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.
There has been a surge in the number of liberal Americans owning a firearm, according to new gun ownership data from the University of Chicago’s NORC research group cited by The Wall Street Journal.
According to WSJ, a world that has long been the domain of the white conservative male is being adopted by a growing number of Democrats who are ditching their scruples and getting themselves down to the local gun store.
Given this growing trend, it is hardly surprising that presidential candidate Kamala Harris has repeatedly drawn attention to how she and her running mate Tim Walz are both gun owners.
In general, this is good for gun owner rights issues. The more gun owners the more votes we get against restrictive gun laws. That’s fine, but the question I have is, “Why now?”
This is one of the answers given in the article:
Michael Ciemnoczolowski, a dyed in the wool Democrat from Iowa, interviewed by the news outlet, said that he was anxious about various unsettling trends that included a rise in armed right-wing extremists.
This chimes with what Professor Deana Rohlinger, a sociology professor at Florida State University, said in Newsweek – that rising gun ownership amongst Democrats could well be linked to the increasing political polarization in the US.
“For some, a gun purchase may be the result of their read on how increased political tensions and divisiveness in the US might play out,” Rohlinger told the news site.
The FBI has arrested an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State militant organization and was plotting an Election Day attack targeting large crowds in the U.S., the Justice Department said Tuesday.
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City told investigators after his arrest Monday that he had planned his attack to coincide with Election Day next month and that he and a co-conspirator expected to die as martyrs, according to charging documents.
Last May, Barb and I visited the Scandinavian countries. One of the places we visited was Stockholm. The Airbnb we stayed at had a few issues, but location was not one of them. We were capable of walking to many interesting places and nearby public transportation enabled quick access to many others.
Barb had a list of places to visit, and we connected with all of them. But just a three-minute walk from our Airbnb I saw this:
When I was in grade school, I really loved science. I entertained a dim fantasy of someday winning a Nobel Prize.
Barb wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was, but we had the time and visited the next day. She became more enthusiastic as we went through the museum. I was excited and shared bits of history she didn’t know. For example, Alford Nobel earned his money by inventing and manufacturing dynamite. He created the peace prize to compensate. He wanted to balance the war destruction enabled by his invention. We would be watching a video and without first mentioning the person, their accomplishments or difficulties would be described. I would whisper, “That must be Niels Bohr!”, or Marie Curie, or someone else I knew about.
There are lots of good cases for SCOTUS to review. I wish an “assault weapon” ban were on the docket and eventually, perhaps incidentally with the “assault weapon” case, get NFA thrown out. The serial number/home build guns issue is being heard and is almost certain to go our way. Eventually I can see the background checks being dropped and being able to order guns online without an FFL. After all, FFL’s are not part of our history and tradition of gun laws.
In the meantime, this is probably a higher priority case than any of the above, even if it is a distraction from the individual rights cases:
The United States Supreme Court will hear case about whether Mexico can sue Smith & Wesson Brands Inc. for facilitating sales to people connected with Mexico’s drug cartels.
On Friday, the justices agreed to hear Smith & Wesson’s case seeking to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the Mexican government. Mexico sued the gun maker and is asking for billions of dollars in damages and new gun-control measures. It’s the first suit by a national government against the gun industry, and one that Smith & Wesson warn could completely decimate their industry.
In a letter addressed to the Supreme Court clerk on August 8, a lawyer for Smith & Wesson Brands said the company is protected from a 2005 law that provides liability shields to gunmakers.
…
In the lawsuit, Mexico alleged the manufactures and distributors were helping the purchase of their firearms by dealers who were known to supply the drug cartels. It also is claimed that the companies did not make changes, such as installing safeguards or making gun serial numbers harder to tamper with, that could make the guns less likely for criminal use.
But I don’t wonder long. The likely reason is that Operation Fast and Furious was a ruse to generate a means to bring down gun dealers and manufacturers.
A group of state legislators, local politicians and nonprofits on Tuesday launched a national coalition that hopes to circumvent the congressional stalemate on gun reform by pressing for violence prevention efforts at the local level.
The coalition, Legislators for Safer Communities, aims to capitalize on the shifting politics of gun reform by focusing more attention on state legislatures, where violence prevention advocates have scored their biggest wins in recent years.
I have to wonder about something which is not mentioned, the courts. The really active gun owner rights groups are getting more done with fewer people and fewer dollars in the Federal courts than they can in the state legislatures. They don’t have to fight the same fights every year in every state.
Are the anti-gun people just trying to keep the money coming in by giving their supporters false hope? Or do they believe the Democrats are soon going to neuter SCOTUS and reverse our wins?
Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into our society on the backs of rightwing billionaires like the late Libertarian David Koch, who ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of shutting down every government agency except the military, courts, and police.
I find it interesting he does not suggest a system he believes to be better. Or in the famous works of Thomas Sowell:
Compared to what?
At what cost?
What hard evidence do you have?
Communism and socialism are well known crimes against humanity (thank you MTHead). And it seems he overlooked the founding documents of the U.S. are a pretty good match for Libertarianism, and we did okay with that for several decades.
It appears to me that Hartmann sees libertarianism as a threat, and he has to lie and distort the facts about it to poison the discussion. This must be so his preferred political structure does not have to compete with the ideas of libertarians.
Via email from a friend and reader who shall remain nameless:
I’ve volunteered to be a poll worker out here in Georgia. I did the primaries, and just finished training for the general election coming up.
For the Primaries, it was all about how to follow the process, how the machines worked and how to troubleshoot them, and what the laws were around voting and how my county interpreted those laws.
This year, the training included visits from two law enforcement agencies with training on active shooter response and other unpleasantness. There is more discussion this year about mob violence (which includes mass ‘victim’ protests), and even the occasional entitled soccer mom ‘Karen’, who thinks election laws can be broken for her convenience and will scream “Disenfranchisement!” if we don’t break the law for her. We’re not allowed to be armed, but my county will station an under-cover officer who is armed at each poling place.
Even money has Stacy Abrams creating a scene in which her supporters create a huge disturbance at a polling location in order to get a poll worker to yell at them or tell them to leave. Then we’ll see a video clip of a nice ‘family of color’ going to vote, spliced to the angry poll worker yelling at them to leave. Personally, I think it’s more than even money this will happen. The state elections board made a big deal about this in their training.
Also interesting is that a new law was passed in Georgia requiring the ballots to be hand-counted before leaving the polling place! When I heard about this, I was thrilled! I’d love to get a hand count of the human-readable names on a ballot and compare that with the tally garnered from the barcode printed on those ballots. But alas, that is not how it’s going to work. The way the law is being interpreted is that the ‘number of ballots cast’ will be counted and compared against the scanned count of ‘ballots cast’ to make sure they match.
Ugh. We did that on our own initiative after the primaries just as a due diligence check to make sure that the number of registered voters checking in matched ballots printed matched ballots recorded. We had a solid paper trail and multiple witness signatures for any discrepancy (printer ruined one ballot that needed to be re-printed. We kept the ruined ballot, voided it, and documented the occurrence. Anyone with a discrepancy with a voter registration was given a provisional ballot, and the county will deep-dive into that voter’s legal registration status before counting or tossing the vote. This part we do very well indeed.
It’s the bloody barcodes, and the fact that I don’t know what they tell the counter! I’d be happy to count all the ballots for A and for B manually, and then check that against the report from the counting machine. We post the results from the counting machine at each voting location on the door of the poling location after the polls close. Immediately transparent. But without an audit of the counting machines, I don’t trust them. They’ve been wrong before.
The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue.
It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.
So it’s really, really, hard, much harder to build consensus today than any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this. You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc.
But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.
"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change."
It’s been, only two days since someone, allegedly, tried to kill Donald Trump again. And you are here at the podium in the White House Briefing Room, calling him a threat. How many more assignation attempts on Donald Trump until the president, and the vice president, and you pick a different word, to describe Trump, other than threat?
If you question their violence inspiring rhetoric, they declare your speech is dangerous. Then, if you listen to the rest of her response, she doubles down on Trump being a threat.
This is what they think of you.
Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about their attitude toward the First Amendment?
We’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.
Using the 2nd Amendment as sort of a canary in the coalmine seems to work well. If they won’t respect the 2nd Amendment, why should you expect they will respect any other rights? And, of course, once they have sufficiently infringed upon the right to keep and bear arms you don’t have the means to effectively push back when they infringe all your rights all the time.
Via an email, which had “terrorism” instead of “the dynamite bomb” in the quote, from pkoning.
While it captures the appropriate sentiment succinctly, it is not all that accurate these days. It appears to me that Israel is doing rather well in their fight against the terrorists/dynamite-bombers in their neighborhoods while using few, and perhaps zero, Winchester rifles. As was reported in a briefing at work last week:
They compromised the supply chain and delivered pagers with explosives to Hezbollah leadership. They blew them up almost simultaneously. Hezbollah then went to walkie-talkies and those were blown up. When Hezbollah then assembled in a single building for face-to-face communication, they blew up the building.
This will be studied and admired for years to come as one of the most creative, complex, and well executed operations in the history of warfare.
Precision guided bombs, M-4s, M-16s, tanks, and hand grenades have been delivering some very authoritative answers as well.
Whatever you think of their religion, ethics, and/or political behavior, they have certainly demonstrated if you don’t respect them, you risk coming to fear them.
I hope gun owners don’t have to teach similar lessons to those who fail to respect us and our rights.
The nearest neighbor is over 0.5 miles away. The nearest stop sign is over two miles away. The nearest stop light is nearly 40 miles away. And the nearest interstate freeway is over 130 miles away.
It turns out what I regard as a feature some claim this isolation is, in software development terms, a “bug.”
It all depends on your design goals. I’m designing for quiet, safety, stability, and resilience. I think it is an appropriate location for uncertain times.
At 6:00 AM it was a little cool and Barb was prepared:
I had often wondered how they got hot air in the balloon without burning them. Once they are inflated, sure, not really a problem.
They inflated them on the ground with a fan. Then, they poke the burner (they probably have a different name for them) in and put hot air in until the balloon lifts off the ground.
There are few other situations where you would need defensive weapons more than when the social structure has been ripped apart. Either this is either mind boggling stupid or deliberate enabling of criminals.