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.
While there’s certainly always a place for civil disobedience, I think “just don’t comply” and boating accident jokes are not a real solution to the expansion of authoritarian gun control laws.
Hard truth: They don’t care if you don’t comply. Either you’ll get caught breaking the law and charged, or, your defiance will be driven underground and unseen, and they will win the culture in the meantime. Your grandkids will find your gun stash after you die and turn it in.
By making more and more stuff illegal or more expensive, they also choke off any new converts (this is also why the antigun groups are obsessed with pressuring YouTube and others to censor).
You can’t just ignore them, because they will not ignore you.
Also note that they aren’t going to play to your strengths. They are not going to “go door to door”. They will increase costs through licenses, delays, taxes, lawsuits, zoning, debanking, fines, inspections, fingerprinting, background checks, “sensitive places”, “red flag laws”, “child endangerment”, “safe storage” requirements, semi-auto bans, magazine capacity limits, caliber restrictions, self-manufacturing bans, ammo quantity purchasing limits, age limits, etc.
We need to fight with our strengths. Take new people to range. Donate money to gun groups that win in the courts (I donate thousands each year to the Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition). Leave comments on anti-gun media articles.
Most importantly, be a good public representative of gun ownership.
I thought I had posted a picture of the pump daughter Jaime and I put on her well. I can’t find it now, so maybe I remember sharing it with people at work.
The back story is that last May she had a well drilled on her property in Idaho (she currently lives about 45 minutes southeast of Seattle). As it typical she stressed some about finding water. She bought the property without knowing for certain there would be water. All the neighbors have good wells without going too deep. But that didn’t mean she would find water.
She called and gave me updates as they started drilling, they were down 100′ and there was nothing. None of the neighbors had to go below about 150′. They were below 150′ and still nothing. She wanted to know if she should have them drill in a different place on the property. “Keep going for a while longer. That isn’t really that deep yet.”
It wasn’t too much longer before she called back. I could tell from the tone of her voice it was good news. “Guess how many gallons per minute they have!”, she demanded. “80?”, I replied. I knew it was up there from the excitement in her voice. “100!”, she crowed. She went on to say they hit water at 220 feet, drilled to 240 feet, and the driller said it is an artesian well. I always thought an artesian well is when the water comes completely out of the ground. But apparently that is not the definition. The water was five feet below the surface.
Nice!
Sometime later, probably about July or August she wanted to talk about the well again. Since she doesn’t have electricity on the property yet, she asked if we could put a hand pump in and she could have water to irrigate a few trees. At five feet below the surface, it would be trivial to pull that water on up and fill buckets with a hand pump. So, we put a pitcher pump in with a ten-foot-long pipe and she had consumable water.
Recently she started talking to a local architect who went out to the property to look at the lay of the land, etc. and reported the pump was leaking water. What? Really? Yup. He sent her a picture.
Ten days ago, I visited to see it for myself:
I have never seen anything like this before. That’s awesome!
When will there be a national reckoning for those who misled us? None of the dire predictions about carbon emissions throwing us into global catastrophe offered by scientists, politicians, or international organizations over the past 50 years have come true. In the end, the endless string of chilling forecasts failed to terrorize people out of modernity.
By the time it was all said and done โ and it feels like the public is about done โ there wasnโt a malady, tragedy, or human foible that wasnโt attributed to a slight variation in world climate, including mental illness, diabetes, migraines, prostitution, asthma, dementia, and sexual dysfunction. Climate change has turned us into addicts, thieves, human traffickers, refugees, and warmongers, and accentuated our political divisions.
Itโs been 20 years since the release of the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth. In it, Malthusian nutjob and former Vice President Al Gore confidently popularized a slew of unhinged pseudoscientific warnings. Yet the snows of Kilimanjaro are still with us. Glacier National Park is not “formerly known as Glacier National Park.” We have not seen a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes โ we have seen fewer. There has not been a catastrophic sea-level rise flooding major areas. Despite the hopes of some, Manhattan and Miami remain above water. As do low-lying Pacific islands.
No other group of people would be treated with deference after engaging in such a massive and costly deception.
…
the notion that man-made greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to humankind has been little more than a backdoor way to institute unpopular environmentalist policies and temper economic growth. Itโs about time we end the scam.ย
At this point, even if the global temperature were to rise and be due to human activity, it would be a modern-day version of the story “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” There have been too many failed prophecies to get people to believe the most recent ones. Plus, one should be extraordinarily skeptical of people who make false prophecies. They have a vested interest in getting more people to believe their next prophecies.
In the new study, the scientists tracked how the radio signals from Juno back to Earth bent as they passed through Jupiter’s atmosphere, before cutting out when the planet blocked the signal entirely. Those measurements allowed the team to account for Jupiter’s winds, which slightly alter the shape of the gaseous planet. Then, they used that information to make precise calculations of the planet’s shape and size.
I wonder if this is the largest ever experiment with a manmade “flashlight”.
As a gun guy for a loooong time, I have bad news for 3D printing guysโthe word “gun” is often enough for people to give up their rights out of fear.
People will gladly bend over & let the state have their way with them if it will help with the made up “Gun Problem”.
Guns are the Goldstein Big Brother uses to fuel enough Two Minutes Hate so that people will gladly turn their eyes away from abuses like this because they have been brainwashed into thinking somehow this will keep them safe.
It won’t. And it WILL be used against more than printed guns. It’s a form of control and they will use their fairly successful campaign of making guns out to be the boogeyman to allow them to control more & more of your life.
This is why I’ve fought gun control. It’s MUCH more than just the guns, always has been. But too many people are scared shitless of loud noises & Hollywood portrayals that they honestly fear them enough to allow whatever draconian laws are presented and then call you names & try to have your life ruined if you oppose them.
This is regarding the restrictions certain politicians are putting on the 3D printers. These restrictions include printer firmware recognizing gun parts and refusing to print them and the printer “calling home” to report restricted items being made.
This is a First Amendment issue as well as a Second Amendment issue.
During one of his training videos, Carita claimed his group has a “strong focus on bringing gun owners into policy discussions.”
However, Carita did not respond to phone calls, texts or emails sent via his website, so there’s at least one gun owner he doesn’t want to bring into any policy discussion. Also, his website’s “contact us” and “media inquiries” buttons have both been disconnected.
Hawaii is not addressing an unprecedented societal concern posed by permitholders. Data show the opposite: carry-license revocations are exceedingly rareโtypically between 0.01% and 0.32% annuallyโand often unrelated to criminal conduct. Texas conviction statistics show that permitholders are nearly seven times less likely to be convicted of a crime than the general population. Coloradoโs arrest-based revocation system shows that permitholders are more than eight times less likely to be arrested. Independent research, from RAND to the Chicago Tribune, and even data collected by the Violence Policy Center, confirm that permitholders offend at far lower rates than ordinary citizens. Concealed carry permitholders are exceptionally law-abiding, and Hawaiiโs treatment of them as predatory actors has no empirical or historical foundation.
This is nothing new. Essentially everyone, even anti-gun people, knows the basics of this. The only reasons they continue to harass gun owners with laws against possessing gun for defensive use must be something other than fear of gun owners committing criminal acts.
In my mind the best explanations for this unconstitutional and immoral behavior are:
They intend to commit acts against gun owners that they know would get them shot.
High violent crime rates against defenseless people increase dependency on the government.
Tribal loyalty compels them to be opposed to anything their political enemies advocate.
Robbers are the natural ally of the anti-capitalist and the anti-gun people are protecting their allies.
They have mental health issues and are unable to think rationally (Peterson Syndrome).
Of course, various anti-gun people can have more than one reason to pursue their evil goals. There is no need to pick just one reason. embrace the power of and. Then, prepare and respond appropriately.
Weโre not here trying to burden unnecessarily the American citizen, who has the complete right to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms, and we will not be doing that in the future if I am so confirmed.
He is mouthing words which are better than the actions of the director during the Biden administration, but unless he is dismantling the firearms portion of the ATF the agency is always going to be an illegal “burden” (infringement) of the Second Amendment. 4473s and background checks were not part of the history and tradition of firearms regulation at the time of our country’s founding.
Still, we should take one step at a time and celebrate our victories. Having a better director than the last one is a step in the right direction and worthy of mild celebration. Always remember, Laugh, and the World Laughs with You. If nothing else keep in mind that if Robert Cekada is confirmed as director, the anti-gunners will be saddened and demoralized.
A distinctive mark of fascism is its conception of politics, best captured by Carl Schmitt, an early-20th-century German political theorist whose doctrines legitimized Nazism. Schmitt rejected the Madisonian view of politics as a social negotiation in which different factions, interests, and ideology come to agreement, the core idea of our Constitution. Rather, he saw politics as a state of war between enemies, neither of which can understand the other and both of which feel existentially threatenedโand only one of which can win. The aim of Schmittian politics is not to share the country but to dominate or destroy the other side.
Most of the body of the article is behind a paywall so I only have the part quoted in the email.
As many of you will point out, there is no compromise or coming to agreement with those who want you dead. There is no compromise with those who want a cradle to grave welfare state for everyone. But there is a better way to go about opposing them without risking a death spiral into your own purity test driven genocide of killing all the communists.
There is a fair amount of truth to what I could read in the quote above about the definition of fascism. And I prefer to use the oldest definition I can find. It is from an unabridged dictionary copyrighted in various years from 1927 through1946. In part, the Fascisti were:
… organized in connection with a repressive movement directed against the socialists and communists and the disturbances excited by them during 1919 and the years following, which regarded the government as criminally negligent in failing to deal with these disturbances, and took measure on its own account, often violent ones, to combat them…
Hence, one could say people opposed to socialists and communists meet part of the definition of Fascist. Aside from the increased ease of which the dirty label sticks there are other reasons to not defining yourself as opposed, especially violently opposed, to communists and socialists.
Remember the poem from a couple days ago: Laugh, and the World Laughs with You? If you are an unhappy, angry person you will have fewer people who wish to be around you and join your political bandwagon. Be for something good. Be for freedom. Be for liberty. Be for a booming economy. Be for a wealthy society.
To offer Bitcoin holders a bit of hope, I will point out the CNN article claims there have been crashes of equal magnitude before and the crypto currency recovered within a year. However, the reasons for the crash were different then.
And, as I mentioned in several of those posts, it is a faith-based asset without the backing of a government which accepts it for payment of taxes. The government backing of an issued currency ensures a non-zero value as long as the government exists (since they will honor as payment of taxes). Bitcoin could go to zero in the span of days or weeks. Right now, you could be watching it slide into oblivion.
If this is its end, the economic ripples will be “interesting.”
I know it would not be consistent with other memes with the same format, but if someone were to tell me this, my response would be, “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.” Or perhaps, “Make it 90% and we have a deal.”
Laugh, and the world laughs with you, weep, and you weep alone. For the sad old earth must borrow it’s mirth, but has trouble enough of its own. Sing and the hills will answer, sigh it is lost on the air For the echoes bound to a joyful sound but shrink from voicing care.
Rejoice and men will seek you, grieve and they turn and go They want full measure of all your pleasure but do not need your woe. Be glad and your friends are many, be sad and you’ll lose them all There are none to decline your nectared wine but alone you must drink life’s gall.
Feast and your halls are crowded, fast and the world goes by Succeed and give and it helps you live but no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure for a long and lordly train But one by one we must all file on through the narrow aisles of pain
Ella Wheeler Wilcox Solitude February 25, 1883
Over 40 years ago I wrote a program to give me a random quote every time my computer booted up. I still use that program. Instead of on boot, it runs when I start up a new instance of a command prompt. The quote above appeared a few minutes ago. I don’t remember putting the quote in the collection. But like a lot of others in the collection, it resonates with me. Perhaps, in these troubled times, it will resonate with you as well and give you some direction to better days ahead.
I asked Grok for the original publish date and received a little more than what I asked for:
It was first published on February 25, 1883, in The New York Sun newspaper. (Some sources note slight variations like February 21, but February 25 is the most consistently cited date across reliable references.)
The poem later appeared in her collection Poems of Passion, released in May 1883, which became a major bestseller.
The inspiration came from an incident on a train where Wilcox observed contrasting emotionsโa joyful group and a grieving widowโleading to the insight that joy is shared, but sorrow is often solitary. She reportedly earned just $5 for the initial newspaper publication.
The people who scream the loudest about government tyranny have nothing to say. The same people who fantasize about standing up to federal overreach have vanished at the precise moment federal power killed a citizen exercising a constitutional right.
This is the tell.
We have seen this movement erupt before. When Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-15 and killed two people, he was transformed into a cause. He was fundraised for, defended relentlessly, and held up as proof that armed citizens are the last line of order in a chaotic world. The weapon was the point, and the violence was excused. The narrative was protected at all costs.
But when a man lawfully carrying a firearm is tackled, disarmed, and shot anyway, there is no mobilization from the same crowd. The difference is not the gun. It is who the gun is allowed to protect.
Because the gun-rights movement has never actually been about freedom. It is about hierarchy and about who gets to feel powerful and in charge. It is about whose fear counts, and whose death does not.
Dead children are acceptable collateral. Dead immigrants are invisible. Dead Black and brown men are routine. And now, apparently, dead armed citizens are still not enough to stir outrage unless they fit the right political story.
The tell is that McClure left out the part where Alex Petti, who is never named in the article, committed a crime and was in the process of being arrested when he was disarmed and erroneously shot during the scuffle. A criminal getting shot by law enforcement during an arrest is much different than Rittenhouse who successfully defended himself against multiple criminals’ intent on killing or seriously injuring him.
The two situations are not analogous. It has nothing to do with the political affiliation, skin color, or immigration status. It has to do with whether the people involved were law-abiding or not.
The only thing clear in the article is McClure does not have a good grasp of reality and/or is being deliberately deceptive.
It is my intention to assure the residents of Livingston that we are still a Second Amendment sanctuary county, and we will be paying close attention to the bills that will be coming out of Richmond. I will do my absolute best to help protect those citizens and our constitutional values here in Spotsylvania.
With the flurry of gun control laws being enacted in Virginia this is at least a little bit of good news. I don’t think the whole “Second Amendment sanctuary” thing has ever been tested in the legal arena. But at least it is “a spit in their face”.
Several niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups said that since the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, they can hardly keep up with the surging demand for firearms training.
Surely, everyone can see this will result in making it easier to eliminate the infringements on our 2nd Amendment rights. Some people will be concerned of increased odds for violent civil war. What they probably don’t realize is that once someone becomes a gun owner there is increased rate of those people leaving the political left.
I see this as a minor increase in risk with tremendous potential for good.
So, why escalate to violence? Because the most dedicated communist agitators have no choice. Walz desperately wants a standdown because Trump has not folded. The deportations continue, and the campaign is not getting the response the left hoped for. Sure, the usual eunuchs (Tillis cannot depart the Senate soon enough) are whining, but Trump is holding firm and forcing the state actors to refuse his reasonable requests, like turning over criminals. The Walz types wonโt escalate, but the radicals very well could.
Remember, you earn cred as a leftist by going left. You lose it by moderating or compromising. The leftists have talked themselves into a box canyon: Trump is literally Hitler, so how can they stop resisting? No, there will be leftists who want to move on to direct violent action and plenty of social media supporters to cheer it on. Think of it as an opportunity; the one who goes violent first becomes their hero. They will try to do it for max marquee effect and the lowest possible risk – both in terms of the authorities fighting back and judicial accountability…
I want my underground bunker in Idaho completed and stocked.
In related news, today a co-worker and his wife are meeting me in Idaho to look for property to aid in their escape from Washington state. Prices are outlandishly high compared to what I think they should be.
The Renee Good case was clear-cut self-defense. Objectively, she hit the accelerator when her tires were pointed directly at the officer. If the officer had complete omnipotence he would still have been justified in using deadly force.
The Pretti case is different. It still looks like lawful self-defense, but in this case, if the officers were omnipotent, they would NOT have fired. But from the perception of the individual officer in the moment, all they know is that they are dealing with an agitator who has 1) aggressively confronted a federal law enforcement officer 2) unlawfully interfered in an arrest of a third party and 3) violently resisted arrest. And then the officer hears “gun gun gun.” We don’t know exactly what that officer was seeing at the time; maybe the body cam video will be probative, maybe not. But the officer is allowed to rely on the perceptions of his colleagues combined with his own, so if he heard “gun gun gun” and saw Pretti reach for his waist that’s a lawful shoot even if the officer was mistaken.
There is at least one video I have seen that appears to show the officer who took Petti’s gun had an AD with it as he was walking away. This, as you might expect, appears to have initiated the shooting of Petti.
If true, it will almost certainly result in it being a lawful, tragic shooting.