Articles by Herschel Smith

News from Houston.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A mother who pulled into a southwest Houston gas station overnight could never have imagined what happened next. Her 1-year-old baby in the backseat of her car was shot. The pair was caught in the middle as police confronted a chase suspect.

The shooting happened around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday at a Chevron gas station near the Southwest Freeway and Beechnut.

Police say the officer who opened fire didn’t know the baby was in the back seat.

The baby’s mother was parked at the gas station at pump 4. She was outside her car getting gas, and her baby was in the back seat.

Suddenly, a suspect in a black Mercedes crashed at the gas station, jumped out of the Mercedes, and got into her car, according to police.

Houston police had been chasing the man for about three miles. They say the black Mercedes he was driving was possibly linked to two aggravated robberies.

Officers thought he was about to steal the woman’s car.

Police say the man had a gun, so officers told him to drop it.

According to police, the man didn’t drop the gun, and that’s when the officer fired, hitting not only the suspect, but also the 1-year-old child in the backseat.

Your life is never in more danger than when the police are around.

The only thing left is for Art Acevedo to go in front of the cameras and tell everybody how great his officers are and how he has confidence in them.

I was in contact with South Carolina Carry today asking if they had a comprehensive email contact list for South Carolina legislators.  They don’t.

As followup to this post I had intended to begin making contact and learned that they (SC legislators) have begun to use the absurd contact forms.  In other words, they have cloistered themselves off and insulated themselves from their constituency.

This makes it very hard, as intended.  If anyone knows how to make contact with South Carolina legislators, especially if you have a comprehensive distribution list, that would be great.  Or if not, if there is some retired gun rights advocate who just wants to help in this endeavor, please feel free to post here, or email me.  Perhaps there is someone who has contacts inside the SC government who could assist us with this?

South Carolina Carry is also interested in such a list.

SGT.BAG.

The War on Guns will be as successful as the War on Drugs…….

Or the war on alcohol.  And they pulled out all the stops with prohibition.  Via WRSA, this article at Slate describes “The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”

From an insightful comment to the ridiculous troll.  This comment was received into spam a few days ago from someone named John Q. Patriot concerning Ashli Babbit (I won’t supply his IP).

Never forget she died storming the capitol draped not in the flag of her country, but in the flag of the man inciting insurrection.

Insurrection.  He uses that word, but I don’t think he understands what it means.  Anyway, that does bring up an interesting point worthy of future discussion, that being the pledge of allegiance to flags, the biblical view of lawful oaths and vows as discussed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and so on.

This is fertile ground to be plowed from a theological perspective, but not now.  This will take time and effort.

The controllers are active.

The United State House of Representatives is expected to vote on “universal background check” legislation, H.R. 8, as early as next week. This bill is actually the criminalization of the private transfer of firearms. The House may also vote on the “Charleston Loophole” bill, which would allow the federal government to indefinitely delay a firearms transfer without supplying proof that the person receiving the firearm is prohibited from doing so.

“Universal background check” legislation reintroduced by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) would criminalize the private transfer of firearms and targets gun owners for persecution. It could make criminals out of law-abiding gun owners for simply loaning a firearm to a friend or some family members.

One commenter remarks that “Scott, Rubio, Toomy, Porter, Collins, and Romney are a yes vote for both of these bills. It isn’t an easy battle. UBC can pass under foreseeable circumstances. This is actually a big deal.”

Rubio and Toomey for sure, probably Collins, and assuredly Romney.  I probably would have put Cornyn on that list as well.

Note the statement by Kissinger, who for all of his elitist, globalist faults, was correct in this: “A conventional army loses if it does not win.  The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

David Codrea.

Gun owners can thank supposed “originalist” Justice Antonin Scalia for perpetuating and solidifying the “confusion,” although it’s fair to suspect his motives were more deliberate than speculative.

[ … ]

“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited,” Scalia volunteered, seemingly desperate to apologize for the majority ruling and to make a concession the gun-grabbers could use to later advantage.

I think Scalia was appealing to the beltway elitists for forgiveness.  As we’ve observed elsewhere:

Heller offers a Second Amendment cleaned up so that it can safely be brought into the homes of affluent Washington suburbanites who would never dream of resistance-they have too much sunk into the system–but who might own a gun to protect themselves from the private dangers that, they believe, stalk around their doors at night. Scalia commonly touts his own judicial courage, his willingness to read the Constitution as it stands and let the chips fall where they may. But Heller is noteworthy for its cowardice.

Rather than being a great victory for the second amendment, I believe the Heller decision was one root of our interpretational problems with it.

Codrea does offer the remedy.

“For someone represented by the establishment as an “originalist,” Scalia’s views were anything but. In A View of the Constitution, which colleague Brian Puckett writes “was the standard constitutional law text at Harvard until 1845 and at Dartmouth until 1860,” William Rawle, “a contemporary of the Founders and the man to whom George Washington offered an appointment as the first U.S. Attorney General,” offered a vastly different opinion.

“No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people,” Rawle declared. “Such a flagitious (think “shameful,” “wicked,” “criminal,” “villainous”) attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.”

Speaking of shameful, wicked, and criminal villains, fast-forward to the present. There is a Democrat eye-rolling feeding frenzy to strip Americans of what Continental Congress Delegate Tench Coxe called “the birthright of an American,” which he specifically identified as “every other terrible implement of the soldier.”

“[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” Coxe continued.”

News from South Carolina.

A bill that would allow people to carry guns without concealing them in South Carolina is heading to the House floor.

The House Judiciary Committee approved so-called open carry of weapons for people who already have a concealed-weapons permit by a 16-8 vote Tuesday.

South Carolina is one of only five states without open carry, joining atypical partners such as California, Florida, Illinois and New York.

The committee ignored amendments by Democrats that would remove the ban on weapons at the Statehouse and would refine rules on weapons at public events like festivals.

The bill is enthusiastically backed by many Republicans and conservatives, who said it makes sense to let people carry the weapons they can already have in a visible holster. Laws against pointing a gun at someone or threating someone with a gun without a legal reason would remain on the books.

Of course laws against assault will remain on the books, just like laws against brandishing.  Why does that even need to be stated?

Now.  Since the committees have apparently taken their job seriously and refused to allow this bill to perish in committee like it always seems to do, the real struggle begins.

From here on we take names and make lists.  Every member of the House will have to cast a vote, since as I understand it, turning this bill over from committee constitutes a motion and second.  It’s a live bill.

Oh, there are still parliamentary tricks that could be played, like someone could make a substitute motion to do something like send it back to the committee to study this more, or some such nonsense.  But that also requires a vote by every member of the House.

So we take names, and no one gets to hide behind the fact that there is no live bill to vote on.  That horse has left the barn.

It’s time to ramp up the comms to House members, and after that, members of the senate.  They need to hear from people, especially if you live in South Carolina.  I frequently visit relatives in South Carolina and so I should have a say, but they won’t listen to me like they would from my readers in South Carolina.

Get busy.

Matt Bracken.

I believe that Team Tyranny won’t have to do much door-to-door gun confiscation. I think that a few show-piece gun confiscation raids using overwhelming force at 4AM (that are designed for network TV audiences) will be sufficient. Instead, they’ll just send citizens a notice by text, email and registered snail-mail that they already know what newly-illegal guns they possess. This list will be based on AI programs scraping and data-mining your social media history, credit card purchases, and all past FFL sales records, which surely will be collected as part of the new law.

All of this information will be knitted together much the way that the IRS does business. I borrowed this paradigm from “Old Curmudgeon” on a Free Republic thread: “Have you noticed how the IRS manages to enforce the tax laws? Every taxable transaction is documented by multiple parties so that one party’s failure to report will be revealed by the another party’s paperwork. Then the person who violated the tax law is made an example of, a horrible example, causing reasonable people to be very afraid of the IRS. They will use a similar method to end gun ownership.”

And don’t think for a minute that they won’t get all the gun sales records, once they pass their “Emergency Measures To Prevent Domestic Terrorism Act.”

So how will they plan to separate you from your now-illegal guns? You’ll be notified that next Thursday at 9AM is your designated time to appear at a certain address, perhaps your local police station, or perhaps a big-box store parking lot, with said newly-illegal firearms and ammo magazines. Current Covid vaccine distribution gives them a model for this new system. Instead of going to get a Covid shot, you’ll be going to turn in the newly banned guns on the list.

Many people will refuse to do so. A week later, they will be totally disappeared from social media. Digitally disappeared. This makes it hard to complain about your treatment.

If you send an email about your situation to your local news station, they will automatically get a warning email just ahead of yours, or your email will be contained inside of a red flashing “warning box.” This is how the CCP keeps the comrades in line in Communist China. ChiCom programmers are already working with silicon valley to get Team Tyranny, both government and private sector, up to speed on these protocols.

You’ll get more official warnings to turn in the newly illegal guns that they know you have. Serial numbers won’t matter much, they’ll have your own prior social media “confessions,” along with those proud pictures you posted at the range, along with your credit card history, etc. You bought ten P-Mags, a chest rig, a “drop-in” trigger and a new buffer spring? They know you have an AR. And you can assume that the sales records of FFL dealers will all be collected under the new “emergency” gun control law.

You still won’t comply? You’re doxed at work. Your company “can’t take the risk” of employing you after they get secret back-channel warnings from the DHS. You and your wife the school teacher or nurse will be unemployed. How are you going to pay your mortgage? Your kids’ tuition bill? Your car payment? Again, as a DHS-suspected “domestic terror threat” you can’t get the local news to touch the story.

Next step: your ATM card is frozen. Then your credit cards. Then your bank drops you. Still a hard case? Your electricity arrives intermittently. Then it stops altogether. Then your water is cut off. The local news will still not touch your story, since they have been warned about the dangerous domestic terror threat from people like you.

If this obtained, I suspect it would catalyze an entirely new set of problems for the controllers that would be both magnificent and terrible in its dreadfulness.

Remember unintended consequences.  And remember that there are multiple hundreds of millions of guns in America.

FRC.

There were a lot of powerful arguments against the Equality Act, but Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) resorted to the ultimate authority: the Bible. During an intense debate on the House floor, the Florida representative said it was time for his colleagues to hear the truth about the transgender issue. But Democrats aren’t interested in the truth — or God. And far-Left radical Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) didn’t mind saying so.

“‘A woman must not wear men’s clothing nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this,'” Steube read from Deuteronomy 22:5. But let’s be clear, he said. “It’s not clothing or personal style that offends God, but rather the use of one’s appearance to act out or take on a sexual identity different from the one biologically assigned by God at birth.” What’s happening when men, women, and children do that, Steube said, is that “they’re making a statement that God didn’t know what He was doing when he created them.” And if Congress supports that — by passing extreme transgender bills like the Equality Act — then this country is “go[ing] directly against what is laid out in scripture.”

Democrats, irate that the Florida congressman dared to quote the word of God on the House floor, unleashed on Steube. Everyone from Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) to Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), shamed him for being transphobic and intolerant. But it was Congressman Nadler’s response that was the most shocking and revealing. “Mr. Steube,” he said pointedly, “what any religious tradition describes as God’s will is no concern of this Congress.”

God scoffs at his arrogance.

It sounds like it might be time for imprecatory prayers against this man.

Ammoland.

One such bill is HR 405, the LEAD Act, introduced by Ted Lieu, a congressman from California (no surprise, a Democrat). In this case LEAD stands for Lead Endangers Animals Daily, and it bans the use of traditional ammunition on lands that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has jurisdiction over. For a first offense, there is a $500 fine, with additional offenses leading to fines from $1,000 to $5,000.

… a box of 25 non-toxic shotgun shells runs for over $40 at SportsmansGuide.com. Assuming you’d have enough proficiency and confidence in a shotgun/shell combo after firing 250 rounds, that’s $400 before one single “for real” use. By comparison, a box of 25 traditional shells runs for about $13 at that same site. Assuming the same 250 rounds for proficiency and confidence, that is a difference of $270 – enough to buy a FMK semiauto pistol from Sportsman’s Guide (following all state and federal laws, of course).

First any land managed by the US Fish and Wildlife “Service,” tomorrow everywhere.

They’ll do anything to make the shooting sports as expensive as possible.  This is one of many such controller bills that are sure to darken the skies over the next couple of years.