It was another dangerous series of days to be in Chicago over the weekend as 42 were shot and five were killed. In one 16-hour period, 16 were shot with one killed.Where are the protests from "Black Lives Matter"?
On September 8, 2015–just two weeks after Vester Lee Flanagan used a legally purchased firearm to kill news reporter Alison Parker on-air–Kaine put forward a bill to hold licensed gun dealers liable for the misuse of firearms. The bill was designed to “raise the bar” and require more “accountability” on the part of gun sellers. The Roanoke Times reported that Kaine’s bill “would make gun sellers criminally liable for a bad sale if they didn’t take reasonable, affirmative steps to determine the customer met federal criteria.”
Consider the scenario–Flanagan passed a federal background check for his gun. He passed the very same check that Hillary Clinton, Gabby Giffords, and others assure us will reduce crime and/or make us safer. But after passing the check and acquiring the gun, Flanagan carried out an evil deed. Background checks will never stop a latent criminal from getting a gun; they only stop actual criminals.
Yet even though the law was followed regarding Flanagan–a federal background check completed and passed–Kaine’s response was to push for more liability on the licensed gun dealer. In other words, he wants the gun dealer held responsible for what a buyer does after exiting the store with a firearm the FBI allowed him to purchase.
This is Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
Guns are pretty easy to make, and modern tools make them much easier.And drives liberals crazy!IN THE WAKE of the worst mass shooting in US history, many Americans want to ban civilians from buying the AR-15, that ultra-popular, all-American killing tool. But in basements and garages around the country, another group of Americans is collecting the machines and materials to make those firearms in the privacy of their own homes. And for them, just as much as for gun control advocates, Orlando represents a call to arms.Regulation is futile.
Sen. Chris Murrphy (D-CT) is one of the leading proponents of Monday’s senate votes to inhibit the 2nd amendment. Days after the Islamic terror attack in Orlando, Murphy led a filibuster on the floor of the senate demanding votes on a whole host of bills and he said this to his fellow senators as he ended his filibuster speech:So preventing gun violence had nothing to do with the vote. It's all about control.“Ask yourself what can you do to make sure that Orlando or Sandy Hook never ever happens again.”................
So it’s worth noting that during an interview on ABC News Murphy was forced to admit that the bills he has proposed and will be voted on today would have not stopped either Orlando or Sandy Hook or any of the other recent mass shootings in America.
Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck said Friday that UCLA gunman Mainak Sarkar purchased his firearms “legally.”This shows that Universal Background Checks demanded by Gun Control proponants really works!!!
Sarkar allegedly shot and killed 31-year-old Ashley Hasti in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and then traveled to Los Angeles, where he allegedly shot and killed professor William Klug on the UCLA campus on June 1.
According to NBC News, chief Beck said Sarkar had two handguns, both of which had been “purchased legally.” Beck also said that “at least one of the guns” was registered to Sarkar.
As Breitbart News previously reported, the phrase “legally purchased” means Sarkar passed a background check for the handguns, or at least one of them.
On January 1, the Chicago Tribune reported that the number of shooting victims in gun-controlled Chicago for 2015 was 2,986.The Dear Leader blaming Wisconsin and Indiana for the gun control fail makes about as much sense as Kalifornia Gov. Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown blaming Nevada and Arizona's gun control laws for the terrorist shooting in San Bernardino. All the gun used in the San Bernardino shooting were legally purchased in Kalifornia, after a universal background check and a 10 day waiting period.
Mind you, Chicago has a “violence tax” that raises the price of every gun and bullet sold at retail, an “assault weapons” ban, limits on the number of gun stores and the locations of those stores, and what the New York Times describes as handgun restrictions that let city leaders “get as close as they could get legally to a ban without a ban.”
The result? According to the Chicago Tribune, there has been nearly 3,000 shooting victims in one year’s time.
And the Tribune reports approximate 470 homicides for Chicago in 2015, which means gun-controlled Chicago had “the most violent year of all major U.S. cities.” It is the worst year the city has seen since 2012, “when 500 people were killed.”
On October 27, President Obama tried to blame Indiana and Wisconsin for the gun control failure in Chicago. His line of reasoning was that the pro-Second Amendment stance of Indiana and Wisconsin led to guns flooding into Chicago from out of state. Bretibart News previously reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) made a similar move on September 17, when he blamed southern states for New York City’s soaring rate of firearm-related homicides.
The Washington Post‘s fact checker took a look at recent mass shootings and concluded there is no evidence that stronger gun laws would have prevented any of them.It must really burn the few honest liberals, when the facts get in the way of the narrative.
Glenn Kessler decided to fact check a statement by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on the red-hot topic of gun control. Last Friday on CBS This Morning, Rubio said, “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.” Kessler doesn’t say exactly who suggested he check this claim, but he does note that the colleague who did so assumed that “it was almost certainly incorrect.”
Since Rubio’s statement was a bit vague, Kessler went back as far as the December 2012 Newtown shooting in Connecticut. Based on a list of mass shootings between then and now maintained by progressive magazine Mother Jones, Kessler assembled a list of 12 shootings and looked at the circumstances of each one in turn.
What he found was no evidence that any proposed gun laws would have stopped any of the mass shootings in question. In most cases, guns used in these killings were purchased legally (though not always by the person who used them).
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy announced Thursday that he will issue an executive order banning anybody on federal terrorism watch lists from buying a gun in the state.I can't wait for the lawsuits to start. This is a couple prime examples of black letter law violations of the 2nd and 5th Amendment, for starters. I want to see the damages awarded to the plaintiffs. I hope it's big dollars.
“We intend to prevent, by executive order through my powers as governor, those on government watch lists from obtaining a permit to purchase a firearm in Connecticut,” Malloy said at a Thursday press conference. “If Congress will not act, we in the states will.”
Under his planned order, anybody on the lists would be barred from purchasing either guns or ammunition. It’s not clear how many people the executive order will affect, but there are about 47,000 people on the federal government’s no-fly list and about a million people on the terrorism watch list (though many of these are not U.S. citizens or even residents). Malloy says the executive order’s details are still being worked out, in concert with the White House.
Failing upward!Quoting one the brighter philosophers of our day, Inigo Montoya, who happens to be a superior intellect that Granny Legosi, "You keep using [those] word. I do not think it means what you think it means.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that even with her home state's strict gun laws the San Bernardino terrorists got their weapons, but argued that's reason to expand the statutes federally nonetheless.
Pelosi was asked on PBS about the fact that the guns used in last week's massacre at a county Christmas party were legally purchased in California, which "has one of the tougher gun control laws in the country."
"Well, it is. And the fact is that's why we need a national gun law so that there is no thought that even though one state may have good laws you can buy guns in another place. These, as you said, were bought in California," Pelosi said.
It isn’t even St. Patrick’s Day, but we are all Irish now: In Connecticut, the boneheaded state government passed a law demanding the registration of certain firearms, and the people of Connecticut, perhaps communing for a moment with their independent-minded Yankee forebears, mainly refused to comply. On the other side of the country in the heart of California’s technology corridor, the city of Sunnyvale demanded that residents hand over all firearms capable of accepting magazines holding more than ten rounds — effectively, everything except revolvers and some single-shot rifles — and the good men and women of Silicon Valley responded by turning in a grand total of zero firearms. Similar initiatives in other jurisdictions have produced similar results.That's the main problem with 'Irish Democracy'.
Political scientists call this “Irish democracy,” the phenomenon by which the general members of a polity resist the mandates of their would-be rulers by simply refusing to comply with them. It is a low-cost form of civil disobedience, but one that can be very effective at times: Mohandas K. Gandhi was entirely correct in his famous declaration to the British powers that they would eventually be forced to simply pack up their tiffin pails and go home, because 300,000 Englishman could not control 300 million (at the time) Indians if those Indians didn’t cooperate.
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The hallmark episode of Irish democracy in the American setting is Prohibition, which is a cautionary tale — and not only for the would-be modern prohibitionist. Prohibition demonstrated several things to the American public, which took the lesson to heart: Politicians are entirely capable of making stupid laws when in the grips of voguish thinking; the American people are more than capable of ignoring and subverting those laws; that subversion often is met with ruthlessness and brutality on the part of law enforcement, but enforcement is by no means even-handed; hypocrisy, like alcohol, is a useful social lubricant in moderation but debilitating in excess; social tensions reveal who has political power and who doesn’t, casting a harsh bright light on Lenin’s fundamental question — “Who? Whom?”; and law enforcement is just as corruptible as any other institution. Prohibition did a lot of damage by providing an enduring model of organized crime, but it also undermined Americans’ faith in the rule of law as such: Favoritism in enforcement, bribery, and institutional incapacity severely damaged the law’s prestige. We have never really quite recovered.
Our new prohibitionists are a lot like the old ones. The nice corduroy-clad liberals in places such as Georgetown and the Upper West Side use guns as a stand-in for the sort of people who own guns in much the same way as the old WASP prohibitionists used booze as a stand-in for the sort of people who drank too much: Irish and other Catholics, especially immigrants, and especially especially poor immigrants. The horror at “gun culture” is about the culture — rural, conservative, traditionalist, patriotic, self-reliant or at least aspiring to self-reliance — much more than it is about the guns. It’s the same sort of dynamic that gets people worked up about Confederate flags or poor white people with diabetes who shop at Walmart.
A little dose of Irish democracy is an excellent thing in response to that, especially when it is coming from California and Connecticut rather than Oklahoma and Alabama. But winning the fight on gun rights while losing the fight on the rule of law is the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
Although well-meaning—supporters genuinely want to keep military-style weapons “off the streets” and guns out of the hands of suspected threats—both measures are wrongheaded.
There’s no doubt assault weapons—there’s no official definition for the term, which makes identifying them for prohibition difficult, if not impossible—are scary to many Americans, especially with their presence in high-profile shootings like the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, or the theater killings in Aurora, Colorado. But out of 73 mass killers from 1982 to 2015, just 25 used rifles of any kind, including military-style weapons. Most used revolvers, shotguns, and semi-automatic handguns. Which gets to a related point: We might feel safer if we ban “assault weapons,” but we won’t be safer. Of the 43,000 Americans killed with guns since 2010, just a fraction—3.5 percent—were killed with rifles.
The vast majority of gun murder victims are killed with handguns. But a handgun ban isn’t on the table, and for good reason—with its opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court stated an individual right to gun ownership. And under Heller, handguns are weapons in “common use” for “traditionally lawful purposes” like defending a home. A ban would be unconstitutional.
Has there ever been a better example of liberal overreach than the coverage that followed the shooting in San Bernardino? It started in the immediate aftermath of the attack with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said: “Yo GOP, kinda hard to talk about ‘keeping people safe’ when your peeps are shooting up America,” and the numerous attempts at “prayer shaming” anyone who offered their “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of the horrific event.It's all about the narrative and winning the daily news cycle. Actually fixing the problem requires work and consensus.
Without waiting to learn the actual facts (which turned out to be that the assailants were radicalized Muslims), Moulitsas didn’t just assume the shooters were Republicans; he also sought to score shameless political points.
Usually a rather marginal figure, Moulitsas set the tone for the next few days. Comparisons between the NRA and ISIS abounded, and the ubiquity of the “prayer shaming” that took place makes one wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of coordinated effort. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, for example, both quickly echoed the “God isn’t fixing this” musings of left-leaning media elites.
But at the very least, it was all a prime example of the kind of groupthink that exists among—not just the Left—but also a certain set of young “mainstream” media types. New York’s Daily News took that line of thought to its natural end point Saturday night when they published an op-ed that blamed one of the shooting victims for his own fate. His offense? Being a conservative “Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew” and a supporter of the NRA.
On December 6 the Associated Press pointed out that California’s aggressive gun control laws–expanded background checks, heavy regulations on “assault weapons,” and other regulations–all proved impotent to stop the San Bernardino terror attacks. Breitbart News previously reported that the expanded background checks failed to make a difference, yet Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other Democrats responded to the San Bernardino attacks by pushing to expand background checks in every state. According to the AP, the fact that the guns used in the attack were “[legally] purchased” by people who passed background checks is raising questions about whether any new gun controls could be effective against such determined attackers. The common refrain to date has been to expand background checks to cover the no-fly list so that terrorists who are barred from flight are also barred from buying guns. However, that approach would be meaningless, as CNN reports that Syed Farook and Tashfeen were not on “any list” tied to potential terrorists in the U.S.No Duh!
With the House GOP opposed to adding the imprecise no-fly list to background checks, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says it is “unconscionable” to oppose gun control that would not have stopped the San Bernardino attack.Pelosi conveniently fails to mention that neither the shooter or the wife were not on any list.
The addition of the no-fly list would not have stopped the San Bernardino attack because the attackers—Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik—weren’t on it. On December 4, CNN reported that Farook and Malik weren’t on “any list” of potential terrorists in the U.S.
But instead of changing their course, Democrats are doubling down and trying to force a vote on gun control in the House.
Yes, but the point is to give the Press something to talk about besides Obama's colossal failures in the war on Terror.It's all a distraction.Another mass shooting, another round of liberal venom hurled at people who oppose further gun control measures. In the wake of the slaughter in San Bernadino, the charges were particularly shrill. “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are part of the problem, and everybody knows it,” said one liberal Washington Post columnist, in a representative tweet.Remember, when we’re talking about gun control, we’re not talking about how Obama told us us that ISIS was the JV team, or how he’s importing lots of poorly “vetted” middle eastern Muslims, or how he has botched Syria and Libya, or how his hashtag campaign against Boko Haram failed, or how the domestic protections against terror are looking porous and ineffectual, or how . . . well, you get the idea. Plus, gun control is a tribal rallying cry for uninformed Obama supporters. Or, to be less redundant, Obama supporters.
Most gun control advocates know that the push for federal gun laws is futile. Public support for gun rights is near historical highs, the structure of the U.S. Senate favors pro-gun forces, and—as many observers pointed out at the time—if the tragedy at Sandy Hook couldn’t get gun legislation through the Congress, nothing can, at least for the foreseeable future. But liberal decision to make the San Bernadino massacre a story about gun control is more than futile—it is fundamentally disconnected from the role the Second Amendment has played in American political thought, and therefore might be even less effective than past efforts.
Two of President Obama’s favorite gun control solutions did not prevent this week’s massacre. To be fair, preventing massacres isn’t their actual purpose, just the excuse."But Dear Leader, the universal background check performed 4 times in California didn't work. But you said it would, What do we do now?"The Washington Post reports that the four guns used in the San Bernardino massacre "were all purchased legally from federally licensed firearms dealers," which means the buyers passed background checks. As usual, in other words, President Obama's knee-jerk response to mass shootings—"universal background checks"—makes no sense.
UPDATE: At a press conference that just concluded, law enforcement officials revealed that the two handguns were purchased by the shooters, but the long guns (the rifles) were not. So while the media will tell you the guns were purchased legally, they were not USED legally: this is called a "straw purchase" and it is illegal. We also learned that there were high -capacity magazine at the scene -- and hicapmags are also illegal in California. Additionally, law enforcement officials were not certain if the AR15 was California legal. So in other words, a bunch of existing gun laws were broken during this massacre. Remember that when President Obama and his motley crew of gun controllers demand even more firearms laws under the guise of preventing gun violence.Waiting ...............
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It didn't take long for calls for gun control to start following the horrific massacre in San Bernardino by Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The motive for the massacre has escaped our law enforcement officials as of this writing.
But "moments after the news broke of the shooting," Obama spoke to CBS News and called for "common sense gun safety laws" and also urged lawmakers to prevent people on the "No Fly List" from legally purchasing firearms. (As an aside, people on the No Fly List have not been adjudicated of anything, so that presents a whole range of civil liberty issues.)
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California has very restrictive firearms laws, probably the most restrictive in America. The laws are so restrictive that gun manufacturers have to make guns specifically for California. Many gun dealers or manufacturers just don't do business in California at all. It's a pain in the ass. Here's a great piece discussing the firearms laws in California by Brian Doherty at Reason.
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But when pressed for specificity about "common sense" restrictions on firearms, we don't hear much about a plan to stop gun violence. Following the California paradigm, where most assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines are straight out illegal, what additional restrictions are we missing? A longer waiting period? Background checks that include more information? What kind of information other than criminal history should be included in a background check?
So really? What's the plan? You know, the "common sense" one that doesn't involve a total ban on firearms?
They sure did, Babs. They sure did.So, did any, ANY member of the Drive-By Media ask her how? Please explain.
For gun control advocates, it sure sounded like a great idea. Why not force gun purchasers to fire a round at the police station so that the ballistic “fingerprint” of the firearm could be catalogued? That way, police could find the perpetrator every time a gun was used in a crime. What could go wrong?Yet another "common sense" gun control straw man put up by gun control advocates. Another failure and colossal waste of money and resources.
Plenty, according to the Baltimore Sun’s Erin Cox. Fifteen years, millions of dollars, and 340,000 shell casings later, Maryland decided last week to scrap the system … after failing to solve one single crime in its existence.
Gun-control advocates are always talking about a ban on so-called “assault” weapons – but doing so would have no impact on gun violence.
