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.
Okay, I just want to add that the shooter was a 20-year-old kitchen worker from nearby Bethel Park in Pennsylvania. According to a CNN report, a senior law enforcement official said that he bought 50 rounds from a local gun store hours before the rally.
Shouldn’t that have been reported? Somebody buys…a 20-year-old white guy? I mean we’ve seen that many times now. Young white men with guns and nobody reported that he bought 50 rounds of ammunition?
Joy Behar
July 15, 2024
Lefties Horrified Young White Men Can Buy 50 Rounds of Ammo Without Triggering a SWAT Raid – Shooting News Weekly
“white guy”? Racist much?
“50 rounds of ammunition”? Out of touch with reality?
I wonder what she would think if she knew it is nothing special when this white guy buys buys 5,000 rounds of ammunition and/or assembles 2,000 rounds.
Minnesota cites common law evidence that (as minors) 18 to 20-year-olds did not have full rights. Minnesota, however, does not put forward common law analogues restricting the right to bear arms. Instead, Minnesota points to statutory law, such as the Militia Act of 1792 that required 18 to 20-year-olds to acquire firearms, as evidence the common law was the inverse. See The Militia Act of 1792, ch. 33, 1 Stat. 271, § 1. A mandate to acquire a firearm is hardly “evidence” that one was previously prohibited from owning one.
Duane Benton
Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
July 15, 2024
Worth-Opinion.pdf (saf.org)
Kristin Worth; Austin Dye; Axel Anderson; Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus; Second Amendment Foundation; Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc.v.
Bob Jacobson, in his individual capacity and in his official capacity as Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety
Kyle Burton, in his individual capacity and in his official capacity as Sheriff of Mille Lacs County, Minnesota; Dan Starry, in his individual capacity and in his official capacity as Sheriff of Washington County, Minnesota; Troy Wolbersen, in his individual capacity and in his official capacity as Sheriff of Douglas County, Minnesota Defendants
Judges, Smith, Benton, and Stras unanimously held that Minnesota’s law banning 18-year old’s from carrying arms in public is unconstitutional. I found it amusing Minnesota would cite a law requiring 18-year old’s to acquire a firearm in support of their insistence that 18-year old’s can be denied the right to carry arms. Are they really that stupid? And/or that desperate?
Related:
SAF SEEKING PLAINTIFFS –
ATTENTION MINNESOTA RESIDENTS!Are you – or someone you know – a young adult 18-20-years-old, have a clean background and want to exercise your right to carry a firearm for self-defense? If you fit the criteria above, please email Legal@saf.org with your contact and background information, including the county in which you reside. Sign up here!
Common claims about U.S. self-defense law’s “exceptionalism” and “inhumanity” fail under closer scrutiny. Observers in the media, academia, and elsewhere tend to conflate access to deadly force (via firearms) with the legal authorization of the same. England and Germany’s self-defense laws, for example, far from being more “humane” toward the alleged attackers, place comparatively less legal restrictions on the circumstances under which deadly defensive force can be used.
Beyond assertions about U.S. self-defense law’s “harshness” being factually off-base, they are distractions. They get in the way of our embarking on a more informed national debate about the proper role of, and justification for, self-preferential deadly force in a modern, democratic society.
Eugene Volokh
March 15, 2022
Comparing U.S., English, and German Self-Defense Law (reason.com)
Interesting. I was under the impression that self-defense was essentially illegal in England. What about the stories such as a U.S. woman in England defending herself from attack with a nail file and being convicted?
Perhaps the law and the reality of prosecution are two different things.
Does anyone know more about this topic? This is kind of important to me. My step daughter is currently living in England.
If fascism is imminent, then where was everybody?
That’s what Nadine Seiler was wondering. The 59-year-old had come all the way from Waldorf, Maryland, to be one of two protesters standing on a street corner near a Secret Service checkpoint, where attendees and reporters like me were entering the convention. “I Googled it, and America has at least 200 million adults over 18 years old,” she said. “Why, with democracy on the line, are there only two of us here?”
Seiler wore hot-pink lipstick and a T-shirt that read July 13 was a false flag. She told me that she didn’t actually believe that Republicans had staged the Trump assassination attempt. But Republicans had blamed January 6 on the FBI, so two could play that game. Democrats are “gutless and spineless,” she told me. “I am done being polite, and I am done being sane.”
Elaine Godfrey
July 19, 2024
The Democrats Aren’t Even Trying (msn.com)
I find it interesting Seiler is purposely seeking insanity. But perhaps she doesn’t really need to seek it. Maybe it finds her as soon as she lets her guard down.
Perhaps the jig is up and they know Fascism is not imminent. But that doesn’t stop them from being evil and/or insane.
Don’t be surprised if the public quiet is hiding a dark and sinister resolve to not miss next time.
Prepare appropriately.
Aren’t you just a full cup of stupid?! Tiny micro peen feels the need to show of his big bad gun. Dude, even with laser sights I doubt you could hit the broad side of a barn.
Jana B Warrior Angel @Janabw81
Posted on X, August 3, 2023
It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier (see also here)!
As is typical with people with some mental disorders, she imagines she knows things about other people which she has now way of knowing. In other words, she is delusional.
Many technology companies, including Microsoft, made commitments to improve diversity efforts after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the historic protests that followed.
In 2020, Microsoft pledged to double the number of Black leaders within the company by 2025.
…
Despite those commitments, many tech companies have appeared to retreat somewhat from diversity efforts. Zoom laid off a DEI-focused team earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. Google and Meta also cut DEI programs last year, according to CNBC.
Ashley Stewart
July 15, 2024
Internal Microsoft Email Shows DEI Leader Blasting Layoffs – Business Insider
I don’t know the numbers for my company, but I do know that every single one of the people I knew who were working on DEI stuff, even occasionally, are no longer employed as of the last layoff.
We live in interesting times.
The CrowdStrike Internet disaster prompted me gather some thoughts which have been percolating in my mind for a while. The CrowdStrike event puts a little different spin on them and perhaps, if desirable, will get my thoughts more attention. Of course, this could be my naivete and everyone else already knows all this.
When I worked in the Cyber Security Group at Pacific Northwest Laboratory one of the things I was asked to do was to review and comment on a DHS proposal for making the Internet more secure. In the paper was the suggestion that the Federal Government have a central location with gatekeeping capabilities to isolate sections of the Internet from each other to prevent worms from spreading to the entire Internet. I advocated against this because having a single (even if somewhat distributed) point of control/failure would make it an exceedingly attractive target. Sure, it could be made very secure. But with that big of a payoff for access it will be attacked by the best of the brightest of most nation states as well as those with common criminal intent. When the bad guys inevitably get access, those who intended to make the Internet more secure will be responsible for enabling a catastrophe.
I suspect most large companies are in a similar situation and/or are inadvertently working toward one. At my company most of our security monitoring is being migrated into the cloud. I can’t imagine a major corporation not using Office 365. Which depends on Azure. And I’m sure many other critical or nearly critical products are could based in every company. I used to work at Microsoft and trust Microsoft to do a good job with their security/reliability/etc.. Amazon and Google do as well or better than Microsoft, but the payoff for breaching one of these cloud providers is so great that I find it difficult to imagine it won’t someday be breached/shutdown in some form.
Of course, the same goes for any highly used system. CrowdStrike probably wasn’t breached. But it was a single point of failure for a large section of the planet. And the consequences of this accident probably cost billions. And I shouldn’t have to remind anyone about the SolarWinds hack and how many companies that affected.
And if you want to get really concerned, think of what happened in the TV series Battlestar Galactica. The enemy robots compromised all the computerized systems of human civilization and used that to hide their nuclear strike and suppress the defenses. We now have AI built into our computer security. Enemy robots don’t even have to break and enter. They just need to convince their AI cousins to switch sides.
I don’t know that there is a practical solution. I know what I advocated for in the DHS proposal. I advocated for independent solutions providing diversity and redundancy of the Internet. Even if you postulate an infinitely benign government, government control of everything is a single point of failure.
Having diverse hardware, software, processes, and people (hardware and software are not the only things which can be hacked and/or broken) is very expensive to implement, operate, and maintain. And redundancy is a surprisingly difficult task. As a Boeing Reliability Engineer once told me, “It doesn’t much matter how many backup systems you have. What matters is, how independent they are.” Having the ability to land safely with three out of four engines shutdown doesn’t matter if someone contaminated the fuel in the supply truck.
Perhaps there isn’t a practical solution. But people should at least be aware and hence they may be able to mitigate risks in some instances.
Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows 4 related to the Falcon sensor. Please monitor the status via the tech alert on our customer support portal.
A message on the Crowdstrike technical help line
July 19, 2024
CrowdStrike outage sparks global chaos with airline, bank and other disruptions | WMAY – 92.7 WMAY
There was a Windows 4. Better known as Windows NT 4. Which, of course, is something like 20 years past end of life.
The above quote was on many major news sites. But as of late July 19th, 2024 a search for “Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows 4 related to the Falcon sensor” will yield lots of hits. But clicking through, some of them do not have that quote.
I suspect someone managed to spoof a bunch of “journalists”.
Yet another data point demonstrating you cannot trust the media.
We should be thanking the stupid commie bastards. We just wanted to elect him as president.
Shit like that will make him a f–k’in emperor.
MTHead
July 15, 2024
Comment to Call for Calm
As I am not a fan of emperors I won’t be thanking anyone about this.
That said, I did think this was rather funny. I really like sick humor…
I remember from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016 and how it presaged our current era of political violence, before what is being called an “assassination attempt” on former president Donald Trump happened on Saturday evening. After the news broke, I paused. Was this appropriate? Actually, there’s never been a more important time to understand where this came from. It also looks like the shooter was a 20-year-old male registered Republican, but I don’t read too much into that—at 20, many young people are politically unformed, though they have access to guns. I won’t blame an ideology, except for the right wing’s gun worship. And we’ll never know why the Secret Service, maligned for its event security, let Trump pause after they rushed in to protect him, and stand and raise his fist in a fascist salute. He waved it around maniacally and almost hit the female agent closest to him in the head. Why they let him take a victory lap in a dangerous situation—there could have been other shooters—we’ll never know.
President Biden’s campaign pulled all his (increasingly wonderful and populist) ads down. I guess that’s what you do, if you’re a decent human being. Imagine the situation reversed: Trump would be running ads that say grazing Biden’s ear will worsen his (nonexistent) Parkinson’s. They are monsters; we are not.
To his political credit, in a somber Oval Office address Sunday night, Biden put the attack on Trump in the context where it belongs: of January 6, the brutal beating of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and the kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
But the monsters are still blaming Biden’s completely valid attacks on Trump as if they set up this (nominal Republican) to shoot the disgraced former president. Democrats must recover quickly and say Trump has been uniquely responsible for stoking the violence that apparently grazed his ear. There’s so much metaphor there, but he won’t hear it.
Joan Walsh
July 15, 2024
Where Our Current Moment of Political Violence Began (msn.com)
Was it a political attack on Paul Pelosi? I don’t think so.
How many of the kidnapping plot were found not guilty because of FBI entrapment?
January 6th was intentional violence? If so, then why did they all leave their guns in their cars?
They are decent people?
One has to wonder if Walsh is living in a different universe or is deliberately lying by omission of things like*:
June 2017: Republican Congresswoman Steve Scalise and four others were shot by a left-wing activist during a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. Scalise was critically injured but survived the attack.
September 2018: A Republican campaign volunteer in Minnesota was assaulted and left unconscious while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. The attacker was later charged with assault.
February 2020: A Republican campaign staffer in California was physically assaulted while registering voters. The attacker was later arrested and charged with battery.
August 2020: A Republican National Convention (RNC) volunteer in Wisconsin was attacked and knocked unconscious by a group of protesters. The volunteer was wearing an RNC hat at the time of the attack.
And I love how she says:
what is being called an “assassination attempt”
And claims Trump raised
his fist in a fascist salute
Delusional or evil? You decide.
* This list was obtained from New Chat | Gab AI | An Uncensored and Unfiltered AI Platform via the query “Please give me a list of violent attacks against republicans in the last ten years”
Both Gemini and Copilot refused to respond to that same request.
Duke University researchers embarked on a comprehensive journey to dissect the effectiveness of gun laws across the United States.
Their focus? The relationship between stringent gun regulations and homicide rates. The results were unexpected—they found “no difference in homicide rates” between states with tough laws and those with more lenient ones.
Georgia Mckoy
July 12, 2024
Bombshell Study Finds Gun Restriction Laws Do Not Lead to Homicide Decrease Nationwide
Anyone paying attention knew this decades ago.
But do they trust the science? See for yourself:
Gun ownership in America has surged, with over 82 million Americans now owning at least one firearm—a 28% increase since 1994.
This uptick illustrates the growing urgency for effective gun regulation to keep pace with rising ownership rates.
In other words, “Gun ownership is increasing! No harm done! We must do something!”
These people are members of an evil, religious, science denying cult with an unshakable faith in gun control and the benevolence of government. They belong in the dustbin of history.
We still do not know about the shooter in this assassination attempt. However, we know all too well how unhinged people can find justification in the incendiary rhetoric of our politics. This moment did not occur in a vacuum; it occurred in a time when our leaders long abandoned reason for rage.
Jonathan Turley
July 13, 2024
Opinion: The attempted assassination of Trump is not nearly as surprising as it should be (msn.com)
It is not just the “leaders”. Rationality, if it exists, is just a thin veneer over the emotions in nearly everyone. The political currency of the left is almost nothing but emotion and violence. It is what they believe in and what they do.
As I have said before:
The Second Amendment isn’t only not about hunting–it’s about protecting us from liberals.
These emotional dorks are such predictable cliches. Bitchface dirty deleted but the internet is forever.
Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
Posted on X on June 21, 2024
It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier (see also here)!
Yup. It’s totally predictable. That is why we call it Markley’s Law.
Appropriate:
BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms condemns Saturday’s attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump during a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and praises the quick action by the U.S. Secret Service to protect Mr. Trump and neutralize the suspect.
“We offer prayers of thanks that Donald Trump is safe, and we mourn for the innocent person who was killed during the incident,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “We condemn this act of insanity, because violence of any kind can never be tolerated as part of the political process in a free country.
“Furthermore, we condemn the political vitriol which has been directed toward the former president, creating such an atmosphere of irrational hatred,” Gottlieb continued. “It is despicable that Donald Trump has been vilified for many months as a ‘threat to democracy.’ What has become clear is that the level of hateful rhetoric directed at the former president is the real threat to democracy, which is underscored by the Biden campaign’s suspension of political advertising.
“The whole world is watching how the American people respond to this deplorable attempt on the life of the former President,” Gottlieb added. “In America, we settle our political differences at the ballot box. We cannot allow those differences to reach the level of volatility which results in this kind of dangerous extremism. We call for calm on all sides. We are a nation of rational debate, not political derangement.
“There is no room for the sort of vile rhetoric which has been rampant so far in the campaign to demonize Mr. Trump and prevent at all costs his possible re-election in November,” Gottlieb observed. “We expect a thorough investigation and full public disclosure of the facts surrounding this horrific act.”
Nowadays, it is difficult to be an informed news consumer, especially if you value the right to keep and bear arms. When a story involves guns or the Second Amendment, what passes for news is usually propaganda – finely honed and served up with a purpose.
Many Americans have found alternative news sources. This is the main reason why the Associated Press and other corporate media sources are hemorrhaging readers and viewers. The legacy media’s decline is self-inflicted. Their continued adherence to pushing false narratives did them in.
Lee Williams
July 11, 2024
Associated Press Refuses to Correct Anti-gun Story – Another Symptom of its Decline
If they go bankrupt and every single person involved in this long term conspiracy to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms can’t find work for years, they are still getting off easy. They should be prosecuted.
Remember what I said last October:
Another “interesting” scenario, made more likely by the current high emotions on both sides of the political fence, are that the candidate for one party or another is assassinated. Then, before the election, the other major candidate is assassinated.
Former President Donald Trump was wounded on a Pennsylvania campaign stage by a sniper’s bullet Saturday night in an apparent assassination attempt that nearly claimed his life, law enforcement sources told The Post.
The pictures from some angles look like a bullet hole through the upper right ear.
If you look at this flag you can see there was a fair amount of wind:
The linked articles says, “Law enforcement sources said that the bullet may have been deflected by glass before Trump was struck in the face.” I would like to throw my hypothesis into the pot and say the sniper misread the wind.
As I told daughter Jaime after she sent me a text message about the attempt:
It will take at least two days for the rumors to fade and something resembling the truth comes out.
The conspiracy theories will last for decades.
An assassination does prevent the target from obtaining office. A failed assassination attempt probably increases the chances the target will obtain office.
Attempted or successful, it increases the odds of more political violence. The odds of civil war just increased.
I want my underground bunker in Idaho.
The firearms industry, looking to expand beyond its shrinking base of white male gun owners, has focused its marketing efforts on Black, Latino, and Asian Americans. If successful, such efforts can only increase gun death and injury in these communities.
Violence Policy Center
July 9, 2024
Nearly 90 Percent of Black Homicide Victims Killed With Guns, Study Finds | Violence Policy Center (vpc.org)
Interesting. The VPC is claiming the “gun death and injury” rates in non-white communities will increase if their gun ownership rates increase. And that most guns are currently owned by white males… who happen to have much lower “gun death and injury” rates than the black males. That doesn’t make any sense. One would expect that since white males have low “gun death and injury” rates we should encourage other to look to them for clues as to how to obtain those same low “gun death and injury” rates. Such as owning guns and learning how to use them to defend yourself.
Logical thinking is not what gun control people are known for. This is just another data point demonstrating they have crap for brains and/or they are evil and deliberately lying because they want those non-whites to continue having high “gun death and injury” rates.
I am not a lawyer. But it would see this bolsters the case for building your own machine guns, mortar’s, grenades, etc..
Late last night, after months of litigation, a federal court in Texas decided the federal ban on at-home distillation of beverage spirits is unconstitutional. The district court’s decision is fair; it is correct on the law; and it is historic.
Lawyers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) represent several amateur home-distilling enthusiasts who want to pursue the essentially harmless hobby of at-home distilling of beverage spirits for personal use without the looming threat of legal sanctions. Under federal law, distilling in one’s home or backyard can result in a $10,000 fine and a five-year imprisonment.
The court found that:
- The federal ban on home distilling exceeds the scope of the federal government’s limited powers.
- The Constitution’s tax power does not allow the federal government to ban home distilling, largely because the ban does not add money into the federal treasury or protect federal tax revenue.
- The Constitution’s power to regulate interstate commerce does not allow the federal government to ban home distilling, largely because the ban neither regulates interstate commerce directly nor is it related to any larger regulatory scheme.
I didn’t read the actual ruling but I suspect what the judge said can be applied to almost anything not involved in Interstate commerce. Hence, when applied to homemade grenades at a Boomershoot side event the courts would be inclined to say the Federal government can’t ban them either.
We are faced with two prospects as of January 2025: the need for massive civil resistance in the face of unleashed repression, and what we might call “left federalism”—as in the ability of governors and legislatures in states like California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York to nullify federal edicts and keep democracy going. A frightening prospect of ever-increasing confrontation, but it may be all we have in the face of the coming juggernaut.
Van Gosse
July 11, 2024
The Democrats Are Slow-Walking Into Fascism (msn.com)
Interesting. They envision:
Trump will then be entitled to claim an overwhelming mandate for his authoritarian rule: concentration camps for millions of undocumented people, a purge of the federal civil service, deploying the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his opponents, and so much more.
Which, of course, there were not even hints of this in his first term. But the Obama and Biden administration did give us numerous examples of this sort of behavior.
It appears to me they are working themselves up into a frenzy such that things could get “spicy” in early November.
I would like to be in an underground bunker in Idaho for a week or two after election day.
The post-debate Biden situation has so far been all about electoral viability, with the news media’s entire focus is whether Democrats can win in November by dumping him for someone else. Horse race and such.
Which is stunning, because the main story should be that this is one of the biggest political scandals in history, and a legitimately massive conspiracy to keep Americans in the dark in order for Democrats to cling onto political power.
Seriously, think about the complete picture here. The President of the United States, the most powerful person on the planet, is suffering a rapid cognitive decline. Dozens of members of his party as well as “journalists” and celebrities have known this for many months, as they finally admit (because it is now advantageous to do so).
But what were they doing right up to the debate? Completely denying it. The New York Times and others even ran bullshit “fact checks” of videos of Biden struggling, telling us not to believe our own lying eyes. Save for maybe Dean Phillips and Robert Kennedy Jr., no Democrat politician would dare suggest Biden was in decline. They all tried to cover it up.
I think this may be the biggest conspiracy in American political history. It’s at least the biggest since Watergate, but even Watergate didn’t implicate this many co-conspirators. The Biden covverup involves pretty much all Democrats who regularly interact with Biden trying to hide his condition, from members of the House all the way up to the Vice President and the cabinet. They put their own political fortunes ahead of the good of the country – at least until it was time to stab Caesar for their own political benefit, once the debate made maintaining their lie untenable.
And maybe you expect that sort of craven political behavior from politicians. But the news media? We are now getting reporters proudly publishing pieces about scary interactions with Biden that happened 6 months ago or more. Where were these reports when those interactions happened? Only rightwing media covered Biden’s decline honestly (no doubt because it served them of course), but rightwing media doesn’t have the same access to him. The rest of the news media appears to have colluded with Democrats to hide Biden’s condition in order to help them stay in power.
And now, all these people now have the gall to talk to us about “Saving democracy”? Seriously? Eat shit.
The Democrats should be held accountable for this by suffering major losses in November. The news media should continue to lose trust, as it has proven more than ever that most of it is just a PR firm for Democrats.
Crazy that they are going to get away with what should be a cataclysmic scandal.
Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, July 10, 2024
“Appears to have colluded..”? It’s well beyond “appears”.
It was obvious to me, and I’m sure millions of others, that Biden was suffering from dementia four years ago. I specially remember telling someone I could not vote for someone with dementia (and getting an extremely emotional denial). Some people were in denial. Some were oblivious. But the majority of people with access to him had to have known for years.
They knew and made a decision to say nothing about the most powerful person on the planet being feeble minded.
