Articles by Herschel Smith

Uncle:

He doesn’t like free speech.

The Second Amendment Foundation and The National Rifle Association oppose his appointment to the court.

He supported a hearing to ban handguns in DC.

He supported a gun registry.

And back in 2008, Dave Kopel ran down his record on guns.

Okay, so here’s my take.  We can accept this bastard now, which is absolutely loathsome and objectionable, or we can wait until, in order, (1) Trump is nominated, (2) Trump loses to Hillary, and (3) Hillary appoints someone as bad or worse.

I’m not suggesting that we accept the bastard.  If the Senate caves and has hearings on him, they all ought to be tarred and feathered.  I’m merely placing bad and worse in juxtaposition to make a point.  Terry McAuliffe and the power of the vote in northern Virginia will give Virginia to Hillary.  I guarantee it.

In know North Carolina because I live here.  Folks around these parts are horrified at Trump’s antics.  Listen to me.  Embarrassed and horrified.  North Carolina will go for Hillary, I guarantee it.  Florida will be reliable democrat territory.  Colorado is too dominated by Denver, Vail and Aspen, with too few blue collar workers, to go GOP this time, especially with so little difference between the two candidates.  The key swing states will go for Hillary.

Trump has won his states with less than a majority of the GOP voters.  Of the voters left, many of them are conservative Christians who will never vote for someone who supports abortion (not to mention socialized medicine, the two things to which we said we would never agree – remember?).  I said I won’t vote for Trump, and I won’t.  I won’t throw away my vote on yet another least bad option, one who supports abortion, supports a single payer health care system, has a squishy record on gun rights, and is a proven hypocrite on foreign workers and immigration (my four no-compromise issues).  The GOP voters won’t turn out for him like they turned out for the primaries, the party is too fractured.  It will not become fractured, it already is fractured, like a light bulb thrown down on the floor.  Totally busted.  Not in the future, but right now.  It’s over.

Trump cannot win a general election, and virtually all of the polls say that.  So Hillary will be the next president.  The biggest issue we might face will be that Hillary wins with a single party vote with voters pulling a single “lever,” thus ushering in democratic control of the senate and house.  This would give Hillary everything she needed for an assault weapons ban, national gun registry, control over sales of ammunition, and justices on the supreme court to back it all up.

The long and short of it is this.  Prepare for what’s coming.  Steel yourself.  Or better, I hope you are already prepared and putting the finishing touches on your preparations, mental and otherwise.

Ammoland:

Kailua, HI -(AmmoLand.com)- The Senate Public Safety Committee, Chairman Senator Clarence K. Nishihara, will hold a public hearing on HB2632 March 17, 2016.

Please click on the bill number above for bill information and to send testimony.  HRA OPPOSES.

Deadline to submit testimony, 1:45 pm Wednesday March 16.

Requires the county police to seize all firearms from any person who is a danger to self or others due to mental health reasons and requires emergency hospitalization. Good idea! But where’s the due process?

The bill language in the present draft is unclear as to whether a judge’s order is required to seize guns. HPD thinks they won’t need one.

HRA remains STRONGLY OPPOSED unless the bill is amended to specify that a court order must be obtained for the hospitalization before firearms can be seized, as required under the 2nd and 4th Amendments and Hawaii State law: capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol06_Ch0321-0344/HRS0334/HRS_0334-0061.htm.

MAHALO,

HARVEY GERWIG, LEGISLATIVE LIAISON and PRESIDENT, HRA

For more information, visit: www.hawaiirifleassociation.org.

Ah, mental health again.  So tell us, Senator Nishihara, all about the awful things you’re going to stop with this additional power and bureaucracy?  Remember that we’ve got mental health professionals on record stating that mental health maladies do not constitute propensity to violence, and that they cannot be predictors of violence with their profession.  So with that in mind, tell us all about how you’re going to stop awful things from happening?  We’re listening.  Tell us all about your scholarly prowess in mental health and how you know more than the professionals.

I’ve exchanged email with Harvey Gerwig.  Nice guy, and I hope Hawaii gun owners are able to wrap their arms around the problem of this terrible, totalitarian state government.

News From Oklahoma:

The Oklahoma House Thursday overwhelmingly adopted legislation that would permit gun owners to carry their weapons openly without a state-issued license.

House members voted 73-15 for House Bill 3098, the so-called “constitutional open carry” measure, and sent it to the state Senate for debate and a vote.

The measure’s author, Republican Rep. Jeff Coody of Grandfield, said it is similar to open carry laws in more than 30 other states and would allow gun owners to exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms openly, such is in a holster, without having to comply with existing state government licensing requirements.

Coody said persons who want to carry a concealed weapon would still be required to obtain a state permit.

“It’s the ultimate freedom bill regarding open carry,” Coody said. Coody and other supporters said citizens who are qualified to own a handgun should not be required to ask the government for permission and pay a fee to openly carry it.

“It’s our God-given right to defend our self,” said Rep. John Bennett, R-Sallisaw.

But opponents said it would have serious financial consequences for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which administers firearms licenses issued under the Oklahoma Self Defense Act.

A fiscal analysis performed for the House indicates the measure would reduce OSBI’s revenue by at least $6 million and would lead to the loss of jobs and reduced operating expenses at the agency.

The reduction in revenue would be because firearms owners would no longer seek concealed carry licenses – which cost $100 for initial 5-year license and $200 for 10 years – if they could carry a gun openly without a license. There are now more than 238,300 Oklahomans with active licenses to carry handguns, according to state figures.

Seldom do you see it in such stark words.  Recognizing God-given rights will lead to the rejection of state-granted rights, thus leading to less power by the state, and fewer jobs at the feeding trough of public wealth.  Therefore, the statists are against recognizing God-given rights.

So there you have it.  I believe some of these grievances are similar to those that were enumerated by the colonists against King George.  Yes, now that I think about it, I’m sure of it.  “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Via reader Mack, this from The Rutherford Institute, and written up at Richmond-Times Dispatch.

A Hopewell man who filed a federal lawsuit against a Hopewell police officer who had him arrested and detained at a peaceful public protest while armed with a rifle and pistol has settled the case.

The lawsuit was resolved to the “mutual satisfaction” of both sides, the two parties said in separate statements. Specific terms of the settlement were not disclosed; the lawsuit was formally dismissed last week.

The nine-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond in 2014 said Brandon Howard drew the attention of Hopewell police on Aug. 26, 2013, when he was seen displaying a 6-by-4-foot sign that read “Impeach Obama” on an Interstate 295 overpass.

He had an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder on a strap and a .380-caliber Bersa pistol holstered on his waist.

Howard had been protesting lawfully for about 30 minutes when a Hopewell police officer pulled up to the area on the overpass where Howard was standing and parked his vehicle. Three to five police cruisers arrived a short time later with their emergency lights flashing, the suit said.

Six to eight officers then got out of their cars with their guns drawn and commanded Howard to drop his sign and get on the ground with his hands spread above his head, the complaint said.

After Howard immediately complied, Sgt. John Hunter stated to Howard, “What do you think you are doing threatening people on my interstate?” Howard replied that he had not threatened anyone and was simply exercising his First Amendment and Second Amendment rights.

To that, Hunter said, “Not on my overpass you’re not,” according to the suit.

The complaint says Hunter then handcuffed Howard, with Hunter advising Howard that he was being detained but not arrested after Howard asked if he was under arrest. Howard was placed in a police cruiser and taken to the Hopewell police station without anyone informing him of his legal rights or providing him “with any basis or authorization for his arrest and detention,” the suit says.

Howard spent the following 90 minutes in an interrogation room, with handcuffs still binding his hands behind his back, but was never questioned during his detention, the suit says.

He was then told he was free to go, his weapons were returned, and he was driven back to the interstate overpass.

The complaint said the police violated Howard’s First Amendment right to free speech, Second Amendment right to bear arms, and Fourth Amendment right to be free from a groundless arrest when they confronted him with guns drawn and ordered him to the ground on the unfounded belief that Howard was violating the law by being in public with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Howard’s suit sought “nominal compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”

The settlement “resolved the lawsuit to the mutual satisfaction of the parties,” according to a news release emailed Friday by the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties advocacy group in Charlottesville that represented Howard.

Hunter said in a statement Saturday: “The parties have resolved this matter to their mutual satisfaction. As a gun owner, avid hunter and former Marine, I, John Hunter, respect and honor citizens’ Second Amendment rights. Similarly, as a citizen and former candidate for public office, I respect the rights of citizens to express themselves and engage in political speech as protected by the First Amendment.

“It was not my intention to compromise Mr. Howard’s rights under the Constitution. As a police officer, my number one priority was the safety of the public.”

The Washington Post:

A masked man burst into a 7-Eleven near Seattle early Sunday morning, swinging a hatchet and slicing the store clerk.

Before the masked man could seriously hurt anyone, though, a customer who was drinking his morning coffee pulled out a concealed weapon and fatally shot the attacker.

Authorities did not name the attacker or the customer, but they did hail the concealed weapon owner as a hero.

“This could have been disastrous,” King County Sheriff Sgt. Cindi West told KIRO7. “Had this guy not shot, who knows what would have happened? We might have a dead clerk right now, and instead we have a dead bad guy.”

The clerk, Kuldeep Singh, suffered minor cuts to his stomach. He, too, thanked the customer for saving his life.

“He [was] killing me,” Singh, 58, said of the hatchet-wielding attacker. Singh added that the customer was a “nice guy.”

West said that the incident will be investigated fully but that the 60-year-old customer was currently being considered a Good Samaritan.

Wait a minute!  The weapon carrier wasn’t an evil NRA member child molester and serial abuser?  You mean he wasn’t a rapist?  You mean he didn’t make things less safe by carrying a weapon?  We hear all the time about how use – even mere ownership – of a weapon always fails and makes you less safe.  In this case, even the LEO is calling this guy a hero, while the victim is hailing him as a good Samaritan.

The narrative failed so badly in this case something had to go wrong at The Washington Post.  How did the editors let this one slip through?

David Codrea:

With the Ohio primary tomorrow, it’s evident Gun Owners of America Chairman Tim Macy has not kept a pledge made by Director Emeritus Larry Pratt last year on national radio about factoring a candidate’s position on immigration in the group’s political ratings.

Groan.  Sigh.  I think it was Jesus who said let your yes be yes, and your no be no.

Eric Holder:

The Senate leadership’s plan to blockade President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court is the “height of arrogance,” former Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says — lashing out at GOP lawmakers for repeatedly refusing to “meet the president halfway.”

Is it the kind of arrogance it takes to discretely send weapons to the Mexican cartels in order to build a case for more regulation of legally made and sold American firearms?  Oh yea.  One is legal, the other illegal.

It’s a sad day for Breitbart.

Kirsten Powers: How long will Obama ignore Christian genocide?  Dumb question.  Forever.

25% of French teenagers are Muslims.  That means France is finished.  It’s a dead man walking.  For the record, I don’t agree with the author’s understanding of Descarte and French identity.  For this I would turn to Carl Becker, “Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers,” but I simply don’t have time for that tonight.

Do you grok the one-handed operation?  No, me neither.

Donald Trump on random numbers.  Yea, I know something about random number generator algorithms as part of my Monte Carlo analysis training.  1237 is no random number in this context.  It’s just one more than 1236, which is exactly half of 2472.  Am I going to fast for you?

Trump said he has “instructed his people” to look into paying the legal fees of a 78-year-old man charged with assault after he sucker-punched a protester at a North Carolina rally. “He loves his country” and may have gotten “carried away,” said Trump, who argued the supporter was provoked by the protester.”

This is as full of crap as everything else Trump says.  The MSM was aghast at what he said.  On the other hand, I looked deeper and saw that it’s a misdirect meant for affect.  It’s all bluster.  If he had wanted to pay for the man’s legal expenses, all he had to do was contact the man, set up an account, and tell the man to hire any counsel he wished at Trump’s expense.  Instead, he said he has “instructed his people to look into paying the legal fees.”  This is double speak for it may never happen, or he wants to intimate that it might happen, or that there is something more complicated than merely opening an account.  There isn’t, and Trump just wanted the affect at the rally.

In a stunning failure to understand the current political climate, dope John Kasich goes all in for amnesty.

Here’s the text of a brief telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Kanye West.  I still think Trump should ask him to be his running mate.

Part III

Part II

Part I

News from S.C.:

Sen. Floyd Nicholson, D-Greenwood, expressed a more general view of concealed-carry practices.

“Carrying weapons? I’m totally opposed. It’s just my personal opinion. I don’t own a gun. I am not a hunter, and I have nothing against those individuals who hunt. But just carrying a weapon around? I think we’re going back to the Wild Wild West,” said Nicholson. A portion of his district borders the Savannah River, and stretches across parts McCormick, Greenwood, Saluda, and Abbeville counties.

“Give everybody a holster and a gun and let them go, like they’re doing in Texas? I’m just opposed to this.”

We’ve already seen another of the jerk-offs in S.C., a communist by the name of Larry Martin.  It sounds like South Carolina voters have their work cut out for them.  They should stock up on tar and feathers.

I had always wondered about a more detailed listing of why the Senate hates Ted Cruz.  NPR tries.

Probably the most awkward question you can ask Republican senators these days is why they’re still giving Ted Cruz the cold shoulder when it comes to endorsements.

“Well, I think you know the answer to that,” said Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

“I’m going to let you … speculate about that,” offered Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” said Dean Heller of Nevada, without elaborating further.

No, it’s not obvious, jerk off.  I don’t want to speculate – I want you to be man enough to explain in words why you hate the man.

During Cruz’s very first year in the Senate, he and a group of House Republicans helped force a 16-day government shutdown. At the time, in 2013, he crowed about it. But his Senate Republican colleagues were fuming. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said Cruz had led them on with a promise to defund Obamacare.

“You know, we’ve been asking from the beginning: What’s the end game? How does this end? How do you achieve what you’re purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare? And I never got an answer to that,” Ayotte told reporters when the government was reopening that October.

And then there was the time Cruz flirted with the idea of defunding the president’s executive action on immigration. He fumbled a procedural maneuver on the Senate floor, which forced his colleagues to come to work on a Saturday. Not the kind of smooth move that will earn one’s way into senators’ hearts.

So let me get this straight.  Cruz is only one man and cannot force a government shutdown forever, but he managed to do it for a while, and you expect that to be some sort of problem for me?  I would have loved it if he had been able to burn down Washington, D.C., and tar and feather you bunch of traitors, but as I said, he’s only one man.  And now we get to the sophomoric.  He forced you to work on a Saturday!?!  A Saturday!?!  Poor babies.  Did you not get to go to your house on the lake that weekend, you sorry collection of bottom-feeding twits?

And then, of course, there was the time Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar.

Oh, I see.  You only want liars in the Senate, Ted didn’t oblige and he called out the lies.  God almighty.  What a cannibalistic gaggle of gargoyles.  I hate them more every day, and I didn’t think that was possible.