone who hasn’t passed a background check, (2) they restrict the sale of firearms for individuals under 21 years of age, and (3) they don’t sell bump stocks or high-capacity magazines.”

The bank’s policy applied only to its business clients, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500-sized companies. It did not restrict how Citi’s personal banking customers used their cards. Citi says it provides banking services to more than 19,000 companies globally.

“As a society, we all know that something needs to change. And as a company, we feel we must do our part,” Citigroup Executive Vice President of Enterprise Services and Public Affairs Ed Skyler said in 2018.

But Skyler says things have changed. “The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of firearms,” he wrote Tuesday in a blog post announcing that Citi “will no longer have a specific policy as it relates to firearms.”

Operation choke point, it was called. And it’s illegal because it interferes with interstate commerce.

When the government creates a banking system and essentially forces everyone to use it for business, and then encourages that system to exclude certain actors, it’s also immoral.

In today’s orders list.

A right trampled and ignored – even laughed at.

@dcodrea @Stambo2A @2Aupdates @GunOwners @gunpolicy @2ARenaissance

SCOTUS orders list today. Snope v. Brown denied certiorari.

Cowards and traitors to the constitution, except for Thomas.

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) June 2, 2025

Source.

I’m the only gun owning liberal in my general friend/acquaintance group and the proposal to drop the $200 stamp for cans has some of them seriously worked up about how Republicans are making mass shootings easier this way, making quietly killing someone more affordable, etc. The usual.

It doesn’t seem to get through that they’re pretty much never used in crimes and that if that was your goal, you’d be far better off just 3D printing/garage building a cheap illegal one. Seriously. There are well over a million cans in this country and they’re involved in like 40+ crimes a year. And I’m not even sure that’s limited to legal ones.

There’s so much bad shit in this bill, but removing a tax on things that are seen as nothing more than safety devices in other countries is not one of them and the fixation on it is really frustrating.

I guess it just reminds me how effectively a huge number of left leaning voters have been lied to about guns and how they work (as well as gun owners, for that matter) and it’s hard to know how to start undoing that damage. How do I effectively explain that I just wanna giggle when my gun goes whump instead of boom sometimes when that thing is clearly built to spec for kid killing?

Here’s the first thing you do. You explain to them that suppressors are safety equipment, as important as any other safety equipment such as hard hats or safety glasses. And if you need to, you cite the relevant parts of the federal code where OSHA is concerned about hearing loss. You explain to them that this has to do with the proper function of the human body.

Next, you don’t use words like giggle. You insist that “shall not be infringed means shall not be infringed.” Period.

Finally, you get yourself a new set of friends. Your friends are controllers and you shouldn’t be around them.