Article 5 Clause 3: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
A leftie made an appearance in the comments section here at Sector Ocho. He made some claims that I want to address. This post is an attempt to educate, not engage in personal attacks. Perhaps this poor, misguided leftist has good motives, but simply isn’t aware that he is mistaken. This will either set him straight, or prove that he is a partisan hack. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for now, and simply assume that his is uninformed, rather than being willfully deceptive. His claims will be in red. So here they are, along with my response:
Or the riots that occurred in New York, Seattle, DC, and Portland during Trump’s 2017 inauguration. In DC alone, over 200 people were arrested for taking part in the violence. According to CNN, “Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad “antifascist” protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk.”
In February, leftist protesters started a violent clash while opposing Milo Yiannopoulos making an appearance at US Berkeley, doing more than $100,000 in damage. Two Young Republicans were severely beaten and had to be hospitalized. The attackers, who were not affiliated with the university, were taken into custody by UC Berkeley police.
Black-clad protesters wearing masks threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police. Some even hurled Molotov cocktails that ignited fires. They also smashed windows of the student union center on the Berkeley campus where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.
At least six people were injured. Some were attacked by the agitators – who are a part of an anarchist group known as the “Black Bloc” that has been causing problems in Oakland for years, said Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley spokesman.
March saw more leftist initiated violence. Again in Berkeley, the Black Bloc again attacked people attending a Trump rally. A group of self described Antifascists were responsible.
The #Trump rally in Berkeley has broken out in violence four minutes before the march is supposed to start. pic.twitter.com/NJ4HWjh06P
It happened in April, again in Berkeley. Antifa again attacked Trump supporters.
A May Day rally in Portland, Oregon, descended into chaos when the “anti-fascists” showed up, attacking police officers and setting fires. The same day, police in Olympia, Wash., say they were confronted with a “mob” of masked and violent protesters who threw rocks and used slingshots to target officers.
And their response was to ‘take a peaceful tour of the Capitol’, right?
No less peaceful than the “peaceful protests” of the summer of 2020.
Most (not all) of the violence has been performed by your side.
I think that the selected violence from 2017 that I have illustrated in this post shows that you are mistaken. In addition, don’t forget the 400 or so armed leftists that occupied a city block in Portland, using force and refusing to obey court order to vacate a house when the tenants refused to leave the property.
There is also CHAZ (CHOP), AFAC, and numerous other armed groups that have openly declared war on the right.
If the Left begins the next ‘Civil War’, as you call it, I would dare say it was instigated by the Right.
I would argue that the Civil War has already begun, and it was started by violent acts perpetrated by those on the left. It could be argued that the first shots in the second American Civil War have been fired, but that will be a question better left for the historians in some future decade.
It’s just that the right hasn’t gotten sufficiently pissed off to fight back yet. Remember that the right owns 400 million or so firearms, along with several billion rounds of ammunition. We go out on the weekends and shoot at stuff because we think it is fun to see how accurate we can be, how far away we can still punch holes in things. There are those on the right who can hit man sized targets at over a mile. I don’t consider myself to be an exceptionally good shot, and I can reliably hit man sized targets at several hundred yards. We just aren’t pissed off enough yet.
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.
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.
It seems that the CDC has been doing firearm homicide studies. The study found that the rate of gun homicides among Black males between the ages of 10-24 was 21.6 times higher than white males of the same age. I guarantee you that this means the CDC is about to have its gun violence budget cut.
The left is using the shooting in New York and is going to come at us with every gun control move that they have. There is nothing that they love as much as pools of blood that they can joyously dance in while they call for more control that everyone knows will not work.
You could counter their arguments by pointing out that the US, despite having more guns in private hands than the rest of the world combined, still has fewer homicides than half of the nations in the world.
You could argue that, even in nations where guns are banned, suicide rates are much higher than the US. The US has a combined suicide/homicide rate of 16.6 per 100,000 while South Korea, where firearms are virtually illegal, has a rate of 29.8. Canada, where there is severe gun control and handguns are virtually illegal: 18.3 per 100,000.
At one point or another, we have all made each of these arguments in gun control debates. They are based upon logic and facts, and backed with scores of studies and mountains of statistical evidence.
And they are always ignored.
The left bases its arguments on emotion and catchphrases. The don’t care about science, don’t care about evidence, unless it is convenient to do so in support of their position. All other facts are ignored. Arguing something like this is a waste of time. I know, because I have wasted my time like this for decades.
As they say in War Games, the only winning move is not to play. So don’t.
I will not turn in my guns. Just in case you feel that confiscating them is the answer and you send the cops over to take them, there are two outcomes of that plan.
You will lose a lot of cops. Eventually, the cops will stop taking the chance.
Governments are jumping on the boogieman of so-called ‘ghost’ guns, which as you all know, are privately made firearms. That isn’t how they are defining it, though. Just like how the anti-gunners redefined “assault weapons” to be a moving target that no one really can define or understand, ghost guns are a made up term that can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
Cities are passing bans against possessing or even looking longingly at ghost guns, which they are defining as any gun without a serial number. This casts a wide net that will capture such things as C&R firearms. Many firearms made before GCA68 became the law of the land do not have, and were not required to have, serial numbers. To engrave a collectable firearm with a serial number would destroy its value, while not engraving that firearm with a serial number makes you a criminal.
Yet passing a law that prohibits privately made firearms will do as much to stop criminals as it did to stop illicit drug dealers. When a person can make a submachine gun for less than $100 of Home Depot parts and some common hand tools, there is little that can be done to stop them. They are making firearms in caves in Pakistan, and in the jungles of the Philippines:
The sheriff’s office in Santa Fe has released a video showing that not only did Alec Baldwin point a firearm at his camerawoman, he had his finger on the trigger when he did it. The raw footage from the day of the incident shows Baldwin practicing his draw. He draws multiple times with his finger on the trigger, and at 2:34, you can see him thumb the hammer back and pull the trigger. (hat tip to Emily Post)
I don’t expect that this will cause any Greek philosophers to admit they were wrong, but this seems to prove that my initial position was correct:
Alec Baldwin took a firearm that he didn’t bother to check to see if it was loaded, pointed it at someone, and pulled the trigger. These acts resulted in the death of another person. This makes that person’s death the result of his (and possibly others’) negligence. Her death, her blood, is on his hands. Saying that “he wasn’t trained” doesn’t absolve him of his responsibility for what happened, any more than it would absolve him if he crashed a plane he was flying without first receiving pilot training.
Now the state has finally given some examples and reasons for why they rejected some textbooks. Take a look:
It’s subtle, but they are grooming the kids in their care, so that they grow up to be good little communists.
Grooming kids to become little communists. That is why these books were rejected. I took the Implicit Association Test, and it is garbage. It asks questions like “Are those that you are sexually attracted to mostly of a similar skin tone?” and “Do you think that certain skin tones have an advantage over others in making money?”
Garbage. This isn’t math, and it isn’t science. It’s propaganda.
According to this article, everyone should tip 20% no matter what.
You cannot will yourself to be blind to physical differences. Remove those biases by deciding to tip 20% before ever laying eyes on your server. Don’t even bring the quality of your service into the equation.
First, they attempt to quote scholarly sources like the characters in Harry Potter:
The sometimes-wise Sirius Black tells always-garbage Ron Weasley, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” Well said, dog stars!
The odd part is that this moron doesn’t even know that JK Rowling plagiarized that line from numerous historical figures.
Then they appeal to your leftist cred, because if you don’t tip at least 20%, you are a racist or something.
The tipping system also opens up opportunities for us to flex our unconscious biases. Racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism decimate the earning potential of many competent servers.
Not to be appropriative, but: you’re woke, aren’t you? A big part of being woke is admitting that you have unconscious biases.
Then they proceed to make flawed analogies:
I work a salaried job. I have bad days—days where I am grouchy, disorganized, and distracted. You know what my company doesn’t do in response? Send me a smaller paycheck that month.
Here is the flaw in your argument, cupcake: I am not your employer. You don’t work for me, I have absolutely no contractual obligation to you. If you don’t like your job or what you get paid, get a different job. To show you exactly how asinine and flawed your position is, I could use your same logic and apply it to my own job: If I have a great day at work and save your life, will you give me extra money in appreciation? If I have a bad day and kill your mother when I accidentally give her the wrong medication, shouldn’t I still get paid the same amount as when I saved a life?
This mental midget then goes on to make the classic threat that they always make: threaten to spit in your food.
