5010 rounds so far.  No cleaning.

Politico:

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday differences between Republicans are “all reconcilable” on gun control legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week that strengthening background checks and so-called red flag laws “will be front and center” when addressing gun violence in the Senate after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio left at least 32 people dead.

But John Barrasso of Wyoming the No. 3 GOP senator, told reporters Friday he has “a lot of concerns about the due process component of“ red flag laws, adding he doesn’t “want to punish law-abiding citizens.”

Asked about the conflicting responses, Conway said on “Fox News Sunday” it’s “all reconcilable.”

[ … ]

“We can protect people’s civil liberties, privacy, constitutional rights and public safety all at the right time,” Conway said.

“A” can be “not-A” at the same time it’s “A.”  I guess she believes in the tooth fairy too.

So either Trump (or his communications people) sent her out to parrot those words, or she believes them and is counseling the White House (and thus, Trump).

Either way, it doesn’t portend good things and it once again demonstrates that Trump is out to alienate the base that put him in office.

Via reader Mack, let’s play a game.  “We need a mental health database.”  Who said this?  Let’s name names.

Andrew Cuomo:

Democrats should come together with one clear message on gun safety.

The federal gov’t must:

1) Outlaw assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
2) Create a mental health database
3) Pass universal background checks
4) Pass a Red Flag Law

Wayne LaPierre:

None other than Wayne LaPierre has suggested the same idea. Jeryl Bier pointed me to this speech delivered by LaPierre in 2012 after the Sandy Hook massacre. So frantic was the NRA to steer the conversation away from gun regulations that it proposed having the feds keep tabs on America’s mental illnesses instead.

“How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame – from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave – while provoking others to make their mark?

A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”

Always remember what reader Menckenlite said.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Wayne is as much of a “control freak” as Cuomo.

Military.com.

Such laws could be used to “identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but, when necessary, involuntary confinement,” Trump said. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.”

[ … ]

“To put this in perspective, there are over 1.6 million disabled veterans with a service-connected adjudication by VA of mental illness, including one million veterans with PTSD,” he said.

Let me assist Military.com with their article headline.  “Trump backs red flag laws that WILL impact veteran gun ownership.”

Because.  Forecasting the future, witchcraft, sorcery, wicked divination by community witchdoctors who may as well howl at the moon at midnight and throw chicken bones over their shoulder.

There.  Fixed.

Andrew Napolitano.

Last weekend’s mass murders in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have produced a flood of words about everything from gun control to mental illness to white nationalism. Most of those words have addressed the right to keep and bear arms as if it were a gift from the government. It isn’t.

The U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought, speech and personality. That means that the court has recognized that the framers did not bestow this right upon us. Rather, they recognized its pre-existence as an extension of our natural human right to self-defense and they forbade government — state and federal — from infringing upon it.

He’s right about the pre-theoretical nature of rights, but wrong about one thing.  We have no natural right to anything except to be judged by God.  We are His creatures, and the clay has no say over what the potter does (Romans 9).  We have a God-given right to bear arms, not a “natural right.”  I loath the term natural rights, and I am not a follower of Hobbes, Locke or any of their ilk.

It would be exquisitely unfair, profoundly unconstitutional and historically un-American for the rights of law-abiding folks — “surrender that rifle you own legally and use safely because some other folks have used that same type of weapon criminally” — to be impaired in the name of public safety.

It would also be irrational. A person willing to kill innocents and be killed by the police while doing so surely would have no qualms about violating a state or federal law that prohibited the general ownership of the weapon he was about to use.

[ … ]

Can the government constitutionally outlaw the types of rifles used by the El Paso and Dayton killers? In a word: No. We know that because in the first Supreme Court opinion upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms, the court addressed what kind of arms the Second Amendment protects. The court ruled that the Second Amendment protects individual ownership of weapons one can carry that are of the same degree of sophistication as the bad guys have — or the government has.

So he’s right about this.  But don’t expect the congress or president to know anything about this.  Washington, D.C., is the home of gargoyles, demons and pit vipers.

Then of course there is this.

Utah Shooting Sports Council writing at Ammoland.

H.R. 8 is sold as a “background check bill” to keep guns away from bad people, but we know from 50 years experience that less than 1% of the bad people who fail the background checks are prosecuted.

What is needed are not more background check laws, but enforcement of existing laws. If bad guys are illegally trying to purchase a firearm, they need to be punished. The lawmakers pushing H.R. 8 do not want to do that. They are not serious about stopping bad people from getting guns, they only care about gutting the Second Amendment.

I stopped reading right there.  Because.  Existing laws.  Infringement.

David Codrea:

It’s telling that The Hunt is coming from an industry that relies on fantasy depictions of gun use for so much of its profits and special operator class armed security for protecting its elites while simultaneously being such a major social and political influencer for disarming its customers.

I haven’t heard much about this silly tripe, but I did see one short clip where someone who was being hunted by Antifa was cowering in fear and trying (unsuccessfully) to hide.  From this little clip, it’s obvious that the “hunters” don’t understand their supposed prey.

‘Nuff said.

AP:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Vigilante attacks and mob justice appeared to be on the rise in Mexico this week as violence mounted, more than two dozen bodies appeared along roadsides and the government ruled out any new crackdown on criminal gangs.

Prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa said Thursday five young men have been murdered in recent days, and in all five cases toy cars were carefully placed atop their corpses. The men were apparently car thieves, and the toys indicated both the reason they were killed and served as a warning to other thieves.

The latest such murder came Wednesday. Prosecutors said the victim had been identified as the same man seen on security camera footage earlier that day stealing a pickup truck at gunpoint from a woman outside her home in the state capital, Culiacan.

The National Human Rights Commission said 43 people have been killed in lynchings so far this year, and 173 injured. That was up from the already-record year for mob justice in 2018.

“Those who take justice into their own hands commit acts of barbarism, not justice,” the commission said.

Vigilantes say they have to act because authorities won’t crack down on criminal gangs, which have become more brazen and have begun returning to the grisly mass executions that marked Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war.

Actually, there is a strong history of constables gathering a Posse of locals and enforcing justice.  I much prefer it to the [in]justice we see today.

As for Mexico, it is a failed state, right on the Southern border.

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
– St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803

Cited by David Codrea.  His article at Firearms News is full of important commentary on the current state of affairs, and the apparent current support for a new AWB if only enough rulers would favor it.

Don’t miss the fact that Mitch McConnell feels pressured.

“The urgency of this is not lost on any of us,” McConnell said.

But he noted the bar for legislation includes passing the House, garnering 60 votes in the Senate and a presidential signature.

He did not rule out looking at a ban on assault weapons, but noted there is a dispute over whether the 1994 ban that expired in 2004 had showed results.

“It’s certainly one of the front and center issues,” he said. “But what we can’t do is fail to pass something. What I want to see here is an outcome, not a bunch of partisan back and forths, shots across the bow.”

It’s urgent.  They must do something, because politics.  Codrea points out that Trump has jettisoned his base of gun owners.

Since Donald Trump was elected, the gun community has seen the president bypass Congress and ban bump stocks, support over 21 gun purchases, a Department of State over 32-round magazine ban for civilian firearms exports, push red flag laws which destroy the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th and 5^th Amendments, and a complete ignoring of the evisceration of the 2^nd Amendment in the states of: CA, OR, WA, IL, NM, NV, VT, FL, NY, NJ, MA, etc… And then there is his statement that he “doesn’t like” silencers.

Yes, and I’ll point out one more time that Florida received an influx of Puerto Ricans after the hurricane who will likely vote collectivist, Trump won North Carolina by a small margin, and he is in trouble in Ohio, possibly Georgia and perhaps even Texas.  The road to victory in the next election is narrow.

But it’s like that when you have no principles and undercut the very base you used to put you in office.  We are where we are because enough people didn’t ask Trump the hard questions on his core belief in gun rights (or enough people didn’t listen when I asked the hard questions on core beliefs).  It appears he doesn’t have any.