Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

David Codrea:

Pelosi also has no problem ignoring due process when it comes to enacting citizen disarmament edicts. Case in point, she’s a big supporter of so-called ”No Fly/No Buy” to deny guns to Americans who have not even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one.

Then there is this remark, with which I agree.

And she’s absolutely inconsistent and hypocritical in defending Democrat Conyers, Al Franken and Bill Clinton while calling Republican Roy Moore “a child molester.”

And the comment of the day goes to American Patriot, who says, “If I talked like her after being pulled over by an officer I’d be in cuffs & hauled away for DUI without being tested [f]or drinking for that matter.”

Trying to reason with Pelosi is like trying to teach my dog calculus.

Houston Public Media:

State Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested on Fox News that good people with guns might stop the bad ones.

“If it’s a place where somebody has the ability to carry there is also the opportunity that the gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people,” Paxton said.

But how often does that happen, that a bystander saves the day with a gun?

That question was just one of many we wanted to look into. For some answers we talked with Ashraf Mozayani.

“Very very low number you are looking that somebody protects themselves with the gun,” she said.

How would Mozayani know?

For years, she saw the result of gun fire first-hand when she worked at the medical examiner’s office.

“I have been the lab director and chief toxicologist for Harris County Institute of Forensic Science or at that time we called the medical examiner’s office from 1996 to 2012,” she said.

If someone died in Harris County and required an autopsy, Mozayani was a part of a team analyzing the report.

“In any medical examiner office every morning you usually sit at the table and see every case that comes to the office,” she said.

Mozayani said she rarely saw a report of a fatality where someone used a gun in defense.

Here’s a quick note to Marissa Cummings of Houston Public Media.  Congratulations on winning the stupidest MSM article of the month award!  You should be very proud.

For proof that guns are rarely used in self defense, you turned to a ME who examines dead people.  Of course, you leave out the instances where a person has been shot and lives (which the ME wouldn’t see), and instances where no round has had to be discharged (which the ME wouldn’t see), and also instances where a gun was simply safely carried by someone if needed for self defense and it never had to be used (which law enforcement and the ME wouldn’t see), but could have been used for its intended purpose.

This last category is most important, because it exists for the amelioration of risk, which as we have all learned, is the product of probability and consequences.  Assault is a high risk evolution because the consequences are so high.  Carrying a weapon and being prepared to deploy and use it ameliorates that risk.

Merissa, sit back, get a stout cup of coffee, and think about these things for a while.  Try again later after intense study.

The Post and Courier:

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson on Tuesday urged Congress to pass legislation that would make states recognize one another’s concealed weapon permits, arguing every citizen’s right to self-defense is at risk without it.

With Wilson’s signature, South Carolina signed onto a letter with four other states — Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana, and Montana — in asking Congress to pass either the U.S. Senate’s Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 or the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, a House bill.

The bills would require states to recognize the permits of other states, including ones with less-stringent laws.

“States should not be able to deny citizens of other states the basic constitutional right to self-defense,” Wilson said in a statement. “South Carolinians who have gone through the process of getting concealed weapon permits shouldn’t have to worry about whether they can protect themselves and their families when they travel in other states.”

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-Seneca, is among the Senate bill’s 38 co-sponsors. The House bill is backed by the National Rifle Association. All six of South Carolina’s Republican congressional representatives are among the House bill’s 213 cosponsors.

Well isn’t this just rich?  Ms. Lindsey Graham wants to glom onto a gun rights issue.  As for Wilson’s position, I didn’t hear him speak up when open carry was before the S.C. legislature.  Let me say that again and add a little to it.  If you say nothing when open carry rights come up in the state house and senate, you have no right to open your mouth when some other state doesn’t like your version of infringement.

An infringement is an infringement is an infringement.  They’re all the same to me.

And Wilson is a hypocrite.

David Codrea:

The real question here is why is John Cornyn so eager to give the gun-grabbers a victory, teaming with the likes of Chris Murphy and Dianne Feinstein to “Fix NICS”? After all, we’re talking about a politician that the NRA, which gives him an”A+,” says “has always defended our gun rights in Congress!”

And it’s not like there’s any delegated Constitutional authority for the national government to impose prior restraints on firearms transfers in the first place. So why give citizen disarmament leaders something to crow about, especially since no one but a useful idiot believes expanding infringements is aimed at any but the law-abiding?

For whatever reason – I consider it to be a moral deficiency – this isn’t any different than what we’ve seen for years with him.  He pushed mental health checks two years ago with bureaucrats getting the say over whether someone was “mentally defective.”

This does go to show one useful thing in particular: NRA scoring is meaningless.  Don’t ever trust it for anything.

NBC News:

Experts say it is difficult to know what to do in those situations, but Dr. James Fox, an expert on gun violence and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder,” said it’s dangerous to assume that the mentally ill tend to commit these shootings.

“There’s not really a correlation,” said Fox, who maintains a database on mass shootings. “We like to think that these people are different from the rest of us. We want a simple explanation and if we just say they’re mentally ill, case closed. Because of how fearful dangerous and deadly their actions are, we really want to distance ourselves from it and relegate it to illness.”

Of course, he’s telling us things my readers already know.  Or said another way, he’s trying to teach his granny to suck eggs.

USA Today:

Appearing on the PBS NewsHour the day after the shooting, Deborah Epstein, co-director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center, claimed there is a strong correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings.  “If you look at all the mass shootings that have occurred on U.S. soil,” said Epstein, “the vast majority of them have been committed by people who have perpetrated domestic violence against an intimate partner, a series of intimate partners, or are in the process of dealing with domestic violence.”

In a one-week follow-up story about the church shooting, a headline in the San Antonio Express-News read, “Are mass killings and domestic violence linked? It depends who you ask.” You’d think such a determination would be a matter of fact, not opinion. Unfortunately, in the media version of the children’s game of telephone, the message is easily misinterpreted as it gets repeated from one news source to another.

“There is an obvious link between mass shootings and domestic violence,” suggested Susan Higginbotham, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She at least cited her evidence: “A study last year by Everytown for Gun Safety, which used FBI data and media reports to analyze mass shootings from January 2009 to December 2016, showed that 54% of the perpetrators of these horrific mass killings had a history of domestic or family violence.”

Higginbotham was only partially correct, misconstruing the most important point. The Everytown study did indeed find that 54% of mass shootings involved intimate partners or family members as victims. In this majority, however, the domestic violence was the mass shooting of family members, and not necessarily a history of previous domestic violence.

Everytown’s case summaries of 156 shootings from 2009 through 2016 (in which four or more victims are killed), reveal 85 incidents in which a gunman murdered at least some current or former intimate partners or family members. Of these, 41% were preceded by other acts of domestic violence. Among the entire pool of mass shootings, only 25% revealed any indication of prior domestic violence.

Even if a majority of mass shootings were preceded by violence against intimate partners or family, that still would hardly serve as a reliable predictor of mass murder. There are, unfortunately, at least 10 million incidents of domestic violence every year, according to estimates reported by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. By contrast, there are, on average, about 22 mass shootings annually with at least four fatalities. Were we to predict mass murder on this basis of domestic violence, we would be wrong well more than 99% of the time.

Just in case you missed it, the author, James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University, just completely demolished the Everytown argument.  It is history.  They should bow their heads and hide in shame.  Everytown is a fake, a fraud and a sham.  Their arguments are flimflam and claptrap.

So what is a controller to do when she runs out of ostensibly legitimate excuses?  Why, just go ahead and admit that you want the state to have a monopoly on violence, that you’re controllers, statists and collectivists, and an armed citizenry is an impediment to your statists dreams.

Go ahead and admit it.

News From Boston:

BOSTON – Allowing the use of silencers and the attorney general’s authority to regulate firearms were hot topics at a Public Safety Committee hearing Thursday that saw lawmakers and gun rights advocates tangle over the Second Amendment.

More than 100 people piled into a Statehouse hearing room for the hearing on more than 50 bills dealing with firearms. Gun control activists congregated on one side of the room, many wearing orange T-shirts with “Moms Demand Action” or “Stop Gun Violence” on them. The other side of the room featured gun rights advocates, some of whom wore shirts bearing various slogans.

“We have some folks in this room who believe it is a privilege and we have some folks in this room who believe it is a constitutional right” to own a firearm, National Rifle Association spokesman John Hohenwarter said. “I think that’s where the fight lies.”

Hohenwarter and other gun rights supporters keyed in on a statement Rep. Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge Democrat, made at the hearing as she was testifying in support of various gun control measures and against bills she said would erode Massachusetts’ status as the state with the lowest rate of gun deaths.

“It is a privilege that we allow individuals to hold onto something that causes harm and death,” Decker said. “It is a privilege to have a car license, it is a privilege to have a gun license.”

Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners Action League based in Northboro, said Decker’s comment illustrated frustrations lawful gun owners feel in Massachusetts.

“One of the problems that we face here in Massachusetts is that the Second Amendment is barely recognized in the state as a whole and certainly not as a civil right. I could not have asked for a better witness to that than the previous legislator that actually described our civil rights as a privilege,” Wallace said. “I am aghast that an elected official would actually say that … but that’s not unusual.”

One issue that elicited testimony in favor and in opposition on Thursday was removing the state ban on suppressors, or silencers, which attach to the barrel of a gun and reduce the sound of a bullet being fired.

Sen. Michael Moore, D-Worcester, the co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, and Sen. Donald Humason each filed bills (S 1340/S 1317) to remove the ban on the use of suppressors. Massachusetts is one of 10 states that bans gun suppressors for hunting and one of eight states that bans them for consumers.

“I see them as a tool to continue firearm safety education without having to damage your ears,” Amanda Deveno, a firearm safety instructor and GOAL member, told the committee. “It also makes it easier for me as an instructor on the line to communicate properly with my students.”

Deveno’s argument did not go over well with John Rosenthal, the founder of the nonprofit Stop Handgun Violence.

Rosenthal said that having the Committee on Public Safety approve a bill deregulating silencers “is like the FDA commissioner saying we should deregulate arsenic.”

American Suppressor Association President and Executive Director Knox Williams said the opposition to the suppressors bill “is pretty boilerplate, based on common misconceptions from people who have never taken the time to go out and hear a suppressed gunshot.” He said a gunshot from a gun with a suppressor attached is still as loud as a jackhammer.

Also at issue Thursday was the authority of the attorney general to regulate the sale of firearms. Last summer, Attorney General Maura Healey drew the ire of Second Amendment advocates and sportsmen when she heightened her office’s enforcement of an assault weapons ban that had been on the books for years by cracking down on copycat assault weapons.

Humason, a Westfield Republican, filed S 1326 to remove the regulatory authority for the attorney general from consumer protection laws, Humason and Warren Republican Rep. Todd Smola filed S 1322/H 1310 to strip the attorney general of the office’s authority to regulate weapons and to repeal previously issued regulations, and Spencer Democrat Sen. Anne Gobi filed S 1316 to do away with the term “copies and duplicates” in the definition of assault weapon.

Rep. David Linsky said the bills were “filed in retaliation” to Healey’s actions and urged the committee not to advance the legislation.

“The attorney general has the authority to promulgate and enforce rules on all items sold to consumers in Massachusetts, including firearms. Attorney General Healey acted within her constitutional authority as the consumer advocate to stop the sale of copycat assault weapons and protect the residents of the commonwealth from these illegal weapons,” Linsky, a Natick Democrat, said. “Stripping the attorney general of her authority to regulate firearm sales would set a troubling precedent and leave our residents vulnerable to the whims of the powerful gun lobby.”

The theme of federal inaction ran through Thursday’s hearing, with multiple representatives and gun control advocates arguing that Massachusetts cannot rely on the federal government to set rules for firearms.

“If Congress is not moved to act in the wake of events like Newtown or Las Vegas, we cannot continue to sit around and be shocked or wring our hands at their inaction. States must become the agents of their own protection,” said Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, D-Jamaica Plain.

Methinks that Decker has too elevated an opinion of herself.  “Animal Farm” suddenly came to mind, or perhaps Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union or Communist China.  And the American revolution as the repair for all of this.

The very purpose for weapons to begin with.  Perhaps Decker knows that and fears it.

Why would anyone remain in that awful state anyway?  Say, isn’t Smith & Wesson still ensconced there?  Why, pray tell?

The Hill:

The mayor of Columbia, S.C., is planning to propose a ban on bump stocks and trigger cranks on guns in the city.

“I believe in responsible gun ownership, and I believe in common sense,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin (D) said in a statement, according to ABC News.

“That’s why I’ve decided to do what our federal and state governments are either unable or unwilling to do.”

And next up, Tim Scott:

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott is among the sponsors of bipartisan legislation to ensure federal agencies and state governments accurately report relevant criminal history to the FBI’s database of prohibited gun buyers.

The Republican senator is one of more than half a dozen sponsors of the “Fix NICS Act,” which would penalize federal agencies that fail to properly report required records. It also rewards states that comply by providing them with federal grant preferences.

You can blame Nikki Haley for Tim Scott.  He a republican, but may as well be a democrat.  Ah hell, there’s essentially no difference anyway.  Nevermind.

The Hill:

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Wednesday that senators are nearing a bipartisan deal on gun legislation following a number of high-profile mass shootings.

Big news: super close to a bipartisan breakthrough on gun legislation. Stay tuned…

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 15, 2017

Murphy’s office pointed The Hill to comments made last week by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), who said that he would talk to Democrats about strengthening background checks – an initiative that gained some bipartisan momentum earlier this month after a gunman opened fire on a church in southern Texas, killing 26 people.

…

Cornyn has been a driving force in the GOP for strengthening background checks since the Nov. 5 shooting. He told reporters last week that he would work with Democrats to close gaps in the system, and that he had spoke to Murphy, as well as Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) about the matter.

Oh nice.  That means that despite the fact that it had nothing to do with it, they intend to make person-to-person transfers a felony.  Can’t give that deer rifle to your grandson anymore, gentlemen.  FedGov may come after you.

Here’s a note to Murphy and Cornyn.  Go to hell.

Here’s a quick observation.  Prepare for noncompliance.

NPR is stunned, befuddled and aghast.

Those who live around Sutherland Springs, Texas, may still be questioning why a gunman shot up a Baptist church during Sunday worship. But they’re not at all confused about how citizens should respond. Many believe the best way to stop the next massacre is to pack a pistol everywhere they go.

Those who live around Sutherland Springs, Texas, may still be questioning why a gunman shot up a Baptist church during Sunday worship, but they’re not at all confused about how citizens should respond. Many believe that the best way to stop the next massacre is to pack a pistol everywhere they go. NPR’s John Burnett reports from Wilson County, which includes the rural Texas town.

JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: There’s a sort of cowboy ethic that exists in Wilson County, Texas. A historical marker in front of the stately 19th-century courthouse describes the sheriff a century ago as always armed, but gentlemanly and kind. The current sheriff, Joe Tackitt Jr., has worn the badge for 25 years. In his white cowboy hat and white cowboy shirt, he pauses in the courthouse hallway to ruminate on the private citizen who grabbed a rifle and confronted Devin Patrick Kelley as he left the church where he killed 26 people. The citizen shot Kelley, who fled and later killed himself.

JOE TACKITT JR: I consider the man a hero. I mean, he ended the threat right there at the church. Now, do we know where the guy might have gone had he left the church? ‘Cause he still had weapons.

BURNETT: There is no gun debate for many people who own weapons here in Wilson County. If there was, Sunday’s massacre settled it. Only hours after the shooting, a retired oilfield hand named Ethan Campbell stood on the porch of his house a couple of blocks from the church in Sutherland Springs, cradling his infant son.

ETHAN CAMPBELL: In my opinion, everybody should carry a gun ’cause no matter what, a criminal’s going to carry a gun if you don’t. And if you’ve got a gun on you, you can at least protect yourself or your family.

BURNETT: Many people in the surrounding communities believe Sunday’s massacre validated the NRA’s position – it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. To get a countervailing view I reached out to Angela Turner, who lives in San Antonio 30 miles northwest of here. She works at a private school and volunteers for a group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

ANGELA TURNER: It just makes me sad that this is where the conversation has come, that we’re talking about whether we need to arm ourselves to go to church and protect our kids when they’re going to Sunday school when the conversation that we really should be having is how do we keep violent people from having a gun in the first place?

BURNETT: Nearly 6 percent of Texans have permits to carry guns with them in public. Texas is the state with the third-most permits in the nation after Florida and Pennsylvania. The sheriff reports that lots of his citizens pack pistols, people like Kaelyn Thompson, a 23-year-old waitress who works at Trail Riders Steakhouse in Floresville. She says she and her mom both have 9 mm handguns when they worship at their church. And she wonders whether things would have turned out differently if someone in the Sutherland Springs congregation had shot back.

KAELYN THOMPSON: I mean, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know the circumstances. But to me, if I’m going to die, I would like to least fight, you know? And I don’t know why they didn’t fight or why they didn’t have a gun. Like, there are just so many crazy people out there and so many incidents that you never know when something’s going to happen. But honestly, I carry everywhere I go.

BURNETT: Thompson says several friends and family have said now they plan to get right-to-carry permits. Roman Bolton is one of those considering keeping a concealed handgun on him. He’s a clerk at a hardware store in La Vernia just up the highway from Sutherland Springs. Bolton says even before the recent shooting he has sat in his pew in his church on Sunday mornings and wondered…

ROMAN BOLTON: What if somebody comes in here now and he starts spraying the place? How long does it take a policeman to respond to something like that? Ten minutes is a long time.

BURNETT: A customer, Steve Stephenson, has brought his mower down to the shop to get it worked on. He listens intently to the discussion. I ask him if he thinks that more guns make for a safer society.

STEVE STEPHENSON: I don’t know. What about the Old West? Was that a safe place? Everybody carried back then.

BURNETT: John Burnett, NPR News, Wilson County.

Stunned, he was, that anyone could think that a man’s duty is to take care of himself and his family.  After all, the hippie culture of the colleges doesn’t teach anything like that, and apparently neither did his parents or grandparents.

So in order to make sense of all of this, he “reached out” to get a “countervailing view.”  Of course he did.  He might consider a revised title for this silly piece, something like “At NPR, no one believes that you can do anything to help yourself or make yourself or family safer, except to call the state.”  For some reason or other, the state knows how to do something you don’t.

Fred Tippens:

Men cowering in their bathtub or not having the means to return fire is a sickness on their soul, the cure for which is Christ Jesus. If a man refuses to go armed he admits to a Holy God and all of mankind that he is unfit for his duties in a fallen world. He is a stunted child that is unequal to the task of manhood. Additionally, he doesn’t love his family. A man, any man, will fight to the death to protect that which he loves. This is God’s natural order that they deny and therefore, they deny God himself.

With Fred, I believe that any man who won’t defend his family is an ungodly coward.  Using Jesus as an excuse for his cowardliness is insulting to the Gospel.

Jesus came to die for the sins of His people as a vicarious atonement.  He had to drink the cup that was before Him.  Your death, or the deaths of your family members, won’t be a vicarious atonement for anything or anyone.  That’s why Jesus told His disciples to buy swords.

For everyone who wants to be a pacifist, beatnik, long haired hippie flower child, I suggest a long conversation with your wife (and children, if you have them).  It can begin this way.  “Dear, you know that I love you, and we lock our doors at night because I don’t want anything to happen to you.  But that’s as far as I’m willing to go to protect or defend you.  If someone invades our home, I’m willing to let him rape or even torture you, kill our children, and burn down our house, because I think that’s what Jesus wants us to do.  We care more about the criminals than we do our own safety.  I hope you understand.  Oh, by the way, just to make sure you understand, I feel the same way about defense of you and the children in restaurants, school, and at church as well.”

Please write me and let me know how this conversation goes.  I want the nitty, gritty details of her reaction.