Jesse Watters

LIE: Mass Shootings “Tripled” After Assault Weapons Ban Ended

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jesse Watters: “Can you guess who’s running these places? Democrats. Democrats want to disarm you during the crime wave they created”

The FEDERALIST notes:

The following photographs illustrate the point. Here is a pre-“ban” AR-15. On the end of its barrel is a two-inch-long attachment that reduces smoke and flash, and underneath its A-frame front sight is another attachment called a bayonet lug.

Now here is what the 730,000 AR-15s made during the ban looked like.

BREITBART notes the WaPo article Watters mentions above:

….Setting aside the question of what an “assault weapon” is, Biden’s claim has been fact-checked by the Washington Post — hardly a conservative outlet — and found to be lacking.

The Post fact-checked the statement, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.” The Post reported:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

[….]

The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.

Earlier, the Post gave “Three Pinocchios” to the claim that the end of the assault weapons ban led to a rise in mass shootings. It has since revised that conclusion, given new data. “The body of research now increasingly suggests the 1994 law was effective in reducing mass-shooting deaths,” the Post concluded. Still, it left the claim “unrated,” because the evidence is inconclusive.

The claim mass shootings “tripled” after the end of the ban is based on one study, and is speculative at best…..

Here is FACT CHECK .ORG for one example:

….President Joe Biden claims the 10-year assault weapons ban that he helped shepherd through the Senate as part of the 1994 crime bill “brought down these mass killings.” But the raw numbers, when adjusted for population and other factors, aren’t so clear on that.

There is, however, growing evidence that bans on large-capacity magazines, in particular, might reduce the number of those killed and injured in mass public shootings.

A day after the Boulder, Colorado, mass shooting, in which 10 people were killed by a gunman in a grocery store on March 22, Biden spoke in support of two House-approved bills that would expand background checks to include private sales. Biden also returned to another campaign promise on gun control: to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country, once again,” Biden said. “I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was a law for the longest time and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”

Biden is referring to his work as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he sponsored and largely shepherded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law in 1994. That law, among other things, included an “assault weapons” ban, which prohibited the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more. (Existing weapons on the banned list were “grandfathered,” meaning people could keep them.) A sunset provision, however, meant that the ban expired in 10 years, in 2004.

We wrote about this issue eight years ago, when the gun debate was again raging in Congress. At the time, we found that a three-part study funded by the Department of Justice concluded that the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.”

We wrote:

FactCheck.org, Feb. 1, 2013: The final report concluded the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.” Gun crimes involving assault weapons declined. However, that decline was “offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with [large-capacity magazines].”

Ultimately, the research concluded that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime,” largely because the law’s grandfathering of millions of pre-ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines “ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually” and were “still unfolding” when the ban expired in 2004.

Recent Research 

Some things haven’t changed much since then. A RAND review of gun studies, updated in 2020, concluded there is “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

“We don’t think there are great studies available yet to state the effectiveness of assault weapons bans,” Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told FactCheck.org in a phone interview. “That’s not to say they aren’t effective. The research we reviewed doesn’t provide compelling evidence one way or the other.”…..

TUCKER

‘Disarming You Is The Point’: Tucker Slams Biden’s Gun Control Speech

MORE LIES THE MSM FEEDS US

(See more at NEWSBUSTERS)

AMMOLAND joins the fray:

Here are the three big TRUTHS the left is lying about.

  • 78% of mass shooting do NOT use an “Assault Rifle”
  • As a Percentage of the population, whites, and Hispanics are the LEAST likely to do a mass shooting.
  • Gun Control laws have NO effect on mass shootings.

Only 15 of the 67 events involved an “AR patterned” firearm; they are used in less than 22% of mass shootings. Only 22% of all mass shooting used AR style rifles.

2018 Excoriated a Bit (RALLY FOR OUR RIGHTS):

…..For the sake of this investigation, we used the definition put forth by the Congressional Research Service.  The CRS’s website explains that it “works exclusively for the United States congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and members of both members of the house and senate, regardless of party affiliation.” The website further explains that the CRS  is a “shared staff to congressional committees and members of congress. CRS experts assist at every stage of the legislative process.” 

DEFINITION USED:

Finally we come to the Congressional Research Service’s definition: “The incident takes place in a public area involving four or more deaths—not including the gunman, the shooter selects victims indiscriminately, the violence in these incidents are not a means to an end.”  It should be noted that CRS breaks up shootings involving four or more individuals as public, familial, and felony (robbery, gang activity, etc).  This is because the motives behind each vary greatly.

To put it simply, congress uses the CRS’s research to develop policy and create laws.

THE LIE

Now that we’re “armed” with the facts we need, lets dissect the statistics being pushed by the media.

The stats used in the news sources cited above stating there have been 307 mass shootings thus far in 2018 are from the Gun Violence Archive.  Okay, let’s look a little deeper into the GVA. The mission statement on their website states it is a “non-profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun related violence in the United States.”

We dug into the website’s “mass shooting” report for 2018. We filtered the list by lowest deaths to highest. Immediately 11 out of the 13 pages were disqualified, as there were between 0 and 3 deaths per incident. That means right away, 287 incidents out of 307 do not qualify as a mass shooting by definition. In fact, 155 of these incidents resulted in zero deaths.  This is unbelievable.

That leaves only two pages to dig through. The most common theme with the remaining list of incidents is that they were primarily either family or domestic violence related. Using the definition used by the CRS, that removes all but six shootings that actually count as a public mass shooting. Yes folks, there have only been SIX mass shootings this year in the United States – not 307.

Here are the six qualifying incidents:

  • February 14, 2018, Broward County Florida (Parkland), 17 dead, 17 injured.
  • April 22, 2018, Antioch, Tennessee, 4 dead, 3 injured.
  • May 18, 2018, Santa Fe Texas, 10 dead, 13 injured.
  • June 28, 2018 Annapolis, Maryland, 5 dead, two injured.
  • October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 dead, 7 injured.
  • November 7, 2018, Thousand Oaks, California, 13 dead, 2 injured.

Six mass shootings compared to 307 is a substantial difference. The media easily plays off the ignorance of the public, taking advantage of the fact that there is not a universal definition of “mass shooting”, and blowing up an issue that, although very tragic, is only part of a larger picture of violent crime, most of which does not involve firearms…..

🧵 THREAD 🧵

And a noteworthy TWITTER THREAD discussing the idea that the United States leads the world in gun violence:

[….]

The MSM’s Narrative (“Man Behind the Curtain” Thingy)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder expresses amazement that The Atlantic article garnered so much attention when [at least] equally disturbing stories exist regarding Joe Biden. From saying Thomas Edison didn’t create the light-bulb (NEW YORK POST), to groping Secret Service agents girlfriends (PJ-MEDIA), to lying about how his wife died (MUSKEGON PUNDIT), to name just a few.

This is just another example of how the media can change peoples views by what they report on and what they do not report on:

I bet very few of my Democrat leaning compatriots know any of this. Don’t mind the man behind the curtain!

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=319892625752674&extid=DmjlU1yaUmb0Zklt” width=”692″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]

Hate Crime Hoaxes In The Trump Era

Published by Papa Giorgio

“The MAGA hat has nothing to do with inciting racism,” he said. “It’s the Left that wants to demonize Donald Trump, even though we have the lowest unemployment rate we’ve seen in 50 years, even though we have the lowest African-American unemployment rate that we’ve had in the history of the country, even though we keep moving in the right direction.” — SENATOR TIM SCOTT

(Watch Steven Crowder’s bit on Smollett) Jesse Watters has Andy Ngo (last name sounds like “Noh”) on his show to discuss the rise in “hate-crime hoaxes” in the era of Trump.

Andy wrote a piece in NATIONAL REVIEW that is excellent and full of links. But he ends the story with a jaw-dropping quote from Jussie Smollett… and I think it reflects the rejection of the Judeo-Christian God and shows the inward religious “Messianic” when one turns to social-justice or environmentalism:

  • “While I can only speculate as to Smollett’s motives, perhaps a clue can be found in his bioline on Twitter. Smollett writes: ‘I am simply here to help save the world’.”

To which G.K Chesterton says:

  • “When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

Dennis Prager always points out that environmentalists are self-describing themselves as “saving the planet/humanity.” To which Prager responds in his deep — almost grandfatherly sarcasm — voice, “WHOA whoahoah… you are ‘saving the planet’.” The hubris of the Left is legend.

Andy had an excellent Twitter thread that cataloged a lot of these hate-hoaxes:

Click the TWEETS above to jump to it. The NEW YORK POST also goes through the many hate-hoaxes as well: “The List Of Bogus ‘Hate Crimes’ In Trump Era Is Long.”

MOONBATTERY as well has been keeping a list of the hate-hoaxes for quite some time. He has over two-hundred listed and linked. Jussie made it to that list by-the-by.

I was first alerted to the [then] possible hoax of Jussie by the HODGE TWINS video (jump to it by cling the below TWEET).

The twins noted some comments by Smollett that peaked their skeptical curiosity — other than the people yelling in Obama Country that this was MAGA Country…

Smollett supported Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the anthem — and he was unhappy the president wanted players to stand for the American flag.

In September 2017 on Sirius XM Progress Radio, Smollett said of Trump, “He’s a pig, a racist, a horrible human being. To me, Colin Kaepernick is very patriotic. He’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing as a citizen of this country. If anything, sadly, the person who was falsely elected to be president of the United States is actually the least patriotic person that we’ve seen in a long time.”

(LIFEZETTE)

But since this “incident,” many real hate crimes have occurred to add to the large list of violence against Republicans. Obviously this is not a new story, here are some examples posted on my site:

…MEANWHILE…

However, it is now a widely known phenomenon, thanks to Smollett. Here are a few real hate-crimes that recently (since Smollett) that have happened:

On Saturday in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a man from Tennessee allegedly pulled a gun on a man wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat, stuck the gun in the MAGA-hat-wearing man’s face and reportedly threatened, “It’s a good day for you to die.”

The police report stated that the gun-wielding man was identified as James Phillips, 57, of Cottontown, Tennessee, according to WNKY. Phillips admitted he had given the finger to Terry Pierce and his wife, who were shopping at a Sam’s Club, as WBKO reported. WNKY added that according to the citation given Phillips, Pierce responded by giving the finger back at Phillips, prompting him to pull his gun….

(CHICKS ON THE RIGHT)

The men throwing things at him was not captured on film — but the subsequent confrontation was.

“If you’re going to throw things at me at least do a better job. Why are you attacking a gay man?” Presler says on the video as he approaches the men. “Why are you attacking a gay Trump supporter, I’d like to know?”

The men appear somewhat stunned as he approached them, then asked why he supports President Trump. Presler cited the just-announced effort from the administration to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe. As he was making his point, one of the men yelled “f-ck that n-gga, boy.”

(GATEWAY PUNDIT)

A 23-year-old model who’s appeared in the likes of Maxim magazine finally came forward this month to express her support for President Donald Trump. Elizabeth Pipko, who worked full-time on the president’s 2016 campaign, said she was tired of hiding her support, even if it meant she was risking future modeling jobs.

[….]

But along with potentially sacrificing high-paying modeling work, Pipko says she’s now on the receiving end of constant insults, including being called a “Nazi.” As a religious Jew, the young model took such an attack especially hard.

“Since admitting my support for the President and my work for the 2016 Trump campaign, I have been the target of some extremely inappropriate comments and insults,” Pipko said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “The words that people are using to address me are words that should never be used to speak to anyone, but more importantly, words than should never be used to attack someone simply because of their political beliefs.”

(DAILY WIRE)

Notice the HUBRIS I speak of earlier in the voice of the gal doing the harassing:

Abub Ascencio harasses elderly man in MAGA hat shopping at a thrift store:

And here is a montage of recent assaults:

Myth About Trump’s Unilateral Rescinding Obama’s Mental Health Law

Published by Papa Giorgio

Rush Limbaugh dismantles a lie from the Left expressed by Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue regarding Trump’s first few days in office and his rescinding an Obama era bill that was an Executive Order.

If the Left do not like this legal snafu of one President rescinding another’s E.O., pass laws through Congress dammit! U-n-l-e-s-s they just want to u-s-e the controversy to support their wild positions that have no reality in the real world. Here are the organizations who supported Trump’s action (via the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON):

…Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the rule and called for its repeal because the process did not include sufficient due process protections.

  • “The rule includes no meaningful due process protections prior to the SSA’s transmittal of names to the NICS database,” the group said in their letter. “The determination by SSA line staff that a beneficiary needs a representative payee to manage their money benefit is simply not an ‘adjudication’ in any ordinary meaning of the word. Nor is it a determination that the person ‘[l]acks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs’ as required by the NICS. Indeed, the law and the SSA clearly state that representative payees are appointed for many individuals who are legally competent.”

The National Council on Disability, Consortium for Citizens With Disabilities, and National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery all submitted letters calling for the reversal of the rule during hearings conducted by the Ways and Means Committee….

The WASHINGTON EXAMINER also looks into the pressure from right and left organizations

….This is why America’s new favorite charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (along with many other groups that are not particularly conservative or pertinent to gun rights per se) advocated and wrote in favor of what House Republicans did yesterday. This is from the ACLU’s letter of support:

On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), we urge members of the House of Representatives to support the resolution disapproving the final rule of the Social Security Administration which implements the National Instant Criminal Background Check System Improvement Amendment Acts of 2007….

…In December 2016, the SSA promulgated a final rule that would require the names of all Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit recipients – who, because of a mental impairment, use a representative payee to help manage their benefits – be submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used during gun purchases.

We oppose this rule because it advances and reinforces the harmful stereotype that people with mental disabilities, a vast and diverse group of citizens, are violent. There is no data to support a connection between the need for a representative payee to manage one’s Social Security disability benefits and a propensity toward gun violence. The rule further demonstrates the damaging phenomenon of “spread,” or the perception that a disabled individual with one area of impairment automatically has additional, negative and unrelated attributes. Here, the rule automatically conflates one disability-related characteristic, that is, difficulty managing money, with the inability to safely possess a firearm.

The rule includes no meaningful due process protections prior to the SSA’s transmittal of names to the NICS database. The determination by SSA line staff that a beneficiary needs a representative payee to manage their money benefit is simply not an “adjudication” in any ordinary meaning of the word. Nor is it a determination that the person “[l]acks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs” as required by the NICS. Indeed, the law and the SSA clearly state that representative payees are appointed for many individuals who are legally competent…

…[R]egulation of firearms and individual gun ownership or use must be consistent with civil liberties principles, such as due process, equal protection, freedom from unlawful searches, and privacy. All individuals have the right to be judged on the basis of their individual capabilities, not the characteristics and capabilities that are sometimes attributed (often mistakenly) to any group or class to which they belong. A disability should not constitute grounds for the automatic per se denial of any right or privilege, including gun ownership.

So, if you donated the ACLU after President Trump’s executive travel ban, congratulations. Yesterday’s vote was your victory, too…..

The WASHINGTON TIMES also brings some historical clarity to the issue:

In recent years, advocates for the mentally ill created more boundaries for law enforcement and healthcare workers to forcibly hospitalize Americans who are suspected of being a danger to both themselves and others. The 1966 Lanterman Petris Short Act (LPS Act) was California legislation designed to reform the antiquated state of mental institutions in the state. 

It should be noted that LPS was signed by Governor Reagan in California but only after pressure from groups like the ACLU stepped in and sued on behalf of patients who were being involuntarily hospitalized. Other states followed suit with their own similar involuntary and voluntary commitment statutes.

According to U.S. Veteran’s Affairs, “Maurice Rodgers, spokesman for the California State Psychological Association, called the plan the “Magna Carta of the Mentally Ill,” while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), officially in support of the legislation, raised objection to the fact that the patient had to personally petition for a due process hearing at the initial point in the commitment. 

Tying this all together for us is THE CZAR OF MUSCOVY:

….Later, the Carter administration signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which largely promoted the same idea for national facilities. In 1981, when both parties in Congress agreed to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, President Reagan signed that into law. One of it many provisions was to eliminate federal funding for community services and thereby transfer funding back to individual funding or state-funded efforts. Had Reagan even been aware of that part of the Act, he would have immediately realized the Act was negating the disastrous effects of the LPS he experienced as governor of California.

In other words, the State needs more funding control over mental health facilities, whether local, community, or state. Serious cases could still be funded through Medicaid, creating a virtual federal funding pool of money. This was formalized in the Mental Health Planning Act of 1986.

In effect, bipartisan policies recommended that the Federal government transfer government funding of community mental health facilities back to the states. State-funded facilities as well as privately-funded facilities were not affected by that policy. Reagan signed the bill into law as part of an overall spending cut package. As he would have known, complete state funding of facilities resulted in terrible mental healthcare, but state governments had an obligation to provide for this. However, in 1986, he also signed into a law another bipartisan solution to have Medicaid assist with funding. The laws closed not a single facility.

Ergo, to the liberals, REAGAN CLOSED THE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITIES. The fact that states closed some facilities and let staff go at others due to their own budget issues is unimportant because, of course, liberals hated Reagan. And still do.

[…..]

So when you hear the argument that Reagan closed the mental health facilities, ask the name of one health facility that Reagan actually closed. And when it closed. And how he closed it. And if you hear that Reagan closed it by extenuation of a funding cut, ask which particular bill he signed into law specified that particular facility be closed.

Or is it a case that bipartisan governments at the state and federal levels attempted to improve healthcare treatment and that bipartisan governments within the states screwed things up so badly that individual departments of health closed down less effective facilities? You will have lost the typical liberal at the word bipartisan….

A lifelong Democrat at the DAILY JOURNAL LETTERS ties this all in a neat bow for us:

…As a lifelong Democrat (of the Irish-Catholic-Labor variety), I think Reagan did some good things and other things I didn’t support. But one thing Reagan didn’t do was single-handedly “close down” mental hospitals thus triggering 40 years of mental health hell.

Two other forces actually determined the fate of mental health care in this state. You might call them acts with unintended consequences. Here’s the history.

In 1967, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS Act) a so-called “bill of rights” for those with mental health problems passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly: 77-1. The Senate approved it by similar margins. Then-Gov. Reagan signed it into law.

It was co-authored by California State Assemblyman Frank Lanterman, a Republican, and California State Senators Nicholas C. Petris and Alan Short, both Democrats. LPS went into full effect on July 1, 1972.

The bipartisan law came about because of concerns about the involuntary civil commitment to mental health institutions in California. At the time, the act was thought by many to be a progressive blueprint for modern mental health commitment procedures, not only in California, but in the United States.

Its main purposes were:

  • To end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of mentally disordered persons, people with developmental disabilities, and persons impaired by chronic alcoholism, and to eliminate legal disabilities;
  • To provide prompt evaluation and treatment of persons with serious mental disorders or impaired by chronic alcoholism;
  • To guarantee and protect public safety;
  • To safeguard individual rights through judicial review;
  • To provide individualized treatment, supervision, and placement services by a conservatorship program for gravely disabled persons;
  • To encourage the full use of all existing agencies, professional personnel and public funds to accomplish these objectives and to prevent duplication of services and unnecessary expenditures;
  • To protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts.

Initially, mental health advocates pushed for community-based mental health facilities that would replace the closed mental hospitals.

But that never happened because even though post-Reagan the legislature was still controlled by Democrats, no major funding for new community-based mental health facilities ever occurred. And that situation basically is still the case today.

The second force at work in the mental health care issue were the courts and what is known as “deinstitutionalization.”

During the 1960s, many people began accusing state mental hospitals of violating the civil rights of patients. Some families did, of course, commit incorrigible teenagers or eccentric relatives to years of involuntary confinement and unspeakable treatment. Nurse Ratched, the sadistic nurse famously portrayed in the book and film “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” became a symbol of institutional indifference to the mentally ill.

By the late 1960s, the idea that the mentally ill were not so different from the rest of us, or perhaps were even a little bit more sane, became trendy. Reformers dreamed of taking the mentally ill out of the large institutions and housing them in smaller, community-based residences where they could live more productive and fulfilling lives.

A mental patient could be held for 72 hours only if he or she engaged in an act of serious violence or demonstrated a likelihood of suicide or an inability to provide their own food, shelter or clothing due to mental illness. But 72 hours was rarely enough time to stabilize someone be held another two weeks for evaluation and treatment.

As a practical matter, involuntary commitment was no longer a plausible option…..