Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Source.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Massachusetts’ top law enforcement official Andrea Joy Campbell has taken action in court to protect laws intended to keep residents from experiencing gun violence.

Campbell, according to a release, filed the briefs in lawsuits pertaining to handgun safety regulations and a case taking opposition to a motion to block the state’s assault weapon and large-capacity magazines ban.

“Under my leadership, Massachusetts will continue to lead …

What she really means is continue to violate rights as given by God, enumerated in the constitution, and recognized by the supreme court.

This caused me to go read her court briefs for a bit.  I stumbled on this.

Further, the handgun must have a “safety device,” as defined by statute, that prevents the firing of the gun by an unauthorized user.

What exactly does that mean?

Such safety devices include, but are not limited to, “mechanical locks or devices designed to recognize and authorize, or otherwise allow the firearm to be discharged only by its owner or authorized user, by solenoid use-limitation devices, key activated or combination trigger or handle locks, radio frequency tags, automated fingerprint identification systems or voice recognition.” Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 140, § 131K.

Massachusetts must have passed smart gun laws while I was looking elsewhere.  What a cesspool of communist overreach.  If there are gun owners who still live in Massachusetts, I just have one question.  Why?

I reiterate my smart gun challenge – the one that has never been accepted by any gun controller.

“Perform a fault tree analysis of smart guns.  Use highly respected guidance like the NRC fault tree handbook.

Assess the reliability of one of my semi-automatic handguns as the first state point, and then add smart gun technology to it, and assess it again.  Compare the state points.  Then do that again with a revolver.  Be honest.  Assign a failure probability of greater than zero (0) to the smart technology, because you know that each additional electronic and mechanical component has a failure probability of greater than zero.

Get a PE to seal the work to demonstrate thorough and independent review.  If you can prove that so-called “smart guns” are as reliable as my guns, I’ll pour ketchup on my hard hat, eat it, and post video for everyone to see.  If you lose, you buy me the gun of my choice.  No one will take the challenge because you will lose that challenge.  I’ll win.  Case closed.  End of discussion.”

Any takers?

This is a massively confused rant from a massively confused politician, a very incoherent rant indeed.

She begins by asserting that her cop husband puts on a uniform each and every day to protect and serve, and then posing the rhetorical question she doesn’t very much like, “If the police don’t arrive in time, what is a person supposed to do?”

She then goes on to rehearse a crime in her neighborhood where children perished, saying that the police arrived within two minutes and that didn’t save the children’s lives.

You heard that right.  The police are there to “protect and serve.”  I would remark that they only protect and serve to the extent that they follow the constitution, but that as I have remarked so many times before, cases like Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, Warren v. D.C., and DeShaney v. Winnebago County prove without question or caveat that it’s not the job of police to protect anyone.

It’s your job to protect yourself and your family.  This politician demonstrates again why that must be the case.  Police cannot arrive in time to prevent crime from being committed.  The time frame is too compressed.

And then after asserting that it’s the job of police to protect, against evidence to the contrary, she then asserts that it can’t ultimately be successful.

She goes on with this incoherence.  “Why should anyone be allowed to have a higher caliber, more powerful weapon, than my husband …”

So according to her, (1) police are there to protect.  (2) Police can’t protect you, therefore:  (3) You shouldn’t be allowed to have weapons that match his (I suppose for example a .40S&W, .45ACP, or .44 Magnum, assuming he carries a 9mm like most cops do these days).

Those presuppositions don’t support the conclusion.  There is no coherent syllogism there.  There isn’t even an immediate inference.

I’m surprised that the Virginia House Democrats have left this video on Twitter.  It should be embarrassing to them.

Delegate @CandiMundonKing: “Why should anyone be allowed to have a higher caliber, more powerful weapon than my husband who goes out every day in uniform who has trained and served his community with pride for years?” pic.twitter.com/dnH8AHmJlj

— VA House Democrats (@VAHouseDems) January 27, 2023

This is relevant to the Pistol Brace rule.

The simple truth is that short rifles and short shotguns were never a problem, and continue to not be a problem today. The 1934 National Firearms Act originally wanted to restrict handgun ownership, and the clauses relating to SBRs and SBSs were simply to close the loophole of a person cutting down a rifle or shotgun to get around a handgun prohibition. That handgun (effective) prohibition was removed before the legislation was passed, but the SBR/SBS parts were left in. And thus for 89 years we have has the ridiculous legal situation in which a handgun is fine, a long gun is fine, but something in between is prohibitively regulated.

Read the rest.

The pistol brace ban started with Bumpstocks and then binary triggers. If this isn’t stopped now, all manner of features and accessories will be banned until you’re left with nothing but a flintlock. But if you read the ruling carefully, they’ll be banning all rifle stocks soon, starting with the standard six-position AR stock.

Source.

Just days after Illinois became the ninth U.S. state to ban assault rifles, the state already hit a roadblock to implementing the law: defiant sheriff’s offices.

At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments have publicly vowed to defy elements of a recent gun-control law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, which banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and switches. The offices have vowed to not check if weapons are registered with the state or house individuals arrested only for not complying with the law.

As the number of uncooperative sheriff’s offices increased, Pritzker has made his own vow – to ensure those members of law enforcement who fail to “do their job… won’t be in their job.”

The Illinois Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement Wednesday expressing continued opposition to the law. Simultaneously, dozens of sheriff’s offices began to post nearly identical messages promising they would not check for compliance with the law or arrest offenders of the law.

Jim Kaitschuk, executive director of the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association, said he drafted the statement which sheriff’s offices began to sign or modify.

“Therefore, as the custodian of the jail and chief law enforcement official for DuPage County, that neither myself nor my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the State, nor will we be arresting or housing law abiding individuals that have been charged solely with non-compliance of this Act,” DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick wrote in a statement, which was mirrored by dozens of other offices.

With a population of over 920,000 residents, DuPage County is the largest county to defy the law.

ABC News was able to identify at least 59 sheriff’s offices that issued a nearly identical statement, the main identifiable difference between the statements being the letterhead and name of the county in the text of the statement.

In total, at least 74 offices said they plan to not use resources to enforce elements of the law, impacting nearly 4,000,000 Illinois residents, or over 30 percent of the state’s residents.

Other than DuPage county, the most populous counties in Illinois – Cook, Lake, and Will Counties – have not issued any statement opposing the law. The deadly 2022 Highland Park parade shooting took place in Lake County, which is enforcing the law. Most of the sheriff’s offices opposing the law reside in counties with less than 100,000 residents, though nine defiant counties have populations exceeding 100,000.

Kaitschuk said he disagreed with the idea that sheriffs have an obligation to check compliance with the law or house offenders in their jails.

“That is not a charge that is provided to us, or mandated to us in the bill that passed and was signed by the governor,” he said.

Many of the sheriffs defying the law have described their opposition to the law as akin to civil disobedience to protect the Second Amendment.

“We will not be enforcing it in this county; I will also not house anyone in my jail that has violated this act because we know it to be an unlawful act by the general assembly and the governor,” Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Bullard Sr. said in an online video.

Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell, whose jurisdiction covers nearly 200,000 residents, signed a modified version of the statement. In an interview with ABC News, Campbell based his opposition to the law due to both adherence to the constitution and the ineffectiveness of the law.

“The law will have zero impact on the murder rate in the state of Illinois,” Campbell said.

Some offices took less defiant stances which include waiting for movement from the courts or legislative action.

“I understand that our nation had witnesses frequent tragedies involving gun violence and I am in no way attempting to minimize the impact these events have had,” St. Clair County Sheriff Richard Watson wrote in a statement, in which he said he opposed the law but did not promise to defy it.

When asked why he decided to not enforce the law rather than wait for action from the courts, Campbell returned his belief that the law is unconstitutional and will eventually be struck down.

Pritzker addressed the defiance, commenting that members of law enforcement who fail to enforce it might lose their job.

“The fact is that yes there are of course people who are trying to politically grandstand, who want to make a name for themselves by claiming that they will not comply,” he said. “But the reality is that the state police is responsible for enforcement, as are all law enforcement all across our state and they will in fact do their job or they won’t be in their job.”

Kaitschuk rebutted the idea that Pritzker has the authority to fire members of law enforcement, especially elected sheriffs.

“I’m just not aware of any provision that provides the governor that opportunity to do so,” he said.

I’m not aware of any such provision either, but I do have a question.  Who pays the salary of the county Sheriffs?  If it’s the county, they’re good to go.  If it’s the state, then someone else holds all the cards.

As we discussed earlier, these are the initial baby steps of nullification.  The wheat will get sorted from the chaff as things move forward.

The “wheat” of the Sheriff’s Departments must follow through on action to arrest any officer who enforces the law, or else the nullification will have no effect.

I’m sure you can find the link for it so I won’t provide it here.  As I’ve said before, I don’t own any pistol-braced weapons.  Nonetheless, I’m sure readers need to know this information.  Most readers already know, but if you don’t, you are the one who needs to hear these things.

At Forgotten Weapons

The Blyskawica (“LIghtning”) is an SMG developed in occupied Poland to be issued out to Home Army units during Operation Tempest; the liberation uprisings planned for the advance of the Red Army into Poland.

The gun was developed starting in September 1942 by two engineers, Wacław Zawrotny and Seweryn Wielanier. Both were smart and talented, but neither had previous experience in arms design. The design they created is both innovative in some areas and inferior in others as a result, with major inspiration coming form the Sten and the MP40. Production was undertaken in the harshest conditions of occupied Warsaw, where just possession of cutting tools required German military permission.* It is a credit to the skill and dedication of the Home Army team that some 750 Błyskawica guns were made; the largest mass production of any underground weapon that I am aware of.

More at the link. And here’s an interesting video of the underground development of this weapon. The weapon is examined in detail as well.

NYT.

The Biden administration is closing a major loophole in a new federal rule intended to regulate the sale of pistol parts that can readily be turned into untraceable homemade firearms, in an aggressive expansion of its crackdown on so-called ghost guns.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives directed vendors who sell partially finished frames of Glock-style handguns — the pistol grip and firing mechanism — to treat them like fully completed firearms, which are subject to federal regulations. The move, outlined in an open letter to federally licensed gun dealers, requires sellers to mark the parts with serial numbers, and for buyers to undergo criminal background checks.

The guidance could severely restrict the sale of unregulated and untraceable “80 percent” frames and receivers that have been linked to thousands of crimes, a top goal of the gun control movement. Such parts only require simple alterations to become operational.

The move, should it survive likely legal challenges from gun rights groups, would be among the most significant executive actions President Biden has taken to fulfill his campaign promise to stem the scourge of handgun violence, an effort highlighted by the passage of a bipartisan gun deal in June.

But federal officials told The New York Times earlier this month that the leadership of A.T.F. had done little to stop retailers from continuing to sell the unfinished, unregulated frames, outside of the kits.

A.T.F. officials said that they had been simply weighing various legal approaches before issuing their guidance on handguns. But they were also clearly under pressure to toughen the policy, and have spent the past few weeks working on the new guidance in conjunction with senior lawyers at the Justice Department and White House officials, according to three administration officials familiar with the situation.

Under the new guidance, vendors and manufacturers who fail to comply with the technical requirements outlined in the letter would face penalties ranging from the possible loss of their federal licenses to criminal prosecution.

Yet the move, which the Justice Department described as a clarification of the regulation, is not without risk. Because the rule was created through executive action, rather than a statute validated by Congress, it has given companies confidence that they can keep selling individual gun parts.

Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss possible litigation, said the new guidance would almost certainly be challenged in federal court on the grounds that it violates the Gun Control Act of 1968, which allows people to build firearms for their personal use without submitting to background checks or applying serial numbers.

Isn’t it a hoot how, when a regulation, law, or lack of regulation or law, doesn’t do exactly what some controller – rulemaker wants it to do, it’s considered a “loophole?”

Biden is just doing what Trump did in his precedent-setting move to ban bump stocks by rulemaking rather than forcing the Congress to do their job.

Biden’s plan may in fact suffer from an even further weakness, i.e., it explicitly contradicts another law.

How sweet.  Queue up the popcorn – the court cases will prove to be numerous and amusing.

Details and Video.

Dr. John Lott Jr., president of the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security last week for a hearing dedicated to “Examining Uvalde: The Search for Bipartisan Solutions to Gun Violence.”

Dr. Lott delivered a lot of information but he began with three basic facts that everyone should know about gun-related violence in America.

The three facts are written in summary. The video is 30min with a lot of detail, but the fight for liberty is a long fight and requires we be armed with knowledge.

Surprising no one, The New York Times published one of the most insulting commentaries I’ve ever witnessed, directed mainly at Christian gun owners.  It’s a guest commentary written by Peter Manseau, who claims to have published elsewhere, but I’ve never read any of this books, nor will I considering the lack of scholarship displayed here.  We’ll start, lift some commentary out, and I’ll make remarks along the way.

Is our gun problem a God problem?

The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns; it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.

That this paragraph made it through editing is amazing.  Provenance is “the chronology of ownership, custody or location of a historical object.”  In the following paragraphs he takes aim at Daniel Defense and the religious beliefs of Marty Daniel, but no editor worth his salt would have let this paragraph go unmodified.  Presumably the writer is trying to link Daniel’s views with the gun he built, but that case cannot possibly be demonstrated.  I know plenty of irreligious men who own AR-15s, and many more who work on them.

Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.

So Marty Daniel is a Christian.  What of it?  What does that bring to bear on the case he’s trying to prove?

While some might suggest a Christian firearms company is a contradiction in terms, Daniel Defense is hardly alone. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.

So now the writer has expanded the sweep of his analysis and is targeting all evangelicals.

In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”

For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.

“We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”

He is on the outside looking in.  Most of my readers would say that the constitution (and thus the 2A) only matters the extent to which is comports with Biblical law.  The foundation of our rights is to be found in the Holy Writ, and our philosophical pre-commitments are to the Lord of the universe and His law, not a piece of paper.  The piece of paper is a covenant and contract, null and void upon unfaithfulness.  You don’t have to be a Christian to understand my point of logic.  If the writer is targeting Christians, he’s gotten it exactly backwards.  The constitution isn’t infallible and wasn’t written by God.  Christians don’t turn to the constitution to ascertain rightness and wrongness in their lives.

Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.

More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough-and-tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.

It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.

He has now turned to an irrelevant English movement and a movie to prove his point.  But here he misses so badly that it’s going to take a few moments to sus this out.

If he was a scholar he would have first turned to OT law, where the right of being armed is founded in the Pentateuch.  As I’ve observed so many times before, John Calvin discusses this aspect of the ten commandments and makes it clear that defense of life is not only allowed, but required as a good work by the Godly man.

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

Calvin has here expressed the Biblical position.  “Thou shall not kill” also means “Thou shall protect life.”  This is of course at least partially why Jesus himself commanded his disciples to sell their robes and buy a sword.  He won’t have His followers being defenseless against the onslaught of ne’er-do-wells.  Any loss of life, trials or tribulations, will be by His hand, in His timing, for purposes that He knows, not by anyone else.

But here it’s important not to miss one of the main points of the command in Luke 22:36 like so many do.  Quite literally, He is commanding the purchase of weapons in spite of strictures against ownership and carry of said weapons at the time.  He is commanding His followers to be law-breakers for the sake of self defense.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

Jesus knew the law, and the potential legal troubles He was exposing His disciples to by issuing this command, and yet, that didn’t stop Him.  So going back to the law of Moses, to the command of Christ, and then on to the Crusades which were primarily defensive in nature, the history of armed self defense isn’t traced back to an English movement a few years ago or a silly movie.  It’s in the very nature of the beliefs.

But then the writer can’t stop at merely misunderstanding the subject he purports to analyze.  He then decides to expand his (ill-fated) analysis to insults.  “As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.”

Christianity has always been about a specific, living being who loves us and redeems us and commands us, not about a distant deity who once interacted with His creation.  If he means that the second amendment would have been written differently if Jefferson was not a deist, that point is unproven at best and misguided and simply historically incorrect at worst.  Jefferson wasn’t responsible for the second amendment.  Maddison wrote the text, but the entirety of the colonies insisted on it, most of the Southern colonies being Presbyterian.  It’s too much to discuss in the present context, but in English circles they knew the basis for the war of independence and called it “The Presbyterian Rebellion.”

Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere.

He’s just making things up now.  Ownership and bearing of arms, if a God-given right, doesn’t depend in the least on where one lives or what system of government obtains.  It didn’t in the case of the Armenian Christians who were slaughtered in the deserts of Turkey by the Muslims, it didn’t to the Christians targeted by Idi Amin of Uganda, and it didn’t to the Russians and Ukrainians starved by Stalin.  He wants a scary boogieman to blame, but the intersection of Christians and America has nothing to do with it except in his imagination.

Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.

I vow never to use that word, debunked.  It has become the wordy-word of progressives trying to prove something wrong and who have run out of ideas.  Guns are only unsafe to those who do not treat them with respect and obey all the rules of gun safety.

As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.

Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.

Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.

After blaming Christians for mass shootings, he has finally, at long last, divulged his own philosophical pre-commitments, or religion.  He is a collectivist, and says that the solutions to problems are to be found in the collective.

What he doesn’t mention is that in the twentieth century alone there were over 212,000,000 mass murders by governments across the globe.  The writer doesn’t explain how his collectivist solutions would be better than ours, nor do I believe he can.

The New York Times has paid for another loser commentary that wanders and fails to stay on point, refuses to interact with the real scholarship of its intended target, insults a large constituency of Americans, and considers neither the history of the subject nor the failures of its own solutions.

Is it any wonder that they’re constantly begging for money?

I wonder if she knows how stupid she sounds?  I also wonder if soy-boy to her left knows how idiotic he looks with that silly grin?

It should be noted once again that these jerks are in charge because people vote for them.