I have pinned this post to the top of my blog. It is to remind people of what many of our opponents want. Alison Aires wants a tyrannical government. They want summary execution for private possession of firearms.
This is why we have a Bill of Rights. This is why I created Boomershoot.
The Second Amendment was written in a time when firearms were far less powerful and society was vastly different. The idea of a “well-regulated militia” doesn’t align with the realities of modern America, where personal safety and public health concerns dominate the conversation.
Many argue that it’s time to reinterpret this amendment to reflect current challenges and priorities. This doesn’t mean ignoring history, it means adapting it to better serve the present and future.
Anne Stewart
May 18, 2025
Why Americans Should Consider Giving Up Their Guns
Reinterpret the constitution? I wonder what Ms. Stewart would think of the idea of reinterpreting the Nineteenth Amendment and the First Amendment. She just demonstrated she is unqualified to be voting or expressing a worthwhile opinion on important human rights issues. So, to prevent this type of risk to our rights, let’s not bother with actually amending the constitution. It is too difficult and time consuming. Yet, we cannot continue allowing her and her type putting our rights at risk. Certainly, we can get a consensus allowing women the same rights as men is outdated and does not align with the realities of modern America.
There are some good points here:
NIH Could Be Directed To STUDY ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ – modernity
Legislation has been introduced to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the psychological and social roots of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’.
Ohio Republican Rep. Warren Davidson has presented the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Research Act of 2025, intended to shed light on what has been a serious cultural affliction.
Described as an “intense, irrational hysteria” triggered by the mere mention of President Trump, TDS has become a catch-all for the unhinged reactions of his critics— whether it comes in the form of spittle-flecked blue hair rants, protest effigies, or social media meltdowns.
On the other hand, there is the risk of this leading to forced treatments and mirroring the Soviet Union reeducation treatments and camps.
I would be more comfortable with the concept if there was no government involvement in the research and possible treatments.
Another possibility is that this is just trolling at a grand scale. If so, it is hilariously funny, but I would rather legislators spend their time reducing the national debt and excessive regulation.
It is high time for the Supreme Court to set things right and rein in biased courts that continue to misinterpret and distort the Bruen decision. The Duncan case provides the Court with an opportunity to do that emphatically.
C. D. Michel
Michel & Associates, P.C
May 20, 2025
Act Now: Duncan v. Bonta Deserves a Final Supreme Court Review
There is another magazine ban case, Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island, which is already before SCOTUS. What is interesting is that it has been “DISTRIBUTED for Conference” 15 times. I have to wonder if they are waiting for the Duncan v. Bonta case instead.
Ocean State Tactical is only at the preliminary injunction stage. Duncan has gone through full trials at the district and appeals courts level, twice. This makes Duncan much “riper”.
Regardless, Michel is correct it is high time this infringement was put to an end.
The media are losing their friends just as they lost viewership and readership as they stepped up bias, according to a new survey of news consumers.
Younger voters, older people, Hispanics, Republicans, independents, and even Democrats cited pro-Democratic bias in agreeing that they just can’t hate the media enough.
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shared with Secrets found that 49% believe news bias is getting worse, while, by a margin of 44% to 29%, likely voters agree with the statement: “No matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.”
Paul Bedard
May 12, 2025
Hate of media surges as Democratic bias grows
I came to hate the media back in 1997 during the I-676 fight in Washington State. Here are just a few of the reasons I came to despise them:
The media nearly ignored our 3000 person rally and gave “equal coverage” to the four counter protesters. The media used video of our assembly line making materials for doorknob hangers with a voice over saying the anti-gun people were a grassroots organization.
Things have not gotten any better. But at least the general population appears to have gotten a clue.
If you’re looking for some racist closeted homosexuals with small dicks to block, then look no further than the comment section of the first tweet in this thread
David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙♂️🌈 🔜 #PaxEast @David_Leavitt
Posted on X, May 20, 2024
It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday; it is another science denier (see also here)!
When the first set of insults did not have the desired result, he just adds more insults. Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own. But not in this case. Insults are no match for SCOTUS decisions.
OPM’s audit report found that the ATF’s illegal misclassification scheme hampered the agency’s ability to carry out its law enforcement mission by relocating approximately 100 law enforcement officers from the field to administrative positions at ATF headquarters in Washington, D.C., while continuing to pay them enhanced salaries and benefits. Further, many experienced administrative employees were passed over for promotions as ATF assigned unqualified special agents to senior administrative roles.
OPM estimates the illegal enhancement of ATF bureaucrats’ salaries and benefits cost taxpayers at least $20 million during the five-year period it reviewed. However, whistleblowers allege the scheme has been decades-long and the actual taxpayer cost is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
May 12, 2025
Grassley, Ernst Expose Biden-Era Bureauc…
This reinforces my belief that the majority of high-level government officials need to be prosecuted. I am nearly certain over 90% of the elected officials at the Federal level have committed felonies. And I would not be surprised if 99% of the top bureaucrats could be successfully prosecuted.
Even if we can’t do all that much about guns, we can make real progress on gun violence by reducing interpersonal violence. In fact, a growing body of data and evidence shows that preventing shootings in the first place is not only possible, but enormously cost-effective compared to the traditional policies of U.S. partisan politics.
This, in fact, is the central problem: going back at least to the 1930s the Left and Right have bitterly disagreed about how to reduce violent behavior. The Right tends to think of violence as being caused by intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. The only response, under this perspective, is to try to disincentivize gun violence with the threat of ever-more-severe criminal justice punishments. The Left tends to think of violence as due to bad socio-economic conditions, which leads desperate people to resort to crime and violence in order to feed their families. The only response in this view is to disincentivize violence by improving the alternatives to crime and ending poverty.
But the root of gun violence is not what we think it is. Both the Left and Right, despite their heated disagreements, share an implicit assumption about gun violence: That before anyone pulls a trigger, they carefully weigh the pros and cons beforehand. That gun violence is a deliberate, rational act.
That’s not what most shootings in America are. Most shootings are not premeditated. Most shootings, instead, start with words—arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun.
Whatever people are doing in the middle of a heated argument, it’s most definitely not a careful, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. In those moments, most people are instead acting emotionally, almost automatically—not even really thinking about what we’re doing, in the usual sense of “thinking.”
…
There are social programs that help people better understand their own minds and how to prevent their emotions from taking over. My research center has partnered with a remarkable set of non-profits in Chicago including Youth Guidance, Brightpoint, and Youth Advocate Programs to study programs that help young people recognize when they’re about to engage in something like catastrophizing (or something else) that makes the risk of violence more likely, and how to avoid that. These sorts of programs, and even lower-cost versions that detention-center staff can deliver, have been shown to reduce crime and violence by 20 to 50%.
Jens Ludwig
May 15, 2025
We’ve Been Thinking About Gun Violence All Wrong
This sounds plausible. But the study was published in 2016. If it was that successful and that inexpensive, why was it not adopted statewide or even nationwide by now?
You will be charged with the same crime as Socrates. The corruption of the youth.
Brandon K.
May 4th, 2025
At Boomershoot 2025
Part of the motivation for this comment to me was what was happening with his niece. No, I did not have any unsupervised time with her. But the environment I helped create did have a “corrupting” influence on her. She not only helped make the targets, but she was also popping boomers and having a great time. This was pretty awesome to watch. I did not get any pictures of her smile when she hit one. I also missed capturing the scowl when someone else popped the boomer she was working on. But you can get a clue of her intensity here:
But my favorite corrupting of the youth Boomershoot 2025 story is about this 14-year-old first generation American of Persian ancestry:
Can you guess what she is about to do?
Here is a clue. She is about to put on a very, very, happy face.
Watch for it and turn up the volume to hear what she has to say about it:
Yes. I’m corrupting the youth of our country.
Please send more this way: Boomershoot!
See a very cool video of shooting Boomers through the scope on a windy day: Boomershoot Clinic day #2 – makeitgoboom.
This is from a different day at 636 yards instead of 375 yards:
It appears the targets are significantly thinner near the steel than to the right. I suspect people used the larger steel targets to get their range and windage adjustments. Then they moved to the closest boomers for a more reactive confirmation.
An overall view of what it looks like near the start of the long-distance event:
This is later in the morning when most of the closer targets have released their nitrogen:
Boomershoot is not just all clanging steel, earth shaking, chest thumping explosions, and clouds of smoke. There were a surprising number of children there this year. One eight-year-old learned to shoot a rifle on one day and claimed more boomers than most adults the next. Of course, his instructor was a long-range national champion. Another six-year-old, shooting rifles since he was two, and has a 1,500 -> 2,000-yard shooter for a father. He hit something like seven out of eleven boomers he shot at the 375-yard line.
Then there was this girl:
Boomershoot is for everyone.
At about midday on Monday, April 28, large power outages left millions of homes and businesses in Spain and Portugal without power. The countries were in chaos, with traffic snarled, flights grounded, and subway stations across the country without power. Mobile phone and internet networks went down. Hospitals stopped procedures and used generators to administer to patients. Around 12:15 p.m., demand for electricity in Spain dropped from 27,500 megawatts to nearly 15,000 megawatts in about 5 seconds. Portugal’s outage hit its capital, Lisbon, and surrounding areas, as well as northern and southern parts of the country. Even homes in the French Basque Country were without power for a few minutes.
Institute for Energy Research
April 29, 2025
What Caused Spain and Portugal’s Massive Power Outage? – IER
A significant contributor to the outage was due to politics:
Spain and Portugal are both highly reliant upon generation from wind and solar power, and many are pointing towards their deficiencies as the possible reason for the outage, although governments are denying any linkage.
…
Wind and solar power, in addition to their intermittency and hidden costs, are unable to provide inertia to the grid, which thermal plants, which have been forced to retire, provide.
Meanwhile:
London Underground: Power failure knocks out Tubes, Overground and Elizabeth line
A power failure has caused major disruption to the London Underground network and the Elizabeth line.
The Bakerloo line is currently suspended, as are parts of the Mildmay line, while there are delays on the Elizabeth, Jubilee, District, Circle and Piccadilly lines.
Earlier, sections of the Northern, Jubilee, Waterloo & City and Elizabeth lines were also shut.
Transport for London (TfL) said the issues had been caused by a short power cut which happened at about 14:30 BST. Power has since been restored, but delays and line suspensions are ongoing.
Regarding the situation in Spain and Portugal, I like to think a cloud momentarily blocked the sun, but that seems unlikely for this large of an event.
Still, when I heard about this, I could not help but think this is like a chapter from Atlas Shrugged.
Also, of extreme interest to Barb and I, is that if this had happened four weeks earlier, we would have been on an electric train in Spain cruising through the countryside at 155 -> 165 MPH then slowed to a stop in the middle of nowhere.
It is good we have been doing all the travel we can before we have to retreat to Galt’s Gulch.
Under communism the reasons why murder happens will be abolished, which is why they won’t happen.
RealBolRev 🇨🇳 @RealBolRev_
Posted on X, May 9, 2025
This is why communists are willing to, and have, killed tens of millions of people. What are a few million dead if that is what is needed to create utopia?
Prepare appropriately.
When an Artificial Intelligence model is fed its own input as training data, the model will tend to degrade over time, losing detail with each iteration like a series of photocopies until the model collapses into a fuzz of noisy static.
Something similar, I think, is happening with liberals. They’ve become trapped in their own illusions, eating a media diet that consists entirely of their own propaganda, and then generating new propaganda that simply refers back to the old propaganda in an endless entropic Ouroboros. Meanwhile, the quality of the propaganda they generate is degrading rapidly: the deceptions in the news media or the academic literature get more transparent and less convincing with every iteration; the entertainment media gets less compelling, more poorly written, with worse special effects and less impressive acting; their literature devolves into hamfisted sermons mashed together with smut; their computer games feature worse stories, uglier characters, clumsy game mechanics, bugs, and degrading animation quality.
John Carter
March 26, 2025
The Involution of the Liberal Mind – by John Carter
Via email from Rolf.
In general, this is true of everyone in every group. It is human, and probably all social animal, nature.
A group of people, or animals, will learn from the behavior of others in their social group. Only a few cattle in the herd need to touch their nose to the electric fence before the herd knows better than do the same. After a few days, you can turn off the electric fence, and the cattle will still keep respecting it as a boundary*.
Human groups have taboos that seem weird to others outside their group. Some of these taboos may have had valid reasons at one time but no longer have the same level of validity as they once did. For example, Jewish and Muslim rules against eating pork. Or in Hinduism, the belief that the cow is representative of divine and natural beneficence and should therefore be protected and venerated. All the variations of Christianity have differences in belief which distinguish them and cannot all simultaneously be true because of the contradictions between the different sects. These people socialize with others of their kind and generally live happy and content lives even though they have some set of beliefs which are demonstrably in error.
It is not limited to religious beliefs. Scientists have had extremely heated debates about the nature of the world as well. And, of course, political beliefs are not immune from such errors as well.
I think the situation where the errors to generate a feedback loop and result in a “model collapse” as with the AI example is when there is insufficient contact with reality. In the threat intelligence field, we are told to never take conjecture more than one or maybe two levels. For example, if you see an IP address scanning your outward facing network, and you know that last week this same IP address was associated with a particular threat actor you can claim you have evidence supporting that threat actor is now preparing an attack against you. But you are on shaky ground to claim that if you defend against what techniques and tactics that threat actor used last week you should be safe.
I view the Democrats as having lost touch with reality. At one point in time, they claimed that homosexuals were deserving of respect, equal treatment before the law, and generally should be left alone if it only involved consenting adults. I think what has happened is that this belief has developed a feedback loop disconnected with reality. The group belief has degraded into believing straight people should be treated as a lower class, and transsexual woman are no different than biologically women and should be allowed to compete in sporting events against women.
Or abortion is about a women’s choice about what happens to her body morphing into partial birth abortions are acceptable.
Or recognizing that firearms are the most commonly used murder weapon morphing into a believe that firearms have no benefits to society and the world would be safer if they were banned.
Their systems of belief gradually lost touch with reality and they are now suffering a catastrophic break with voters.
Republicans, currently, are probably more in touch with reality. But they still have issues where they are straining reality near the breaking point. If there are people who believe high tariffs, in of themselves, are an economic benefit then I am nearly certain they are wrong. As means of negotiating away a tariff against us, sure, that probably will work. Or the war on drugs was a benefit to society. Yes, recreational drug use is harmful. But the deaths and family destruction from alcohol and tobacco use are a huge cost to society as well. And shouldn’t we have learned something from alcohol prohibition that can be applied to prohibitions against other recreation drugs?
People need to get out of their “echo chambers.” Sure, it is easy and comfortable to extrapolate from the echos. But those echos are a distortion of the real thing. And with each echo the distortion increases.
* This is not universal. There are some cattle with a personality that will knowingly take the hit of the electric fence to escape the enclosure.
The best story I have heard was of some pigs. They would form a group, get back several feet, run at the fence, and before reaching the fence, start squealing. They would hit the fence and shoot underneath receiving a quick, and relatively minor shock. The shock intensity is reduced because the total current the fence delivered at any one time is limited. With simultaneous animals distributing the current among them, each individual animal had a lower shock intensity.
This video brought tears to my eyes.
How to deal with the ATF. pic.twitter.com/3dmhLJwGSA
— Aaron Nye (@anogy) July 30, 2022
Ah yes, blue-collar workers who stash 20 compensating peashooters that have been gathering dust in their basements longer than they had been diagnosed with diabetes will definitely be at the front lines for a Civil War should the country go to shit.
So dangerous.
Keelthas Jensen @KeelJonLives
Posted on X, June 3, 2024
It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday; it is another science denier (see also here and here)!
Delusions are often functional (Heinlein). In this case the functionality works for everyone. Jensen gets to feel superior and gun owners get a good measure of the caliber of their political opponents.
What you see is a target rich environment:
It is very cool to have a video of your spotting scope. At least one shooting team had a large video monitor of the spotting scope view.
The panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment for Todd Yukutake and David Kikukawa in their action seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to prevent the Attorney General of Hawaii from enforcing two provisions of Hawaii’s firearms laws on the ground that the provisions violate the Second Amendment.
First, plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Hawaii Revised Statutes § 134-2(e), which provides a narrow time window (originally 10 days, and now 30 days) within which to acquire a handgun after obtaining the requisite permit. The permit application process includes a background check. Second, plaintiffs challenged § 134-3 to the extent that, as part of Hawaii’s firearms registration process, it requires a gun owner, within five days of acquiring a firearm, to physically bring the gun to a police station for inspection. The district court concluded that the challenged aspects of both provisions were facially unconstitutional under the Second Amendment and
permanently enjoined their enforcement.Daniel P. Collins
9th Circuit Judge
March 14, 2025
YUKUTAKE V. LOPEZ
While I am happy this outrageous law has been overturned, I don’t expect it to last. As I recall, and Copilot agrees:
So far, it seems that when the Ninth Circuit has ruled a firearms law unconstitutional, the full en banc panel has later reversed that decision.
There has been an appeal for an en banc hearing. And as outrageous as this law is, I do not have high hopes of the law being overturned.
It is important to note that it took over TWO YEARS, for them to deliver this appeals court verdict. The lawsuit was initially filed in October of 2019! A right delayed is a right denied.
It was interesting, as long as I could tolerate it, to read the dissent. The contortions to reach the desired conclusions are epic.
The US Justice Department’s top civil rights official said the division is considering making gun rights a formal priority, in a significant shift from its traditional focus.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in an interview with Bloomberg that the department is reviewing whether certain state and local gun control measures infringe on citizens’ rights.“The Second Amendment is one of the constitutional rights we are committed to defending,” Dhillon said. “We’re adding that to our analysis where states are violating constitutional rights.”
She declined to name specific jurisdictions under review but added, “I think it’s all pretty obvious where people’s rights are being violated.”
Myles Miller
May 9, 2025
Trump’s DOJ Weighs Gun Rights as a Focus for Civil Rights Division
I won’t believe it until I see some politicians being hauled away to prison in orange jumpsuits. We less talk and a lot more action.
Being armed to your toes seems unlikely to do anything but escalate the dangers for you.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
New York Times’ ethics columnist
May 8, 2025
Why Are More Democrats Becoming New Gun Owners? A New Trend?
It would be fun to watch Appiah try convincing a police officer, a surviving mass shooting victim, or a home invasion survivor of this.
For the first time, scientists detected negative light in human history. The discovery, known as “darker than darkness,” tests the basic understanding of natural light phenomena. Research opportunities in quantum physics have expanded through the discovery of negative frequency photons, which hold potential implications that enhance our understanding of the universe.
Edwin O.
May 7, 2025
“It’s darker than darkness” ― Negative light spotted for the first time in human history
I think it would be cool to have a flashlight that projected negative light. You could “shine” it at your floor, wall, etc. and make it appear as a black featureless hole in your living room. You could tell your kids you are getting rid of the dog and “shine” it at Fido sleeping in the corner.
Or how about a laser pointer to play with your cat?
But the best use would be to shine it on your face for a Halloween mask.
Yesterday I received a text message from a friend:
There is a slight chance that someone may try to take out a contract on me. What precautions would you take?
They are as good or better than I am with a handgun. They are at least moderately skilled with rifles. They are middle aged and of middle class means living in a rural area.
Any suggestions?