The right to bear arms isn’t just a constitutional issue — it’s a women’s rights issue. Author and commentator Katie Pavlich explains why guns are the great equalizer between men and women.
2nd Amendment
The 2nd Amendment Explained
This post should be married to my other post regarding the 2nd Amendment,
“The 2nd Amendment Was Only For Muskets.”
Here is the amendment as ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State:
- A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
As Founder, Tench Coxe, of Pennsylvania — noted:
“As the military forces which must occasionally be raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article (of amendment) in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” — Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789
In other words, the comma in that Amendment separates the clause… there are TWO part to this Amendment, and so it should read (The RPT version):
- Since an organized force of volunteer citizens is necessary to defend our freedoms from tyranny within [a. federal vs. state | b. one’s own domicile] or (c.) foreign attack, the government shall in no way limit the People’s right to own and carry weapons for collective (a,c) or for sportsmanship or sustenance reasons as well as personal defense of private property guaranteed as a Natural Right (b).
In other words at the split in the sentence, what is reasonable to protect a state (tanks, bazookas, planes). And what is reasonable to protect a home and hunt with (pistols, semi-auto rifles/shotguns [like the AR], etc).
Here, Mark Levin explains these concepts to a caller to his radio show:
David French discusses some of the issues in his article in NATIONAL REVIEW discussing the original text of this Amendment:
…As Justice Scalia noted in his Heller decision, the amendment contains both a prefatory clause and an operative clause. The prefatory clause, a common feature at the time of drafting, does not limit the operative clause; rather, it explains its purpose.
The operative clause is, of course, clear: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” As Scalia correctly observed, every other time the original, un-amended Constitution or the Bill of Rights uses the phrase “right of the people,” the text “unambiguously refer[s] to individual rights.” Further, the language clearly indicates that the amendment wasn’t creating a new right but recognizing a pre-existing individual liberty — one that is referenced in the 1689 English Bill of Rights. The language “shall not be infringed” indicates recognition, not creation.
But what about the prefatory clause? What does the a “well regulated militia” have to do with an individual right? Scalia explained well in Heller:
The Second Amendment’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia. The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting. But the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens’ militia by taking away their arms was the reason that right — unlike some other English rights — was codified in a written Constitution.
To believe that the Second Amendment is a collective right, Scalia concluded, is to believe that the authors of the Bill of Rights employed individualist language in order to protect the people’s right to take part in militia organizations over which the national government enjoys plenary power…
[….]
It is critical to remember that the Founding Fathers were Englishmen before they were Americans. When they began to sow the seeds of revolt against the British crown, they sought not to destroy all that had gone before but to protect rights that they believed they already possessed. Thus, when George III responded to unrest by attempting to disarm rebellious colonists, he “provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms,” Scalia wrote. (“Arms,” incidentally, did not mean only “muskets” but included any personal weapon that could be wielded by an individual, including but not limited to “musket and bayonet,” “side arms,” and “sabre, holster pistols, and carbine.”)
Justice Scalia understood this well:
By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.
Writing in 1803, after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, St. George Tucker updated Blackstone’s Commentaries. In America, Tucker wrote, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.” The United States, he boasted, “may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty.”
[….]
One cannot analyze the Second Amendment without understanding its moral and philosophical underpinnings. Colonial America was a land populated by people who were both highly literate biblically and steeped in Lockean philosophy.
The biblical record sanctioning self-defense is clear. In Exodus 22, the Law of Moses permits a homeowner to kill even a mere thief who entered his home at night, and the books of Esther and Nehemiah celebrate the self-defense of the Jews against their lawless attackers. Nehemiah exhorted the Israelites to defend themselves: “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.” The oft-forgotten climax of the book of Esther is an act of bloody self-defense against a genocidal foe.
Nor did Jesus require his followers to surrender their lives — or the lives of spouses, children, or neighbors — in the face of armed attack. His disciples carried swords, and in one memorable passage in Luke 22, he declared there were circumstances in which the unarmed should arm themselves: “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Christ’s famous admonition in his Sermon the Mount to “turn the other cheek” in the face of a physical blow is not a command to surrender to deadly violence, and it certainly isn’t a command to surrender family members or neighbors to deadly violence.
In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke described the right of self-defense as a “fundamental law of nature”:
Sec. 16. The state of war is a state of enmity and destruction: and therefore declaring by word or action, not a passionate and hasty, but a sedate settled design upon another man’s life, puts him in a state of war with him against whom he has declared such an intention, and so has exposed his life to the other’s power to be taken away by him, or any one that joins with him in his defence, and espouses his quarrel; it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power. (Emphasis added.)
Moreover, Locke argues, these laws of nature were inseparable from the will of God:
The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of nature, i.e. to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good, or valid against it.
This right is so fundamental that it’s difficult to find even leftist writers who would deny a citizen the right to protect her own life….
Here are a couple quotes by the men who knew the details of what they wrote:
- Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall be debarred the use of arms.”
- Patrick Henry said, “The great object is, that every man be armed.”
- Richard Henry Lee wrote that, “to preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms.”
- Thomas Paine noted, “[A]rms . . . discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.”
- Samuel Adams warned that: “The said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”
(NRA)
More quotes from the Founding Fathers DEFINING the 2nd Amendment can be found at THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
Larry Elder Interviews Professor Malcolm On Gun-Control
Larry Elder interviews Joyce Lee Malcolm, Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, a few days after the Mandalay Bay Sniper (sprayer) killed 59-people in Vegas. As usual, this 2nd Amendment historian sheds light on this right enumerated in the Constitution. You can listen to a previous interview with Dr. Malcolm via Larry Elder (May, 2014).
Gun-Control Advocates Bump Up Against Hard-Facts
Funny how “Putting politics aside” means “Advancing the Democrat Left Agenda.”
| GAY PATRIOT |
I would be remiss to NOT add this by BEN SHAPIRO (for the transcript read THE DAILY WIRE):
Some must read articles and stats — the first is an article by GAY PATRIOT, who quotes a WAPO article (which I will include in full, below). Here is GP referencing about the Washington Post article:
In a rare moment of honesty on the left, a left-wing statistician went through the evidence scientifically and without bias and came to the conclusion that none of the left-wing’s favored policies would put a dent in gun deaths.
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
It’s like us Right-Wing Nut Jobs were saying all along. The policies of the left will fail, and may perhaps even be designed to fail so that their failure will make the case for ever increasing levels of gun control leading ultimately to what the left actually wants: to outlaw the private ownership of firearms.
By the way, the correlation between gun ownership and homicides is actually inverse.
There are actually two policies that would make a difference, but they are politically unpalatable to the Progressive Left.
The majority of gun deaths in the USA are suicides – about two-thirds of all of them….
I want to pause here and break down the suicide numbers a bit… and this is really for all the people that support assisted suicide. Why does it have to be assisted? The biggest demographic that shoots themselves are the geriatric. Many of whom are in the throes or chronic pain or were diagnosed with a life threatening disease with no hope of overcoming. Here are the suicide by gun numbers:
It is sad, but using the Left’s argument FOR suicide… why is this bad? CONTINUING with Gay Patriot…
…The great majority of the gun homicides in the USA are committed by young male criminals in urban areas. The Democrats who run these urban areas are loathe to crack down on this violence for fear of riling “community activists” who claim that stopping young urban males from committing crimes is a conspiracy to re-enact slavery via the “Prison Industrial Complex.”
So, for whatever reason, the only “politically palatable” solutions involve restricting the rights of non-criminal people to possess lawful means of self-defense…..
Mmmm… that brings up a different stat. I wouldn’t know where to look for such a study, but, I bet if one were to quantify those who are Democrat and those who are Republican using guns in homicide activity… I wonder what the comparative percentages would be.
For instance, one can see many more Republicans own guns, but more inner-city gang members use them illegally.
Last I remember from being in jail myself, most minority criminals are Democrats in regard to who they support.
Also, as people buy more guns, the death rate has dropped. If one were to believe the rhetoric of the Left… this should be the exact opposite:
Dennis Prager is right… this and other arguments from the Left are driven by emotions:
Here is the promised article… Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, and a Leftist!
I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer My Research Told Me Otherwise
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.
As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
In this meme a point is made that I think is worthy… and that is…. there are already laws on the books to make murder illegal. What law can you pass that will stop a person from really committing this horrible act? If laws like this work, why haven’t they?
More than 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016. Over 11,500 deaths by homicide are gun related each year [+/-]. Has the war one drugs and all the regulations and laws (local, county, state, and federal) stopped this? No. The answer is no. NEITHER would any law have helped less people die in Vegas. The next media presentation is prefaced by POLITISTICK:
Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar from Texas admitted something tonight on FOX News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight that you will rarely — if ever — hear from a modern-day Democrat that has taken a hard-left turn the past eight years under Obama, funded by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre in which dozens of people were murdered and hundreds more injured by a madman shooting from a high-rise hotel — at a time when most progressive leftist’s knee-jerk reaction was to blame Second Amendment rights — Henry Cuellar admitted that gun control doesn’t work…..
The following is from an family friend-of-a-friend who was in law enforcement for 35-years:
Here are some very interesting statistics on gun violence, gun deaths, and lots of other causes of death that we deal with every day. Yet no one gets too concerned unless the cause of death is by a firearm. And yes the math is correct.
There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed. The U.S. population is 324,059,091 as of June 22, 2016. Do the math: 0.000000925% of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:
- 65% of those deaths are by suicide, which would never be prevented by gun laws.
- 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified.
- 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – better known as gun violence.
- 3% are accidental discharge deaths.
So technically, “gun violence” is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100. Still too many? Now lets look at how those deaths spanned across the nation.
- 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago
- 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore
- 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit
- 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)
Basically, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause. This leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others. For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1. Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand, it is not guns causing this. It is a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.
Are 5,100 deaths per year horrific? How about in comparison to other deaths? All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault are all done by criminals. It is ludicrous to think that criminals will obey laws. That is why they are called criminals. But what about other deaths each year?
- 40,000+ die from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!
- 36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths
- 34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities(exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide).
Now it gets good:
- 200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors. You are safer walking in the worst areas of Chicago than you are when you are in a hospital!
- 710,000 people die per year from heart disease. It’s time to stop the double cheeseburgers! So what is the point? If the liberal loons and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc). A 10% reduction in medical errors would be 66% of the total number of gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides, simple, easily preventable 10% reductions! So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns? It’s pretty simple: Taking away guns gives control to governments. The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace of the colonies. It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace is a controlled populace. Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S. Constitution. It must be preserved at all costs. So the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about saving lives, look at these facts and remember these words from Noah Webster: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.”
Conceal Carry Tips When Pulled Over By The Police
Is Gun Ownership a Right?
What does the Second Amendment say? Is gun ownership a right for all Americans? Or just for a small militia? Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, explains what the Founding Fathers intended.
Do Women or Guns Have More Rights? | Julie Borowski
Julie responds in her “patented” way to a sign at the women’s march in Washington:
The 2nd Amendment Was Only For Muskets (Puckle Update)
The First “Assault” Weapon – 1718
(Via FIREARM BLOG) The Puckle Gun is one of those firearms of which only a couple of expamples exist in the world, but which is covered in a great deal of introductory firearms books, usually in their section on the history of machine guns. This has led many to assume the Puckle Gun was some kind of proto-machine gun, which isn’t exactly the case, although it is a very important historical step on the road to modern rapid-fire weaponry. Some discussion will follow below, but first, Forgotten Weapons released an installment on the partial original Puckle Gun located at Reed Knight’s Institute of Military Technology…
[ the video below is here in the Firearm Blog post ]
What makes the Puckle significant to the development of rapid fire guns? Its features. It is one of the earliest, if not the earliest breechloading guns to my knowledge that incorporates all of the following features necessary for a modern rapid-fire gun:
- A method of sealing the chamber to prevent gas escape
- A quick-changeable feeding device for rapid reloading
- Pre-set, integrated priming to elminate the priming stage of loading and protect the priming compound from the environment
Previous breechloaders did incorporate one or two of these features, but Puckle’s gun combined all three to produce a true rapid-fire weapon….
In
1718 the “Puckle gun” [above], the first machine gun, appeared. (One could argue that the so-called “assault rifle pre-dated the Second Amendment.) The Colt revolver followed not long after and in the late 1800s the Gatling gun, which fired 200 rounds per minute, appeared on the market. The evolution of firearms was observable during the time that the Constitution was drafted; to argue that the Founding Fathers were unaware of, or not living through, the ever-evolving capabilities of firearms is blatant ignorance of both common sense and fact. Jefferson himself was a noted collector and in letters explained what technological capabilities he favored in pieces over others in his collection. ~ The Dana Show
A transcript of the above CBS 46 presentation can be found HERE.
RED STATE continues on with this thinking:
…Prior to the Civil War, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government and that first Congress dropped references to “as allowed by Law” that had been in the English Bill of Rights. The Founders intended that Congress was to make no law curtailing the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms.
The 2nd Amendment, contrary to much of today’s conversation, has just as much to do with the people protecting themselves from tyranny as it does burglars. That is why there is so little common ground about assault rifles — even charitably ignoring the fact that there really is no such thing. If the 2nd Amendment is to protect the citizenry from even their own government, then the citizenry should be able to be armed.
There are plenty of arguments and bodies to suggest that we might, as a nation, need to rethink this. The Founders gave us that option. We can amend the Constitution.
In doing so, we should keep in mind that in the past 100 years Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, China, and other governments have turned on their people at various times and, in doing so, restricted freedoms starting often with gun ownership. You may think a 30 round magazine is too big. Under the real purpose of the second amendment, a 30 round magazine might be too small.
Regardless, as the President announces how he will curtail the freedoms of the second amendment, we should remember Justice Robert Jackson’s opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943):
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
And the Examiner notes “Pepperbox” and “Volley Guns”
…Put whoever tries to get away with such an unsupportable wild claim on the spot by asking them to explain pepperbox revolvers, multiple barrel handheld firearms based on a concept introduced in the 15th Century, albeit they were initially fired using a match. At the time the Constitution was adopted, pepperboxes had upgraded their technology to flintlock versions, with up to seven barrels rotated by hand.
Then ask them to explain volley guns, first used in 1339.
The Founders experienced first-hand a major technological innovation that yielded a range and accuracy advantage: long guns with rifled barrels, like Kentucky and Pennsylvania rifles, had it all over British standard-issue Brown Bess smooth bore muskets…
The Wild-Wild West:
…How many murders do you suppose these old western towns saw a year? Let’s say the bloodiest, gun-slingingest of the famous cattle towns with the cowboys doing quick-draws at high noon every other day. A hundred? More?
How about five? That was the most murders any old-west town saw in any one year. Ever. Most towns averaged about 1.5 murders a year, and not all of those were shooting. You were way more likely to be murdered in Baltimore in 2008 than you were in Tombstone in 1881, the year of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral (body count: three) and the town’s most violent year ever.
As for the traditional Western gunfight as depicted in movies, the inaccuracy of handguns at the time would have made quick-drawing skill irrelevant: It was simply so unlikely you’d hit a guy on the first, second or third shot that it didn’t really matter which guy got out his gun first. The closest history got to high-noon show downs was dueling, where people just stood across from one another with their guns out, aimed and fired until someone got lucky, and someone else was dead. Forget about “fanning,” rapidly cocking a single-action revolver between rounds like Clint Eastwood does in A Fistful of Dollars. You’d be lucky to hit a henchman if the duel took place in a closet.
Why Do We Believe It?
Because famous gunfighters like Billy the Kid wanted you to believe it. If you’ve seen Young Guns on cable, you probably know the guy was gunning somebody down every ten minutes!
Well according to sources who aren’t Billy The Kid, his lifetime kill count was four. Criminals inflated their murder stats for the same reason guys today inflate their sexual experience: It made them look cool. Towns like Deadwood talked up their violent, lawless natures in order to attract adventurous settlers. Books were written about them and movies were made as soon as cameras were invented, and nobody who’d been out west was rushing to correct the misconceptions because, why the hell would they. A century and a half later, we still love that lie…
Miss Malcolm’s Book has some startling examples of a society gone mad!
Malcolm’s book has shown me that I radically underestimated the danger of gun control. Her detailed study of British legislation on the topic shows the real aim of the disarmers. They wish to abolish the right to armed self-defense entirely. The point is not only to block armed resistance to the state, as I had previously thought; in addition, everyone is to be made totally dependent on the state for protection.
Some of Malcolm’s examples are shocking. In England “[m]erely threatening to defend oneself can also prove illegal, as an elderly lady discovered. She succeeded in frightening off a gang of thugs by firing a blank from a toy gun, only to be arrested for the crime of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm” (p. 184).
Not even if one’s life is in danger can one legally use a weapon. In another case, two men assaulted Eric Butler in a subway, smashing his head and choking him. “In desperation he unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of them. . . . The assailants were charged with unlawful wounding but Butler was also tried, and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon” (p. 185).
You can imagine the legal position if someone goes so far as to use a real gun to defend himself. As British law now stands, you cannot even use a gun in your own home to defend yourself against burglars. In a 1999 incident, Tony Martin surprised a professional burglar and his accomplice while they robbed his home. He fired, killing one of them.
Did the government commend Martin for his bravery in confronting the burglars? Quite the contrary, they tried and convicted him for murder. “Thus an English farmer, living alone, has been sentenced to life in prison for killing one professional burglar and ten years for wounding another when the two broke into his home at night” (p. 216). Fortunately, our story has a “happy” ending: the court of appeals reduced his sentence to five years, on grounds of “diminished capacity.”
[….]
Gun control advocates, faced with these facts, will at once begin to yammer uncontrollably, “a correlation is not a cause.” Indeed it is not; but in this instance, a strong correlation holds in two ways: when guns increase in number, violent crimes decrease, and when guns decrease, violent crimes increase. Further, a plausible causal story explains the correlation: the prospect of armed resistance deters criminals. This is about as good as an inductive argument gets. But I do not anticipate that those who wish to take away the right to self-defense will alter their position. They aim to make everyone totally dependent on the all-powerful state….
(Guns and Violence: The English Experience, Joyce Lee Malcolm)
Beware Fake News!
Or the Washington Post (WaPo) publishing an article on Thursday on how the Russians used American websites to push anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda in the 2016 election. The problem was, however, the the source for their story admitted to lying:
Surveillance Valley reported:
Within a day of the article coming out, PropOrNot’s story is already unraveling. The group admitted to lying about its partnering organizations and refuses to disclose why its media blacklist of “Russian agents” contains some of the best journalists in recent history: Robert Parry (who helped break the Iran-Contra scandal), Robert Scheer (who helped expose CIA funding of student groups in the 1960s as editor at Ramparts) and Yves Smith (the fearless founder of an invaluable and respected financial blog, nakedcapitalism.com). It’s shocking and disturbing that WaPo would smear respected journalists as traitors with no evidence.
Details about this group continue to emerge. It appears there’s a chance that PropOrNot is connected to groups funded the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a CIA spinoff that manages the U.S. government’s foreign propaganda division. If true, that would make PropOrNot’s activities illegal — in violation of a federal law that prohibits the BBG from intentionally influencing or swaying public opinion inside the United States. Creating blacklists of American journalists, labelling them as traitors and then circulating this information to American newspapers would certainly fall into that category.
Maybe Russia has the means to “hack” America’s elections, but it’s hard to talk about it without real evidence. Sure, Russia’s been getting into the psyops game much more lately — with fake and biased news, comment trolls and Twitter bots. It’s cheap and effective, and good at exploiting people’s increasing lack trust in their country’s institutions and political process. But in reality it seems to have very little penetration of America’s media landscape. Let’s face it: life is miserable and getting more miserable by the day for most Americans — and no one in power seems to care one way or another. Americans don’t need a Russian Twitter bot to undermine their trust in the Democratic Party.
Or how bout when the L.A. Times knew about John Edwards affair while running for President, but kept the story bottled up:
The mainstream media’s near-silence about a tabloid report that former presidential candidate John Edwards had an extramarital affair with a campaign worker ended abruptly Friday when he admitted the relationship to ABC News.
The cable news networks pounced on the story, broken by the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer last year but largely unaddressed by major news organizations until Edwards’ admission.
Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all had extensive coverage of the scandal throughout the afternoon, and the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post quickly posted stories on their websites.
Several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, had been pursuing the story prior to Friday. But the burst of attention after he confirmed a romantic relationship with Rielle Hunter, who produced video documentaries for his campaign website, was in marked contrast to the way those news organizations had tiptoed around the original reports….
(CONSERVAPEDIA and L.A. TIMES)
Or NPR’s bias of omission with 18,321 words in pro-Arab only segments, 4,934 words in pro-Israel segments. Bias in number of Arab-only vs Israeli-only segments: 63-percent Palestinian/pro-Arab only segments, 37-percent Israel/pro-Israel segments (CAMERA). Or, as the WASHINGTON TIMES notes, mainstream media outlets advocating certain outcomes:
“The study found a huge disparity in the airtime devoted to advancing more gun control versus arguments in favor of gun rights.,” he continued, noting that the time spent in favor of more gun control was 65 minutes, compared to eight minutes spent on Second Amendment rights and other pro-gun issues.
“CBS was the most stridently anti-gun rights network. By a whopping 10 to 1 ratio, CBS devoted more time to arguing in favor of gun control (30 minutes, 40 seconds) to time that supported gun rights (2 minutes, 56 seconds),” Mr. Dickens noted.
NBC followed with nine times as much airtime for anti-gun rights arguments, with ABC in third place with a 4 to 1 ratio.
“When it came to spokesmen, viewers were far more likely to hear from gun control advocates like liberal Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton than Second Amendment defenders like GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump or Republican Senator James Inhofe,” Mr. Dickens stated. “Anti-gun spokesmen were aired three times as frequently as pro-gun ones (57 to 19), while 27 spokesmen were neutral.”
How bout the medias tendency to not be fair and balanced, thus, guiding public opinion in some way (stories linked in graphics):
Some older examples from ABC, NBC, CBS that include some stats on story imbalances…. as IF they are trying to advocate for something… hmmm:
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So all the recent “HUB-BUB” in regards to “fake news” is really an attempt to control the news by corporate news interests. If you do not know WHY this is not a good thing, please read 1984 again. And this bias is not conspiratorial as much as a worldview issue that cause it’s adherents not to lie or conspire about slanting stories as much as a form of group-think. (ALTHOUGH THIS “CONSPIRING” DOES HAPPEN.) Often times this “group-think” is ripped from it’s context to say people are involved in a giant conspiracy.
- The media as a whole is said to be in a giant conspiracy to overthrow America or conservatives by a designed plan.
- No, it is group-think, their worldview dictates truth to them.
- Many people think there is a nefarious cabal of bankers, CFR and Bilderberger types, controlling human affairs on such a level that World Wars were started and guided by these people.
- No, it is group-think, their worldview dictates a border-less society with all being equal… “just ‘some’ more equal than others” (Animal Farm).
- I often hear people mention that “how could scientist all agree then with evolution? Are you saying there is a giant conspiracy? If you are, I am through listening to you, being that you are crazy.” [BTW, one can substitute “climate change” issues with evolution.]
- No… groupthink…
And this is the crux of the matter… No matter if there is a conspiracy or not, the goals are the same. BUT — and this is an important BUT — how one responds and interacts with society is impacted… greatly. In other words if you tell people of these “grand conspiracies” or “meta-narratives” you will not change anyone’s mind but harm your position. However, if you talk about worldviews and group-think, you will impact minds on the matter, thus, fortifying the case trying to made in regards to media bias.
Hugh Hewitt talks about a time he got to speak to a graduating class of journalists at [I think] Columbia University School of Journalism. He asked the crowd some questions and asked them to separate themselves to one side or the other of the auditorium ~ (questions like: are you pro-life or pro-choice?… are you pro 2nd amendment of for gun control? etc., etc.). By the end of the 5-questions, only a handful were left on one side… all the liberal/progressives were packed into one side of the auditorium. His point was to show this graduating class that what they believe now will impact their work, and that they should be aware [self-aware] of their own biases and try to be reporters, not “change” agents.
(Link to Wikileaks emails showing collusion with Hillary and the Media)
Another recent example can be expressed in donations to campaigns. In an excellent article entitled, “Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash: Far fewer making contributions to Donald Trump, analysis shows,” we see the percentages donated from journalists to the Hillary or Trump campaigns:
In all, people identified in federal campaign finance filings as journalists, reporters, news editors or television news anchors — as well as other donors known to be working in journalism — have combined to give more than $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.
Nearly all of that money — more than 96 percent — has benefited Clinton: About 430 people who work in journalism have, through August, combined to give about $382,000 to the Democratic nominee, the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis indicates.
About 50 identifiable journalists have combined to give about $14,000 to Trump. (Talk radio ideologues, paid TV pundits and the like — think former Trump campaign manager-turned-CNN commentator Corey Lewandowski — are not included in the tally.)
(See more at MEDIA’ITE)
“Ahhh ‘Heller’ No!” Hillary Shot Down by John Lott
THE FEDERALIST notes how the Supreme Court described the facts of the case:
District of Columbia law bans handgun possession by making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and prohibiting the registration of handguns; provides separately that no person may carry an unlicensed handgun, but authorizes the police chief to issue 1-year licenses; and requires residents to keep lawfully owned firearms unloaded and dissembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device. Respondent Heller, a D. C. special policeman, applied to register a handgun he wished to keep at home, but the District refused. He filed this suit seeking, on Second Amendment grounds, to enjoin the city from enforcing the bar on handgun registration, the licensing requirement insofar as it prohibits carrying an unlicensed firearm in the home, and the trigger-lock requirement insofar as it prohibits the use of functional firearms in the home. The District Court dismissed the suit, but the D. C. Circuit reversed, holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess firearms and that the city’s total ban on handguns, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional even when necessary for self-defense, violated that right.
No mention of toddlers.
[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/tedcruzpage/videos/vb.69983322463/10154559010117464/?type=2&theater” width=”692″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]
JOHN LOTT’S article responding to Hillary Clinton’s claims in the 3rd Presidential debate in regards to the 2nd Amendment and the Heller Case:
…The 2008 Heller decision struck down Washington, D.C.’s complete ban on handguns. Before the decision, people in the District could own a rifle or a shotgun, it was a felony to load the gun. This amounted to a complete ban on guns, and the Supreme Court said that Washington went too far.
But then, on Wednesday night, Clinton suggested that Wallace had misunderstood her statement.
She explained: “I support the Second Amendment… I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns. And so they wanted people with guns to safely store them.”
But the Supreme Court did nothing at all to stop safe-storage laws. And the Justices that Clinton promises to appoint to the High Court will, in all likelihood, again make it possible for the government to ban guns.
As to the storage laws, the Heller decision couldn’t have been clearer: “Nor, correspondingly, does our analysis suggest the invalidity of laws regulating the storage of firearms to prevent accidents.” If the ruling contributed to the problem that Clinton describes, one would think that there would have been a lot of accidental gun deaths involving toddlers. But there doesn’t appear to have been a single accidental gun death of any kind in the District, let alone for toddlers, during the eight years since the Heller decision was announced.
The only gun laws that the Supreme Court has struck down have been complete bans on guns. Let me repeat this: If Clinton’s judicial appointments vote to overturn Heller, governments will again be able to ban guns.
And this is a real possibility. Heller can be overturned with just one more appointment to the court.
The Supreme Court is currently tied 4-4 on the meaning of the Second Amendment.
Right now, all four liberal justices have made it clear that they believe in the government’s right to completely ban guns.
In 2010, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes.”
This decision will ensure that many Americans will face gun bans. With the change in the Supreme Court, the District of Columbia and some cities will quickly move to ban guns.
California has already banned over 12,000 models of handguns since 2001, with only a dozen that can still be sold in the state and even those likely banned within a few years.
If Clinton becomes president, all handguns in California will likely soon be banned.
[….]
That Hillary Clinton won’t honestly tell American’s what she intends to do if she becomes president, shows that she is concerned that many Americans do support gun ownership. But regardless of whether or not she openly acknowledges her plans, the threat that she poses is still very real.
Cam Edwards On Anti-Gun Ad (NRA)
Via THE BLAZE
- “It’s interesting. The big city with the most unintentional, accidental homicides or accidental killings was Chicago, Illinois, where there are no gun stores and there are no gun ranges and JROTC is not in the school system. There’s no way to get education; there’s no way to get training.
Media Hysteria Relegates Trump to Godfather Status
Dennis Prager touches on Donald Trumps poor use of the English vernacular to express his poor thinking. The bottom line is that Trump should stay on script and (b) we shouldn’t allow the media to form the narrative. One comment on another video on this topic reads:
“Hillary wants to abolish – essentially abolish – the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. That will be a horrible day.”
That last line is very ambiguous, you could interpret that as following on from the previous line i.e. It would be horrible if the second amendment people shot her. Or that it means it would be horrible if Clinton picked supreme court justices.
He shouldn’t have left it open to interpretation, it’s just giving the Clinton campaign and the biased media far too much ammunition.
I wish to reword this a bit myself:
➤ “Hillary wants to abolish – essentially abolish – the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the NRA and other pro-second amendment groups could continue the fight. But if Hillary gets to appoint judges for the Court, that would be a horrible day.”