Here’s the juice: The NRA had as much to do with the Uvalde killings as Ford Motor Company did with the Waukesha Christmas parade mayhem, making Greenwood’s gesture both asinine and hollow.
“…There are other things we could do. The federal NICS background-check system we use to screen gun buyers is not especially well-administered, and from time to time, people who are not legally eligible to buy a firearm are wrongly approved by NICS, or the sale simply proceeds because NICS doesn’t produce an answer within three business days and the check “times out,” at which point the sale may go forward. (Or it may not: Some dealers won’t make the sale without a positive approval.) In such cases, the federal government has the illegal buyer’s name and address, and other information about him. It has the make and model and a whole lot of other information about the gun that was sold to the illegal buyer. And what does the federal government do with all this information?Nothing. Uncle Sam doesn’t even send someone around to pick up the gun.
Likewise, we almost never prosecute people in “lie and try” cases, meaning cases in which people who are prohibited by law from buying a firearm try anyway on the chance (not negligible) that NICS will wrongly approve the sale. And we pretty rarely prosecute people who lie on the paperwork required in a firearms sale. All of which is to say that we lay a pretty heavy regulatory burden upon people who are inclined to follow the law while doing essentially nothing to those who violate the law.
These are things that could be done, and that might be more useful than yet another teary-eyed sermon from some tedious parasite seeking political office. These are the things Democrats and other gun-control advocates would be pushing for if they were serious about the problem, but they aren’t serious. So these things are off the table, because they mean irritating important Democratic constituencies: the local party bosses and full-time-activist class in mostly black communities in Democrat-run cities for one, and unionized government employees who are disinclined to get off their asses and do some actual work for another.
Which is why we get those teary-eyed sermons from office-seeking parasites rather thanmeaningful reforms that are likely to produce some good results and that are generally supported by gun-rights advocates and other well-informed people.
“On Sunday, I answered as briefly as I could – which in many cases was not very briefly at all – some common questions about the gun-control debate. I have a few even-less-brief observations for Tuesday, but I think you will find them useful.
I begin with what seems to be a mystifying paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost entirely in our gun-control debate.
Almost every single substantive gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell, etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in the state prison population obtained their firearms from a retail source.
Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at gun stores — because they mostly can’t.
In contrast to those modest figures of 2 percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is targeted at this group.
…Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them?
The answer is that this conversation has almost nothing to do with violent crime, and almost nothing to do with policies aimed at reducing violent crime.
The gun-control debate is first and foremost a culture-war issue for Democrats. There is a great deal of violent crime in the United States, and that crime is concentrated in big cities over which Democrats enjoy an effective monopoly of political power. The people who commit most of the murders in the United States — and the people who most often die in those murders — check a lot of Democratic-voter demographic boxes: They are very disproportionately low-income African Americans in urban areas. Democrats are desperate to put a more Republican-looking face on the violent-crime problem, preferably one that is older, white, middle-aged, rural, southern, and Evangelical. That is the reason for the focus on the National Rifle Association in particular and on gun dealers and “gun culture” in general. As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we are talking aboutmatters mostly because it is a way of not talking aboutsomething else…”
We cannot stress enough the amazing insights into the facts and figures surrounding the gun debate Williamson offers in these commentaries. Forewarned is forearmed, and an effective forewarning contains all the facts. Once you read these offerings in their entirety, you’ll be forearmed to the teeth.
Meanwhile, not only does 46* actually suggest “high-caliber” 9mm rounds literally blow the lungs out of a person’s body…
Joe Biden suggests he wants to ban “high caliber” 9mm handguns.
“The massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday has produced the usual demands to “do something.” We share the impulse and the anger, but what specifically to do? The reason there are more demands than solutions is because the problem of how to stop mass shootings by disturbed young men is one of the hardest in a democratic society.
The profile emerging of Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who killed 19 children and two teachers, is depressingly familiar. A teenage loner with a disruptive family life. Bullied as a child because of a speech impediment. Immersed in video games and other virtual reality. Ramos, who was killed amid his massacre, had fought with his mother and hinted at violent ambitions. He shot his grandmother before he drove to the school and murdered children with a rifle in a fourth-grade classroom.
This is achingly similar to the profile of other young mass killers from Sandy Hook to Aurora, Parkland, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Buffalo. They suffer from some mental illness or profound social alienation. The societal challenge is anticipating when such a young man—and it is nearly always a young man—will snap, and how and when to deny him access to firearms.
As he often does, Barack Obama summed up the single-minded response of the progressive side of American politics. “Nearly ten years after Sandy Hook—and ten days after Buffalo—our country is paralyzed,” he wrote on Twitter, “not by fear, but by a gun lobby and a political party that have shown no willingness to act in any way that might help prevent these tragedies.” He continued: “It’s long past time for action, any kind of action.”
Leave it to the former President to demonize his political opponents in the wake of an act of madness. But note his default to “action, any kind of action.”Anything apparently will do as long as it offers the self-satisfaction that we are doing something, even if it turns out to be futile or counter-productive…”
“Futile” and “counter-productive”: The perfect summation of almost every single Progressive policy ever proposed or enacted.
“If the Washington Post is to be believed, Joe Biden is about to desecrate his oath of office in order to engage in an act of wanton political suicide that, in addition to making a mockery of his vow to uphold the law, will pit American against American, increase partisan resentments, further damage our already debilitated lawmaking process, and haunt the reputation and fortune of the arthritic Democratic Party for many years to come:
The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, two of the people said. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse.
This is illegal, and Biden knows it. The executive branch has no generalized power to forgive any amount of student debt for debt-holders of any income group. Asked about the idea last year, Nancy Pelosi confirmed simply that “the president can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion.” Do you know how patently illegal something has to be for Nancy Pelosi to acknowledge it’s illegal? The Department of Education came to the same verdict, determining that the executive branch “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.” Put simply: If Biden wants to do this, he must get Congress to agree. If he tries to bypass Congress to do it anyway, the courts must stop him. And if they don’t, he must be impeached…”
If a policy is illegal, it’s illegal whether it is deemed good or bad by the president and his apologists. But it is worth reiterating nevertheless that the policy Joe Biden is pursuing here is revolting on its own merits. Despite the best efforts of the corrupt and self-dealing figures who are selling it, there remains no case whatsoever for the transference of student debt from the people who incurred it to the people who did not, and there remain hundreds of cases against. It is entirely unnecessary: not only do college graduates have the lowest unemployment rate in the country, they have already benefited from a two-year delay in repaying their loans. It is an arbitrary, one-time-only deal that creates a host of perverse incentives, is deeply unjust to those who have repaid their loans, and makes structural reform even harder. It is inflationary in a period of catastrophic inflation, as all measures that throw money at the demand side of the economy must be. And it is regressive, in that it forces poorer and less-credentialed Americans to pay the debts of rich people who went to college, simply because those rich, college-educated people want their debts paid off, and because they are important enough to Joe Biden and his staff to get it done.
“Don’t tell me what you value,” Joe Biden likes to say. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Okay. How about impeachable offenses? Joe Biden is proposing to break the law in order to hand $200 billion to people who make up to $300,000 per household. What sort of “values” does that indicate, I wonder? Surely, if good ol’ Scranton Joe were going to tear up the Constitution and the statute book, he’d want to do it to help poor people, or to write off small-business loans, or to subsidize mortgages for people who are struggling to stay in their homes? A man who truly had values wouldn’t make a mockery of his office in the first place. But to do so to enrich wealthy graduate students and placate the insatiable corruption of his White House aides? That’s beyond belief.
Or, at least, it would be beyond belief if one hadn’t witnessed the perplexing trajectory of the Democratic Party over the last decade.Once, Democrats prided themselves on being for the little guy. Now, their primary interest is in creating an endless slush fund for the benefit of upper-middle-class Elizabeth Warren voters. If Biden makes this move, it will complete the party’s transformation. And, after that, he’ll deserve every damn consequence.
Here’s a third shot of the juice: This isn’t about reimposing a mask mandate now, but rather preserving it as a card to play just before the election, along with more mail-in balloting.
BTW, give us your thoughts on the greatest challenge facing the country in our new poll just below the top of the page on the right side.
(2). Speaking of a complete detachment from reality, Best of the Web relates anger attributed to Biden over his staff’s “corrections” to his off-the-cuff statements suggests they’re NOT following his directions, insightfully observing, “How many of Mr. Biden’s predecessors had to remind staff who the President was?” Even worse, 46* appears to believe his own spin.
(6). In what should come as a shock to no one…with the faintest clue…the New York Post tells us Joe Biden claims to have received an appointment to the Naval Academy, but his dates don’t add up.
Hells bells, you lying bag of douche: The only tale taller would have been to claim Corn Pop was slated to be your roommate!!!
This from the same company who brought us the scantily clad Ariel…
…and supports the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ indoctrination of kids K-3. Yeah,…right.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…Sluki…
…and last, but never least, the Penguin:
Magoo
Video of the Day
Jesse Watters plumbs the depths of the despicable deeds of the Biden family criminal cartel.
Tales of The Darkside
Tucker explores the problems plaguing the country produced by Progressives.
On the Lightweight Side
Courtesy of the Nickel, a montage of the idiocies the illegitimate occupant of the White House has uttered. Keep in mind, this is the demented old deviant with his finger on the nuclear trigger who wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens.
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