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.
The Italian – throws the cup, breaks it, and walks away in a fit of rage.
The German – carefully washes the cup, sterilizes it and makes a new cup of coffee.
The Frenchman – takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee.
The Chinese – eats the fly and throws away the coffee.
The Russian – Drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was extra with no charge.
The Israeli – sells the coffee to the Frenchman, sells the fly to the Chinese, sells the cup to the Italian, drinks a cup of tea, and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.
The Palestinian – blames the Israeli for the fly falling into his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, the Chinese, the German and the Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give away his cup of coffee to the Palestinian so there will be peace.
Twenty percent of likely voters hold a concealed handgun permit (20.2%), over double the rate for adults overall (8%). Constitutional Carry states have only a slightly higher permit rate than pure Right-to-Carry states (21.38% versus 19.81%). However, our research suggests this gap will narrow over time because the share of adults with permits is declining in Constitutional Carry states while rising in pure Right-to-Carry states.
Interestingly, people in Constitutional Carry states carry handguns at much higher rates than those in pure Right-to-Carry states (34.19% versus 25.98%). In Constitutional Carry states, the share of likely voters who carry exceeds the share with permits by about 13 percentage points. In the other pure Right-to-Carry states, the share who carry exceeds the share with permits by about six percentage points. So Constitutional Carry laws result in about seven percentage points more people carrying than have a permit.
There is lots of other interesting information in this post. For example, did you know that:
Very liberal and very conservative likely voters carry frequently at disproportionately high rates relative to their shares of the population. Very liberal voters account for 24.6% of frequent carriers even though they make up only 12.9% of likely voters. Similarly, very conservative voters account for 23.0% of frequent carriers while making up 18.0% of likely voters.
That high a carry rate among voters has to be making a difference in the future of gun ower rights.
Plaintiffs request the following relief from this Honorable Court:
a. Enter a declaratory judgment stating that the Nonresident Handgun Purchase Ban set forth in 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(a)(3), 922(a)(5), 922(b)(3), and 27 C.F.R. § 478.99(a), and all other related laws, regulations, policies, and procedures, violate the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution;
b. Enter a permanent injunction enjoining Defendants’ enforcement or application of the Nonresident Handgun Purchase Ban set forth in 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(a)(3), 922(a)(5), 922(b)(3), and 27 C.F.R. § 478.99(a), and all other related laws, regulations, policies, and procedures, because it violates the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution;
c. Award Plaintiffs the costs of this action and reasonable attorneys’ fees; and
d. Award Plaintiffs such other legal and equitable relief as is just and appropriate and as necessary to effectuate the Court’s judgment.
I am so pleased this area of 2nd Amendment law is being pursued. It seems like it should be a real slam dunk. If someone can travel to another state and buy weed, get an abortion, or go to church, then why shouldn’t buying a self-defense tool be a no-brainer, “Hell yes, of course!” That’s just from the philosophical viewpoint.
The legal viewpoint is even stronger. The ban on purchasing handguns depending on which side of a line your feet are resting on is obviously an infringement on the plain text of the 2nd Amendment. And, as pointed in this filing:
Bruen reiterated that, “when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.” Bruen, 597 U.S. at 17. And a court may “[o]nly” conclude that the conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s protection if the government can “justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Id. at 24.
This Court already conducted the type of historical analysis that Bruen requires in Mance. The Court observed that “the earliest known state residency restrictions on the purchase or possession of firearms” occurred in 1909. 74 F. Supp. 3d at 805 (“Defendants have not presented, and the Court cannot find, any earlier evidence of longstanding interstate, geography based, or residency-based firearms restrictions.”). Given this history, the Nonresident Handgun Purchase Ban must be enjoined again.
My view is that it is low hanging fruit that should gathered first. It creates a slippery slope that will create momentum, make it easier to win difficult cases like AR and even machine gun bans, and, figuratively, result in the anti-gun movement making a high velocity splat in the history dumpster where they belong.
I would have thought full auto with tracers would be the preferred configuration for the rear seat “weapons officer.” But I am not one to argue with the people in the air and getting the job done with a red-dot sight on a semi-auto. Perhaps they are shooting a fragmenting round.
And, as long as the drone or its friends aren’t shooting back, I could see that being kinda fun.
California has been a long time leader in the movement to prevent gun violence. The passage of these two bills is just another way the state has stepped up to proactively prevent gun violence before it happens. Education, training, and informed research are essential in our fight to stop gun violence at its source and improve public safety in our communities.
Next up, two pieces of GOA-backed legislation on machineguns were introduced to the House.
First, Rep. Jimmy Patronis’ bill; the “Firearm Freedom Act” is the first-ever bill introduced in Congress that would totally repeal the Hughes Amendment.
For those unfamiliar, the Hughes Amendment is part of the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, added via voice vote, which made machineguns after 1986 illegal to sell to anyone other than the federal government.
Rep. Patronis’ bill rights the wrong that was perpetrated on gun owners 40 years ago.
And, Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced the “Freedom From Taxes Act,” which removes the taxes from machineguns and destructive devices, which are currently subject to $200 tax stamps under the National Firearms Act.
Rep. Boebert’s bill removes the remaining taxes on items regulated by the NFA after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” last summer, where taxes on short barreled firearms and suppressors were reduced to $0.
My guess is that these are all posturing with zero chance of becoming law (or repealing law as the case may be). But still, it is fun to think about.
While I’m not a fan of machine guns*, I really want the restrictions on them removed. When machine guns are available without paperwork, cash and carry, family pack of four at Costco, is sort of my mental marker for “game over, we won.”
* Sure, if someone is paying for the ammo, there are ways to have fun with one. I just don’t see an occasion where I would have a real use for one. Sure, they would be useful in defending against fire breathing dragons. So, if there is some serious intel Daenerys Targaryen is on the prowl in my area of operations I will reconsider.
I think one of the things we really do need to take seriously is if these constitutional officers are not willing to enforce the law, what type of legislation can we introduce to hold them accountable for not doing their job
I know these Republican prosecutors see this as an opportunity for tough guy posturing and amateur constitutional lawyering, but ending the sale of assault weapons in Virginia isn’t something an individual prosecutor can do anything about.
Local prosecutors don’t enforce, they prosecute – and my message to anyone thinking about breaking Virginia law is, don’t bet on Virginia law enforcement ignoring it.
“Amateur constitutional lawyering”? Mark Smith, member of the United States Supreme Court bar, explains why prosecutors refusing to enforce these unconstitutional laws is entirely legal.
I would also like to remind Mr. Cole that if he wants to play that game there are already laws the DOJ could start enforcing.
…from King’s College London, where a team of researchers working alongside chemists from Trinity College Dublin has managed to put together a brand new form of the metal that could replace these pricier options. The metal has been engineered into a new molecule, which they call cyclotrialumane. It is basically three aluminum atoms bonded together in a triangle, making it a trimer.
…
The molecule has shown early promise in the lab, suggesting it could eventually help drive important chemical reactions. The researchers were able to use it to split dihydrogen, the H2 molecules that make up hydrogen gas. Splitting the hydrogen molecule is the main driver of hydrogen energy production, and the same process that runs hydrogen-powered vehicles, so this could help with clean fuel production. The molecule also acted as a catalyst in the controlled chain growth of ethene, which happens to be one of the main building blocks of plastics.
Then there is the weird stuff. Bakewell and her team found that reacting the trimer with ethene creates ring structures that nobody has documented before. These include rings built out of five and seven atoms of aluminum and carbon mixed together. That hints at a whole new class of reactions that go past what platinum and palladium can manage on their own.
So… catalytic converters, fuel cells, and many devices used in thousands of other chemical processes may get much cheaper. Interesting.
The antigunners never gave up on their dream to ban handguns, they just realized that dream was deeply unpopular and decided to focus on “assault weapons” and ancillary restrictions like fees, wait times, etc.
The Glock Switch moral panic gave Everytown and the other groups cover to demand that their allies in California and other blue states sue Glock. Now, they are getting them to ban Glock.
By banning Glock and its clones, they ban the most popular handgun platform in the country. And they won’t stop there; they will find some pretext to declare other popular handgun models “too dangerous” and ban those too. Death by a thousand cuts.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has done nothing so far to stop about a dozen states from banning the most popular rifles in the country. Bruen is working out great….if you are in a pro-gun circuit. Antigun circuits like the Ninth, Second, First, etc. are treating it like a joke and have effectively re-imposed interest balancing, and are upholding pretty much all draconian gun control.
So of course antigun states are emboldened to put their toes into the handgun ban waters once again.
If the Court has any self-respect, if John Roberts cares about the legitimacy of his institution at all, they must take on a hardware case soon and make clear that bans on common firearms are unconstitutional.
And then, they must follow that up with frequent summary reversals of the inevitable antigun circuit court defiance of that ruling.
It is long past time to give the anti-gunners and the disobedient lower courts never-ending nightmares. I’d like to see it in the form of prosecutions, convictions, heavy fines, and long sentences. But that may be beyond our reach for a while. I would settle for the humiliation of being repeatedly slapped down by SCOTUS and my dream of high school machine gun sporting events.
Gonna try to explain this to tech CEOs again: Young Americans are pissed. They feel betrayed. Half have embraced the far right & want to cut off your access to cheap foreign labor. The other half have embraced the far left & want to cut off your head. One side will win. Choose.
But even if you completely accept the basic assertions, I’m not sure a win by either side is guaranteed. It’s plausible that the outcome could be closer to everyone loses.
I believe that being shot should be requirement for gun ownership in America. It’s very simple. You need to have gun, like taking selfies with pistols, can’t live with out it? Then take a bullet and you will be granted the right to purchase the firearm of your choice.
…
So if you love guns, if they make you feel safe, if you hold and cuddle with them at night, then you need to be shot. You need to feel a bullet rip through your flesh, and if you survive and enjoy the feeling––then the right to bear arms will be all yours.
Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.
It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.
A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:
Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”
Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.
Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.
While interesting I’m not convinced it is entirely true.
I would have expected the disconnect depending as much or more on where people are on the curve than the difference in IQ between the two. A conversation between 90 / 110 IQ people would not have the same type of disconnections as one between a 140 / 160 pair. Am I wrong?
… Later
I had this in the queue to be published and later decided to ask some AI’s.
So whenever you read about this or that Israeli outrage — and there may be truth to the complaint — place the news in context. Look whom the Israelis are fighting against. Islam is like nothing else in history.
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered something profoundly eerie in the depths of the cosmos: vast, synchronized patterns in ancient galaxies that hint at one of the most mind-bending ideas in physics—that our entire universe might be trapped inside a supermassive black hole.
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered something profoundly eerie in the depths of the cosmos: vast, synchronized patterns in ancient galaxies that hint at one of the most mind-bending ideas in physics—that our entire universe might be trapped inside a supermassive black… pic.twitter.com/3kOCNlqFqD
I hypothesized this years ago and I told you so then. There were others before me as well, but it is interesting to see direct evidence of it. But, as of yet, I have not seen anyone confirming the aspect of the black hole is pulling us along the time axis of four-dimensional space. There is still time for that.
Never forget that the assholes who spent decades labeling all of us nazis and cancelling us for the dumbest bullshit reasons imaginable are hypocritically running this asshole who got a literal fucking SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for the senate.
And here is TIME magazine hypocritically making excuses for it. No matter how slimy you think liberals are, they are worse. Their moral compass is a wind sock.
If you’re other-than-democrat, they’ll destroy your life for waving wrong, smiling awkwardly at a minority, or making the okay sign. Everything we do gets called “white supremacy” even when we’re black or brown, and then they’ll clutch thier pearls and hold a fucking witch trial to burn us at the stake for crimes that only exist in their fevered retard imagination. If anyone on the right is gullible enough to apologize to these trash, that’s just throwing blood in the water, and then they’ll attack you even more.
Then these same fucking Caring White Liberals will run this posturing scumbag for office, and the second it comes out he got a shitty nazi tat on his chest they’ll cry about how it was an innocent mistake from a poor dumb Marine who didn’t know any better (lol).
Pete Hegseth has a cross on his chest and it’s the end of the fucking world, liberal freak out about racist dog whistle, and we’ve got to see a milliong tweets and ten thousand news articles and a hundred thousand hours of news coverage, and it’s even the same exact cross Jimmy Carter had at his funeral and then suddenly it’s okay and not racist.
You put Heinrich Himmler’s hat decoration over your heart as a democrat and all you have to do is go “hur dur I didn’t know no better (wink wink)” and they’ll run you for office. Elon waves funny and democats spend the next few months attacking random people’s Teslas and burning car dealerships.
They truly don’t give a shit about anything. They have no values whatsoever. Every decision is a simple stimulus/response on whether it gets them more power. That’s it. No matter how much the dumb Rs on my side may annoy me, I fucking despise democrats.
The only minor fault with Correia’s awesome* analysis is that it isn’t just about acquiring power. They get a thrill out of exercising their power. When they let their guard down, some of them freely admit it:
it is a thrill; it’s a high… I love it; I absolutely love it.
I am inclined to believe this is a sign of a mental disorder. It is also a sign that you should never give up your guns.
That thrill, that high, will not be satiated by anything. As demonstrated in the USSR, Cambodia, and numerous other times and places. When allowed access to enough government power, tens of millions will be executed. These people will only be stopped by direct physical action.
Prepare appropriately.
* Please also note that Correia’s books are awesome. I highly recommend them.
I’ve also heard it suggested that Trump is faking the FBI data. But that would be easy for the cities to catch when FBI reports did not match what the cities reported.
Michiganders want common-sense safeguards that protect families and support law enforcement, not reckless policies that create new loopholes for illegal guns. The last thing we should be doing is making it easier for handguns to move through the mail.
This was in response to an opinion issued by the DOJ:
A nearly 100-year-old federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced, according to an opinion released Thursday by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The 15-page opinion concluded that a 1927 law, which made it illegal to use the Postal Service to mail concealable firearms, such as pistols and revolvers, infringes on the Second Amendment.
I asked for Copilot for clarification on what this bill actually does. The short version is that it is a procedural block of implementing the proposed rule to stop enforcement of the 1927 law. I don’t think it has much chance of passing, but it is still frustrating. The only silver lining is that it is another demonstration these anti-gun politicians have zero regard for the U.S. constitution.
A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one not made publicly available, to protect the privacy of the victims.
The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams, some also by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones.
Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas brags about theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of “Allahu Akbar” (punctuated by the occasional “Kill the Jew!”) are simply nauseating.
Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear — one with his eye socket hanging out of his face — asking his brother whether he thinks they’re going to die, while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade in their saferoom helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.
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It was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like “take off your pants,” “lie down,” “spread your legs,” and “don’t make trouble.” I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?
I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
Hamas achieved glory and celebrated for a day. The magnitude of their error will be in history books for centuries.
They learned their lesson the hard way.
But it wasn’t just Hamas that should learn a lesson from October 7th. Learn from the mistakes of others. Everyone should have learned that disarmed civilians are vulnerable to such attacks. Never give up your guns. Keep saying, “NO!“until you run out of ammo.
Since 2006, Bellevue has actually cut per-resident spending from $5,741 to $4,653 — a 19% decrease. Seattle? It’s ballooned from $5,997 to $8,677 — up 45%. Seattle now spends nearly twice as much per resident as Bellevue for the same basic services.
What’s that money buying? On violent crime, Seattle logs 542 incidents per 100,000 residents. Bellevue: 99. Property crime: Seattle racks up 4,100 cases; Bellevue about 2,200. Seattle residents are also earning less — median household income is $120,000 v. Bellevue’s $160,000.
But here’s the number that stops you cold. Life expectancy in Seattle’s downtown core — Belltown, First Hill — is 71.6 years. East King County, where Bellevue sits, comes in at 84.2. That’s a 13-year gap. Thirteen years of life, separated by a bridge.
Seattle could start by not electing admitted socialists and communists to the city council and as mayors. But they probably won’t. They will, almost for certain, advocate for Bellevue to become more like Seattle so as to stop attracting the jobs out of Seattle. Just like in the early days of the USSR it was always the fault of the capitalists. The solution was to confiscate the property and send the capitalists to the gulag and/or a mass grave.
Even with San Fransico and Detroit as examples of their path of folly, Seattle will have to attempt learning the bad lesson for themselves. I just hope they actually do eventually learn. With the contrast of Bellevue just a few minutes away across the lake you would think they would learn quickly. But I expect they will be more successful in exporting their mistakes than importing real solutions.
Just in the last few years a homeless shelter was constructed within walking distance of our home in Bellevue. And in March of this year, Sound Transit completed a “high‑frequency light rail service” connecting Seattle to Bellevue and Redmond. That will make it easier for Seattle criminals to do business in Bellevue and Redmond.
Barb and I will enjoy Bellevue while we can. I see storm clouds in the west coming our way. I’m so glad I have an underground bunker in Idaho we can retreat to.
