Antigun

Hardening Targets

President Trump and Senator Cruz have suggested making schools hardened targets by making them single point ingress, and placing security there. Experts are saying that this won’t work. They claim that because making a single point entry won’t stop all shootings, it isn’t worth doing.

Let’s just start by saying that there is not one magic solution that will stop all shooters. I don’t think that it is possible to stop all mass murderers, however, even the FBI had admitted (pdf warning) that every active shooter incident since 2000 has happened in a ‘gun free zone’. It makes for interesting reading.

All you can do is make their efforts more difficult in the hope that it will greatly reduce the number of incidents, and reduce the number of victims in each incident. With that in mind, Florida went a long way in doing just that:

  • Every school in the state must be surrounded by a fence that is a minimum of 5 feet tall. Any opening in that fence must have security in place to ensure that unauthorized people aren’t entering campus.
  • Security cameras must monitor hallways so office staff can monitor them for intruders.
  • All schools must have armed security on campus during school hours.
  • All classrooms must be locked except during period changes.
  • Train teachers and students on how to barricade classrooms, which turned into a pissing contest between teachers and cops.

That doesn’t mean that Florida is perfect. They failed in one area when they instituted a “guardian” program to allow teachers who volunteer for over 100 hours of training to carry weapons on campus. The failure was that any teacher wanting to be a guardian is subject to a requirement that they be approved by both the county sheriff and the Superintendent of the school district. This has resulted in no schools arming teachers in the entire state, with the exception of the superintendents and their chosen friends in each school district. This means that maybe a dozen or so teachers at most are approved in each district, and they are likely to be office personnel that are not present on school campuses, but rather in the district central office, where no students are present. The guardian program wound up being a waste of time, like may issue.

In summary, the only way to reduce the number of school shootings is make the school a less attractive target. Single point access control is just one of several things that need to happen.

By Divemedic, ago

Political Sell Out

Mitch McConnell is about to sell out gun owners. Reports on CNN that McConnell has encouraged Texas Sen. John Cornyn to begin discussions with Democrats to see if they can find a middle ground on pass gun control legislation in the wake of the Texas elementary school shooting.

The Republicans are about to sell out gun owners in order to gain political capital to get some other Republican project a green light. This is why I can’t trust Republicans. They always find a way to feather their own nest at the expense of gun owners.

I used to say that I would never vote Democrat, because Democrats are evil. The problem is that voting Republican isn’t much better, because Republicans will sell out in order to get money or remain in power. Perhaps it would be better to vote for the most lefty politicians there are, so we can get the fight started. I’m not getting any younger, and if it’s inevitable, we might as well get it started while I can still contribute.

By Divemedic, ago

Ghost Guns

While the attack on semiautos is ramping up, it’s easy to forget about the ongoing efforts to make homemade firearms illegal.

This is why I no longer argue about gun control. The only answer you get from me is: NO!

Any further debate is useless and is a waste of time.

By Divemedic, ago

Biden Wrong Again on 2A

President Biden said that the Second Amendment is not absolute before going on to explain that you couldn’t own a cannon when the Bill of Rights was ratified. This remark is identical to one he made back in February that I have already debunked.

The Amendment didn’t say that, for two reasons: First, the Amendments to the Constitution don’t say that people can do anything. The Amendments say that the GOVERNMENT can’t do things. The government can’t infringe on the right keep to bear arms, is what it says. Second, people DID own cannons. Privately organized and funded artillery companies in the colonies date all the way back to the 1630s. A century later, in the 1740s, there are records of Benjamin Franklin helping organize artillery companies while stressing that they were made completely of volunteers and armed at their own expense.

One of the driving forces behind the first major battles of the Revolutionary was because the British soldiers were coming to confiscate privately-owned arms – including cannons and mortars – such as ones that were being held by veterans of the French and Indian War as war trophies.

In fact, there were people who owned entire warships. See my post on this from 2013.

During the course of the Revolution, approximately 1,700 letters of Marque were issued to privateers. In the War of 1812, President James Madison issued more than 500 letters of Marque to privateers. These letters of marque created what was, essentially, legal piracy, and it was sanctioned by the government and even deemed necessary. So how did these privateers arm their vessels? With cannons that they purchased as individuals.

Our colonial navy had approximately 1,200 cannons on board less than 65 ships. The privateers, on the other hand, had almost 15,000 cannons – all privately owned.

The National Firearms Act of 1934, which is, by far, the most restrictive piece of Federal legislation related to the ownership of arms, says nothing about cannons. It wasn’t until 1968 that things we regard as modern artillery were regulated further when ‘destructive devices’ were added to the law.

But muzzleloading cannons, like the ones used during the Revolutionary War remain conspicuously absent in any legislation. You could buy a cannon as an individual in the Revolution era, and you can still buy one today as an individual.

By Divemedic, ago

Musk: I Support 2A, but

Elon recently continued his shift to the right by claiming to support the 2A. He then showed that his journey isn’t complete when he went on to say that he supports Universal Background Checks and thinks “assault weapons” should be restricted to range owners and “people who live in gang areas.”

I am not going to be to hard on him. In this case, it is obvious that he isn’t a dogmatic liberal who supports his cause over facts and logic. It looks to me like he is a new convert away from leftist dogma, and it takes some time to see that everything you have believed in the past is wrong because the information you relied upon to come to those beliefs was bullshit. The confusion over assault weapons was a deliberate misinformation campaign.

The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Josh Sugarmann, 1988

He will come to realize the truth. This is one of those times when attacking him for his mistaken belief would be counterproductive. Someone needs to educate him without attacking him.

By Divemedic, ago

My Thoughts on Uvalde

Anther shooting, and the left is predictably dancing in the victim’s blood before the scene is even cleared or the families of the dead are notified. It’s so predictable: calls for gun control that would not have mattered. The current calls are for universal background checks (in other words, gun registration). This young man who did the shooting had a clear record, would have passed a background check, and a proposed BG check law would have done nothing.

No, every shooting and its victims are simply political fodder to advance a political agenda. The left doesn’t give a rip about the victims, except to the extent that they can be used to advance that agenda, truth and facts be damned. As we proved just this week on this very blog, the left doesn’t care about facts, logic, or the truth.

To debate the left about gun control is a complete waste of time, because they won’t listen. So I just won’t do it. You want gun control? No. Your move.

No, what I want to talk about is social media’s responsibility for this shooting. He was a troubled child that grew into a troubled young man. The clues were there, but as often happens in these cases, no one said anything. Word is, the shooter posted pictures of his guns to social media, and said that a shooting was coming. He actually told one woman it was coming.

In the hours leading up to the killings, the shooter reportedly showed off his guns to an LA-based woman via his Instagram page, taunting that he was ‘about to do’ something.

When the woman asked what, he said: ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’ He began shooting at noon.

The school had purchased technology to monitor social media, but it apparently didn’t work.

So now we come to the point I am trying to make. I have been tossed into Facebook jail dozens of times. Sometimes within minutes of posting something that didn’t agree with their leftist viewpoints. So how can a person post threats to carry out a mass shooting, and Instagram (the site where the threatening posts were made) didn’t notice?

The technology exists for social media companies to monitor what people post. We know it, because they have done it for the past several years. Why don’t they report these things? The only possible answer is that they don’t because they WANT more shootings so the dead victims can be used to advance their agenda.

By Divemedic, ago

Licensing Update

My post from earlier this week on the proposal for national firearms licenses needs a bit of a follow up. Slate has jumped on their usual antigun bandwagon to write a screed in support of this plan. As expected, it hits every tired lefty talking point.

They claim that the AR15 is “two hundred times more lethal than the revolutionary muskets that helped win the American Revolution.” Of course, they ignore the fact that they published this article on the Internet, a speech platform that allows 1,000 times more child pornographers to exist than did handwritten bills of Benjamin Franklin, with the point being that changes in technology to not erode individual rights.

The authors at Slate refer to adherence to the Constitution as “originalist fantasy” as if the very document that grants power to the government in the first place were some piece of paper that can be ignored at the whim of a government official. In that, they are correct: the Constitution CAN be ignored by government officials. The founders knew that, which is why the RKBA exists in the first place. They knew that, one day, this very attitude was likely to take hold, the people themselves would need to take action, and access to arms would be necessary to right the wrongs of government tyranny. The article continues:

Alito appears to have gathered his facts about guns and subways from old Charles Bronson movies, not the meticulously documented evidence about gun violence and regulation supplied in the public health brief filed in the case. Unfortunately, Alito and the court’s new originalist majority appear to have difficulty telling fact from fiction. Indeed, instead of consulting history, as originalist theory requires, the justices seem perfectly happy to parrot the propaganda dished out in briefs bought and paid for by the NRA and other extremists gun rights groups.

Note that they attack Alito and the court. This is all a continuation of the attacks that are needed for the left to pack the court, and Alito is a target of their ire, especially in light of Alito’s own attacks on Roe v. Wade in his leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That particular event has made him the current political enemy number one of the left. I would daresay that he is about to overtake Trump as the left’s most hated man in America. The very next paragraph is a large tell:

It is bitterly ironic that the arguments and logic that Justice Alito put forth in his leaked draft opinion in Dobbs

The opinion that the 2A protects RKBA is referred to as a “libertarian gun rights fantasy” that confuses James Madison with Dirty Harry. What they forget is that Dirty Harry wasn’t a citizen trying to protect himself from government overreach, he was a cop who was enforcing his own version of the law using firearms and a monopoly on force that have largely been denied to the citizens he was sworn to protect.

The article attempts to make the case that states after the Civil War were “empowered by this recognition of express constitutional authority to robustly regulate arms in public, dozens of states and cities enacted laws limiting guns in public, including good cause permitting schemes similar to that in New York,” while leaving out that many of those laws were enacted to prevent the now freed slaves from having access to firearms.

Let the court decide that Americans actually have gun rights, let them actually decide that women don’t have a Constitutional right to kill their children, then follow that with their inability to pack SCOTUS to change it, and you will see a left that becomes insanely violent. Remember how they scream like petulant children when Trump defeated HRC? Remember that it was then that the left began systematically trying to destroy Trump by using the power of the swamp?

I used to think that CW2 would be triggered when the left pushed the right too far. I feel that I may have been wrong. It will be the left that kicks off CW2, and SCOTUS just might be the catalyst.

By Divemedic, ago

National Licensing

Democrats are proposing a license issued by the DOJ in order to purchase, possess, or obtain a firearm. In order to get this license, you would need to be at least 21 years old, pass a written and practical exam, be fingerprinted, and prove your identity.

Can you imagine of Republicans initiated a similar plan for voting registration, obtaining an abortion, or receiving welfare?

Not only is this unconstitutional, but I will not obey. This merely lets the feds know where all of the firearms are for when the confiscations begin. Nope. Not now, not ever.

By Divemedic, ago