How Helene Affected The People Of Appalachia

Herschel Smith · 30 Sep 2024 · 11 Comments

To begin with, this is your president. This ought to be one of the most shameful things ever said by a sitting president. "Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?" BIDEN: "We've given everything that we have." "Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?" BIDEN: "No." pic.twitter.com/jDMNGhpjOz — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024 We must have spent too much money on Ukraine to help Americans in distress. I don't…… [read more]

How We Stopped Mass-Murderers Time After Time

BY PGF
1 year, 6 months ago

We posted about this two months ago when the President of Ecuador authorized citizens to carry and use arms for defense against crime. I argued that the media will need to report these uses to be an effective deterrent to further crime there. And here in America, if there were robust reporting on all defensive gun uses, including when the gun is not fired, the amount of armed robbery and other violent crimes would be drastically lowered.

Slow Facts argues that mass shootings would also be reduced.

Real life isn’t like the movies. Bad guys don’t walk around with a soundtrack thumping with every step. Movie makers want to thrill us, but saving lives in real life is a lot more ordinary than that. Because it doesn’t sell tickets or sell soap, the news media isn’t interested in how our neighbors stopped mass-murderers about once a month for the last eight years. Ordinary people like us would do it even more often if politicians got out of our way.

Recognizing a new problem- Times have changed. Today we live in a media driven culture. Mass-murderers feel like failures and they want to take revenge on society. These narcissists know that the mainstream media will give them a multi-million dollar publicity campaign if they kill enough innocent people. The murderers revel in the thought of being famous even if they are not alive to enjoy that infamy. That feeling of anticipation is one reason the mass-murderers spend years in the planning stage. Those feelings of resentment and anticipation explain why these murderers write such lengthy manifestos and diaries.

Recognizing new solutions- Mass-murderers already feel like a failure. They don’t want to experience more failure when they come to kill. That explains why they seldom attack a group of armed policemen or attack an NRA convention where about half the adults are armed. The media won’t give mass-murderers the recognition they want when they are stopped and killed so quickly.

At first, we weren’t sure if armed citizens were a workable solution. Because the news media doesn’t cover it, it was hard to find cases where the attempted mass-murderers were stopped by ordinary citizens who happened to be nearby. Oddly enough, the mass-murderers did our research for us.

More at the link.

A 99-Percent Solution to Stop Mass-Murders

BY PGF
1 year, 9 months ago

Hint: The solution isn’t politics; it’s you. Source:

There are the solutions we should use, the solutions we could use, and the non-solutions that politicians have used already. Let me bring you up to speed in a hurry.

The bad news is that we built this problem of mass-murder and celebrity-murderers. The good news is that we can fix it. Society changed in significant ways over the last 5 decades. We destroyed families so many young men grew up without fathers. No one taught these young men how to control their strength and their anger. We closed our mental-health facilities and put mentally ill patients out on the street. Recently, we refused to prosecute, convict, and incarcerate violent criminals. Each of those factors certainly contribute to our problem of mass-murder today.

We can disagree about what we meant to do as we changed our public policies but there is no argument about the resulting outcome of increased mass-murder in the last several decades.

Each of those are contributing factors, but they are not the main cause of the increase. We have to address the elephant in the room.

Something else changed in our society. We’ve read the journals and the interviews of mass-murderers and they told us exactly why they kill. They are willing to die so that they can be famous. The biggest problem is the dozens of 24-7 news channels who now give each mass-murderer a 10-million dollar publicity campaign if the murderer kills enough innocent victims. Those are not my words, but theirs. You don’t have to believe me but you should believe them. We created celebrity-murderers, and we should demand that the news media stop turning these mass-murderers into instant celebrities.

The media isn’t the source of the problem. Is there insufficient evidence that “News” is simply government propagandist information of questionable validity and almost zero usefulness? If the government and its media wanted to censor mass shootings and broadcast 24/7 every self-defense firearm use, they could. But that wouldn’t help the long-term plan of keeping people in fear, so they support civilian registration and disarmament.

It isn’t obvious yet, but we are closing the chapter on the brief history of mass-murders in the United States.

We stopped them. Ordinary people like you and I stopped mass-murderers. We learned to attack the murderer if he attacks us in a bar where we are disarmed. We learned to shoot the attacker if we are armed. We found out that shooting back works really well.

Where we are allowed to go armed, ordinary armed civilians stopped attempted mass-murderers over 104 times since 2004. An armed citizen isn’t there at every attempted mass-murder. If he is there, the armed citizen doesn’t choose to intervene every time. In the last few years we were effective at stopping mass-murderers 94-percent of the time when we tried. We stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders where we were allowed to go armed.

Other than the gradual expansion of carry rights, the people are fighting against mass murder without any establishment support whatsoever. He offers many points, good details, and plenty of data. Read the rest.

Related: Not surprisingly, there is more than one gun news story out today about Chicago residents fighting back against gangs and other criminals with their own firearms. Good for them.

Embarrassments Of The New York SAFE Act Gun Ban Legal Ruling

BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 11 months ago

We’ve already discussed a couple of horrible embarrassments uncovered in the ruling on the New York SAFE Act gun ban recently issued by Judge Skretny, but more on that in a moment.

My brother Keith is a graduate of Emory Law School and practicing attorney in Georgia, and clerked for a federal judge.  I know that he has fealty to scholarship and takes his commitment to study, hard work and defensible and logical prose very seriously.  That said, lawyers take it on the chin, and properly so, and my brother once told me the best lawyer joke I ever heard (“99.99% of all lawyers give the rest of us a bad name”).  We’ll come back to this later.

David Codrea is covering John Lott’s analysis of the ruling by Judge Skretny, and has some excerpts and observations that warrant our attention.

“The decision relied heavily on testimony by George Mason University criminology professor Chris Koper, who argued ‘that the criminal use of assault weapons declined after the federal assault-weapons ban was enacted in 1994, independently of trends in gun crime,’” Lott wrote. “But Koper’s two studies on the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban don’t support his claims.”

They state:

“[T]he evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect [of the weapons ban],” the initial study reported.

“[W]e cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the second study concluded. “And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

John Lott and I had an odd run-in several months ago, and he has with Mike Vanderboegh as well.  But not being trifling or holding grudges, let’s observe that Lott’s analysis is important.  So one important feature of the analysis is that the very studies cited by the Judge do not bear out the claims.  But then there is this gem.  The ruling also cites the online magazine Mother Jones.  Just so that you heard that, let’s repeat it.  Judge Skretny’s ruling uses information from … Mother … Jones!

Earlier we learned from Kurt Hofmann that there is logical contradiction in the ruling.  The very logical process the Judge uses to deem the magazine cartridge limit in the SAFE law “arbitrary” isn’t applied to the guns themselves, and should have been.  Furthermore, we’ve seen that the Judge Skretny’s ruling invokes the ridiculous and laughable notion of spray firing from the hip (for semiautomatic weapons, no less) to rule pistol grips on long guns to be legitimately within the sweep of the law, ignoring (or simply not learning) that no one, not military or civilian, spray fires from the hip, and such a practice would not only be the most ineffective thing a rogue shooter could do, it would get you permanently kicked out of every range in America, and for very good reason.

So the list of silly, ridiculous, sophomoric stunts in the ruling is growing.  First, there is the notion of pistol grips and spray firing from the hip; second, the failure to consistently apply the same logic to guns as he does magazines; third, misinterpretation of the very studies he cites to support his conclusions.  Finally, the use of anything from Mother Jones in a legal ruling certainly must be a tacit admission of bankruptcy of thought and ability to do analysis (and for the record, even with my admittedly incomplete assessment of mass shootings, I do take issue with the completeness of the Mother Jones assessment which leaves out the Hartford Beer Distributors shooting, the Geneva County massacre, the Texas Tower shooting [Charles Whitman, who used bolt action long guns] due to the dates of inclusion, and others).

The ruling is quickly becoming a laughingstock.  I am wondering if these Judges just turn over their hardest work to juvenile clerks who get their news from Jon Stewart, Daily Kos and Mother Jones?  So returning to the joke my brother told me, there is sometimes profound truth in humor, no?

Related:

Guns And The Mentally Ill: A Professional Assessment

New York, Pistol Grips And Spray Firing

Kurt Hofmann, In Upholding NY’s SAFE Act, Judge Makes Surprising Inadvertent Admission

David Codrea, Federal Judge Upholding SAFE Act Gun Ban Relied On Unsupported Assumptions


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