There has been reportedly been a deal reached on gun control, with 10 republicans signing on to support it. I will wait for more details since the text hasn’t been written yet, but it doesn’t look too bad. The overwhelming sense I get is that this is mostly a mental health bill. One thing that is concerning, however, is that this law will include a red flag law.
I would feel better if there were a legal mechanism in place that allows for the punishment of those who abuse these legal processes in the form of what has become known as “lawfare.”
Sheriff John Mina, Orange County, Florida Was a Republican, now a Democrat
Chief Rick Braziel (retired), Sacramento, Calif. He was one of the law enforcement officers who publicly lobbied for registering ammunition sales in California.
Deputy Chief Gene Deisinger (retired), Virginia Tech, Va. He has been covering for bad policing since at least 2013: While this may be true, Deisinger said he is frustrated by the widespread criticism of law enforcement without providing any real alternatives. “One of my criticisms of North American culture is that we are really good at criticizing what somebody else did or failed to do,” Deisinger said.
Director of Public Safety Frank Fernandez (retired), Coral Gables, Fla. He has been involved in the gun control movement for most of the last decade: “An 18-year-old with an AK-47 and an AR-15 is completely unreasonable,” said Frank Fernandez, director of public safety in Coral Gables, Florida, and the chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s firearms committee. “That is a weapon that is meant for destruction. It’s not a weapon that you can use to go hunting. That is a weapon … used in the theater of war.”
Albert Guarnieri, FBI Unit Chief. This is the only panelist I couldn’t find a thing on.
Major Mark Lomax (retired), Pennsylvania State Police, Pa. While campaigning for Sheriff of Bucks county as a Democrat, his position on guns was: While he supports the Second Amendment, he believes strongly in licensing and training and sees on need for assault weapons such as AR-15s.
April Naturale, Assistant Vice President, Vibrant Emotional Health This woman is everywhere. She claims to specialize in traumatic stress. She has responded to the war in Ukraine, she was involved with the Feds, the UN, and COVID-19 (pdf warning), the shootings in San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other mass shooting events. It’s like she goes everywhere there is a tragedy that was exploited by the left.
In my post on “educating a leftie,“ I gave examples of just one year of leftist violence. In fact, other than the minor skirmishes of J6, the left has been the one to instigate all of the political violence in the past 6 years.
Unlike the J6 trespassers, he will be granted bail by the end of the month, while some present in the Capitol are facing 40 years in Federal prison. There are two justice systems in the US now.
I am not counting the attempted “abduction” of Governor Whitmer, since a court of law found that the entire plot was planned and fabricated by the FBI as a device to entrap the people involved.
Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:
That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.
What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. Here is a picture of one of the 53 titles of the United States Code:
The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. About 600 crimes a year are added to the Federal Code, so we should be somewhere near 14,000 Federal crimes in the US Code by now.
A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.
In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question. (There are 53 titles now.)
So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
All of that pales in comparison to the regulations. Congress isn’t the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2018, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 250,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.
The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading.
There are nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person can commit in this country as of 2020.
Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.
Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.
There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.
I asked a couple of days ago why they were making such a big deal about the police not doing their jobs. I was wondering what the end game was, and I think I have it. They are following the Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” and the CIA insurgency manual. If you are unfamiliar with them, I did a three part series on them back in 2020. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three is here.
When an attempted overthrow of a government is in the works, one of the things that needs to happen is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to run things and provide needed services to its citizens. They do this by using violence and mayhem to both make the citizens feel unsafe, and to sabotage infrastructure so that people are crying out for basic services.
Once the people don’t trust the government to do that job any more, they turn to the revolutionaries to do it for them, and the revolutionaries step in and “fix” the problem that they themselves created. I think we are seeing a variation of that. The left already hates the local and state police. Now all they have to do is get the right on board.
American Greatness thinks that this is exactly what is happening to the police, and I can’t say that I disagree with them. That is no way means that I am going to support cops who stand around and arrest parents while children are being murdered, but I see what is happening.
The police have chosen sides. They want the left to be in control. I can no longer support the police. I know what many of you are saying: “I have a friend who is a cop, and he is a good guy.”
To that I ask you: “Imagine that you were the man who was walking down this sidewalk in front of a protest and were being harassed by these leftist idiots, just like in the video below. The cops came up to you and were plainly taking the side of the leftists. You tell those cops to get lost and one of them arrests you for stalking and assaulting the protesters. Your friend the cop then approaches. Whose side will he choose? Yours? Or his fellow officers?”
Watch this and see how the cop, who is following the guy and saw the entire incident, takes the side of the leftists. Then see how the other cops arrive and immediately defer to the first cop’s judgment. That is how it ALWAYS works.
I promise you that he will choose to support the other cops 100% of the time. He will protect his pension, his job, and support the blue wall over those who think that they are his friends. Cops do not go against other cops, mostly because they want to protect their jobs and pensions.
The only exception to this is if the aggrieved party is a part of the protected minority class, and there is a public lynching in progress by the left. (Ask Derek Chauvin how much he was supported by his “brothers in blue.”)
That would piss me off to the point where I would consider this to be martial law. So let me ask this- how many troops would it take to guard every school board, every school board member, and every school board member’s family? To create a secure bubble with a radius of 300 yards, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week?
According to their Wikipedia page, the NSBA represents 90,000 local school board members and the 3,000 attorneys that advise them. So let’s say that a security detail would require 6 personnel at a time, meaning that this would require about 20 armed security personnel per member plus their families. Assuming an average of 2.5 people per school board member, the trigger pullers alone would require that the US commit something on the order of 4,500,000 troops. By the time you add in logistical and support personnel, the entire national guard and army combined would need to be deployed. Even with all of that, some school board members are gonna get smoked, if for no other reason that to prove a point.
The dumbasses on the left have no idea what they are talking about or what kind of numbers they need to do any of this stuff.
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.
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.
