Full dependence on the government enables evil

From the FBI today:

FBI Statement on the Shooting in Parkland, Florida

On January 5, 2018, a person close to Nikolas Cruz contacted the FBI’s Public Access Line (PAL) tipline to report concerns about him. The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.

Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life. The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken.

We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said:

“We are still investigating the facts. I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public. It’s up to all Americans to be vigilant, and when members of the public contact us with concerns, we must act properly and quickly.

“We have spoken with victims and families, and deeply regret the additional pain this causes all those affected by this horrific tragedy. All of the men and women of the FBI are dedicated to keeping the American people safe, and are relentlessly committed to improving all that we do and how we do it.”

Good security depends on multiple independent layers. Law enforcement is one layer. Threat intelligence is another. In this instance law enforcement failed. This is how it should have gone down.

Denying access to the protected assets is another. This requires more than signs and stern words. It frequently requires people with guns. This is something the political left is fine with if the protected asset is a bank, government building, celebrity or politician, but it the protected asset is a common person and especially the children of a commoner then they go hysterical and demand even less physical security. This is clearly some sort of insanity and/or evil and should be treated as such.

It’s nice when they self identify

I’ve used this car wash many times. And I walked right by it today.

From the Bellevue Washington police blog:

What started as a routine trip to the car wash ended in a melee and an arrest this past Sunday in Bellevue. Yesterday afternoon shortly before 3 p.m., Bellevue police responded to a road rage incident in the parking lot of the Brown Bear car wash in the Factoria neighborhood of Bellevue. While responding, police learned that there was a minor rear-end crash involving two vehicles that were waiting in line for the car wash. One of the drivers got out of his car to take photos of the damage to the vehicles. The other driver then reportedly got out of his car, pointed a handgun at the victim, and made threats.

When police arrived, the suspect, a 40 year-old Bellevue resident, refused to exit his vehicle or follow the Officers’ instructions. Officers attempted to remove the suspect from the vehicle, and the suspect fought, punching one of the Officers in the face. The suspect allegedly threatened to kill the police and made disparaging comments about the victim’s perceived ethnicity. Police used a taser to subdue the suspect, who was arrested. The Officer that was punched had a minor injury and was transported to the hospital as a precaution. The suspect’s vehicle, a red Chevrolet Camaro with a custom license plate “DIRTBAG”, was impounded to the Bellevue Police Department for a search warrant.The license plate of the suspect's vehicle.

The suspect is expected to be charged today in King County Superior Court with first degree assault with a firearm, assault on a police officer, malicious harassment, obstructing police, and resisting arrest.

If all the dirt bags would identify themselves in such a manner it make so many things much easier.

Quote of the day—Patricia Eddington

Some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat seeking device.

So, you don’t shoot deer with a bullet that size. If you do you could cook it at the same time.

Patricia Eddington
Assembly Woman D-NY
July 2007
[Via a tweet from Firearms Policy Coalition.

See also:

I can be pretty creative if I try. But even if I was given weeks to try I don’t think I could come up with some of the crazy things the anti-gun people say.

I used to listen to a morning D.J. on the radio which regularly featured stupid stuff that people said and did. It had a soundbite of something like, “Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.”* The things these people come up with illustrate the truth of that statement.

At times it’s mind boggling that our enemies are this stupid and yet after the fifty years I have been aware of the battle they still haven’t been defeated.

But does does explain why they push for “smart guns”? Do they recognize they are too stupid to use them without technological assistance?—Joe]


* Mark Twain said something similar.

Anti-gun people say the strangest things

Via the FPC:

TheThingsAntiGunPeopleSay

One might think this sort of thing was a “brain fart” or some slip of the tongue that occurs when under the stress of an interview or public speaking event. But I’ve seen these sort of things happen in written communication. They simply do not have the mental processes to handle rational thought. This happens so frequently we have a name for it. It is called Peterson Syndrome.

How’s that going to work out?

I have to laugh at this:

Until recently, sheriff’s deputies notified offenders they weren’t allowed to possess firearms but gave them 24 hours to turn them in.

There was no mechanism, however, to make sure that the gun was actually turned in. Local law enforcement and state law enforcement officials would go house to house to enforce the laws as resources allowed, but the
process was expensive, slow and potentially dangerous.

The sheriff’s office is now working with the Office on the Status of Woman and others to develop a comprehensive plan for making sure everyone required to surrender their guns does so in a manner that’s safe for officers, according to Suzy Loftus, assistant chief legal counsel for the sheriff’s office.

So, going house to house and confiscating is considered dangerous? Who would have guessed?

So, now, they are going to “develop a comprehensive plan” where people surrender their guns “in a manner that’s safe for officers”.

Wow! These people are really stupid.

Apparently they are unable to conceive of the response, “No. Your move.”

How gun control works

From Rolf:

HowGunControlworks

As I have said before:

How long does it take the average high school dropout to find a way around the ban? Yeah, that’s right, Einstein. The average high school dropout can get all the recreational drugs they want within an hour anytime of the day, any day of the week. So just how effective you think a background check would be in reducing the abuse of recreational drugs?

Now apply what you know about the recreational drug issue to firearms. A background check is totally pointless.

A similar argument can be made for nearly all gun control. Nearly all politicians know this. They have to have some objective other than reducing violent crime because it just doesn’t work and the data supports this conclusion.

Most people who have studied this believe the real objective is to increased the dependency on government and increase the political power of government officials. This line of reasoning can be extrapolated to “so they can implement a socialist state”. YMMV.

Random thought of the day

Progressives who demand gun control sometimes tell me they want to prevent crimes rather than rely on punishment of the perpetrators.

If crime prevention is their preferred approach to these sort of things then why don’t they advocate for building “The Wall”?

Quote of the day—Bernie Sanders 2020‏ @Bernie2020X

You are literally promoting anti Semitism and white supremacy. Guns do not belong in the hands of private citizens. Shame on you.

Bernie Sanders 2020‏ @Bernie2020X
Tweeted on January 7, 2018
[This was in response to Maj Toure‏ @MAJTOURE tweeting the four rules of firearm safety.

Many anti-gun people literally do not have the ability to think logically. This is an example of that.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Scott D. Dailard

The .50 caliber Desert Eagle has similarly destructive characteristics that distinguish it from other handgun cartridges. It is an enormously powerful, high-velocity, armor-piercing round manufactured for use in tank-mounted machine guns that has been adapted for use in a few foreign made handguns.

Scott D. Dailard
1994
The Role of Ammunition in a Balanced Program of Gun Control: A Critique of Moynihan Bullet Bills
Journal of Legislation: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 3.
[And this is just one of many reason why we despise anti-gun people doing “research”. They only have a vague idea of what they are talking about and/or deliberately lie. And, note the date, this has been going on for decades.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Charles C. W. Cooke

Ed Asner, is a 9/11 truther. Given that, the quality of the work is about what you’d expect. Having proposed that Congress, the Supreme Court, and the majority of Americans “claim the Second Amendment is not simply about state militias but guarantees the unfettered right of everyone to own, carry, trade and eventually shoot someone with a gun” — ah, yes, the right to “eventually shoot someone with a gun,” so beloved to those of us who can read — Asner and his co-author, Ed Weinberger, proceed to offer up the most comprehensively illiterate and most embarrassingly researched example within what is, alas, a growing genre. As an example of Second Amendment trutherism, this one will likely never be beaten.

Charles C. W. Cooke
December 19, 2017
No, Salon, the U.S. Was Not ‘Founded on Gun Control’
[I’m skeptical of the claim that it will never be beaten. Human genius has limits but stupidity and evil do not appear to be so handicapped.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ridley Nelson

Without drastic reduction in the number of guns – by say 80 percent – alongside very tight gun type and use restrictions, we will continue to live in a country where deer get far better protection than humans.

Ridley Nelson
December 12, 2017
Armed as For a War Zone
[Really! Some might be tempted to demonstrate the fallacy of Nelson’s assertion with a side by side comparison of the differences.

And don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Feinblatt @JohnFeinblatt

As a package, “Fix NICS” would keep guns from domestic abusers — while “Concealed Carry Reciprocity” would force states to allow people to carry concealed guns in public even if they are domestic abusers, have other dangerous histories, or lack even the most basic safety training to carry concealed guns in public.

John Feinblatt @JohnFeinblatt
President of Everytown for Gun Safety
December 8, 2017
NRA hijacks first bipartisan gun bill in years. Now it’s too dangerous to pass.
[There is a reason no one ever says anti-gun people are smart.

Here we have one of these mental midgets apparently unable to avoid asserting two incompatible conclusions in the same sentence. If Fix NICS keeps guns from domestic abusers, because they are prohibited from firearms possession, then how can CCR force states to allow something Fix NICS prevented?

This sort of thing happens so frequently we have a name for it. It’s called Peterson Syndrome. Logical thought is beyond their capability.

I wish we could just laugh these idiots out of the political arena but unfortunately there are too many people with these type of mental issues.—Joe]

A look into the mind of the other side

Reading this article is like stepping into an alternate reality:

While the Fort Worth Police Department was making a show of getting guns off the streets, it also was quietly supplying the public with guns.

Over the previous 10 years, the department has sold more than 1,100 of its used weapons to licensed gun dealers, which turn around and sell them to the public, according to department records. It isn’t alone.

An investigation by Texas Standard and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that 21 of Texas’ 50 largest law enforcement agencies sell their used weapons to the public, effectively creating a pipeline of guns flowing right back into communities.

Jay Wachtel, a former ATF agent and lecturer at California State University, Fullerton, says departments that sell weapons are playing with fire.

“It’s bullshit. You know instinctively when you put guns out there that they are going to get misused,” Wachtel said. “Nobody that’s gone through a police academy would not consider that possibility.”

Jay Wachtel, the former ATF agent, says he doesn’t know how much of an impact these sales would make on gun crime. “Every schmuck who wants a gun, a lethal gun, can probably get one already,” he said, adding that the real issue is deeper than any statistic.

“It’s a moral issues,” he said. “If (police) are OK with a few crimes and few people being killed because they’re making all this money, then they’re OK with it.”

They want the police to destroy their old guns when they replace them. It’s as if they believe there are a fixed number of guns in their reality. And the “logic” of Wachtel in those last two paragraphs is jaw dropping. He admits “every schmuck” who wants a gun can probably get one but in the next sentence claims crimes are committed and people killed because the police are making money. And, as is frequently true, the logic twists are like fractals, they extend as deep as you can dig into it. Look at this sentence:

Every schmuck who wants a gun, a lethal gun, can probably get one…

He appears to distinguish police guns from guns in general as “a lethal gun”. Have these guns been endowed with special powers because they have been touched by the hands of police officers? Or that the police have approved these particular models for use in their departments it means they are more dangerous in the hands of the general public?

One has to wonder what color the sky is in their universe.

These people are nuts. You cannot talk sense into them. You cannot and should not try to accommodate them in any way. It only encourages them. I spent many years (my counselor told me, “Mere mortals would have left years ago.”) trying to live in peace with someone whos brain was apparently wired such that their reality only partially intersected with mine. The way to deal with them is to set firm limits on the behavior you will tolerate, tell them the consequences if they violate those limits, and then do what you said you would do if they step over the line. The result will be unpleasant. But the result will be far better than if you attempt to accommodate them.

Quote of the day—Alex Pareene

We will probably not nationalize or expropriate our arms manufacturers any time soon, though we obviously should. We can at least make it possible to sue them into dust. But if you want a gun ban in the United States, here’s a thought: Even if you accept the (obviously, stupidly, grandly wrong) conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment, there’s still no actual right to sell guns. So why not ban that?

Alex Pareene
November 20, 2017
BAN GUNS
[Apart from not reading and/or understanding the complete decision he references he has crap for brains if he thinks his suggestion even begins to make sense. Using the same logic, you may have the right to vote but not holding elections makes that right meaningless. Which, of course, is what he wants. But I find it difficult to believe the courts would tolerate such an idea and if they did I find it difficult to believe there would be enough law enforcement willing to enforce such decisions and/or prevent a dramatic and sudden shortage of judges and politicians.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Marjorie Decker

It is a privilege that we allow individuals to hold onto something that causes harm and death. It is a privilege to have a car license, it is a privilege to have a gun license.

Marjorie Decker
Massachusetts state representative (Democrat)
November 16, 2017
‘Privilege’ comment riles gun rights supporters
[So holding onto a kitchen knife or baseball bat is a privilege? How about a pitchfork or a torch? Or how about a bucket of hot tar, a bag of feathers, and a fence rail? Does the state of Massachusetts issues licenses for these?

Also of interest, “Are there hunting licenses and bag limits for politicians who have crap for brains and vote for laws infringing upon the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms?” I’m asking for friends who live in Massachusetts.—Joe]

Quote of the day—David Frum

It’s out of bounds to observe that “Chicago” is shorthand for “we only have gun crime because of black people” or how often “I want to protect my family” is code for “I need to prove to my girlfriend who’s really boss.”

David Frum
October 6, 2017
The Rules of the Gun Debate–The rules for discussing firearms in the United States obscure the obvious solutions.
[I wouldn’t say it’s “out of bounds”. I would say it’s stupid to say things that are obviously and easily provably to be false.

I have to wonder if Frum’s straw man arguments are the result of raw talent or if it took years of training.—Joe]

Lunacy

The political left tends to call anyone who disagrees with them lunatics. As Lyle points out, in some cases it’s about perception. When I’m in a mellow mood I give them a pass on being stupid, ignorant and/or evil. Maybe they just can’t see things from my point of view.

Then there cases like this (via a Tweet from Michael Z Williamson) regarding protestors who are blocking railroad tracks in Olympia Washington:

“There is reason to suspect that the blockade protesters are neither interested in negotiating nor in an amicable resolution that would result in removing the blockade without force.”

A protester who signed in with the name Franz spoke during the meeting’s public comment period, and read the protesters’ list of demands.

The demands, also sent to The Olympian in a press release, are for:

▪ The Port of Olympia to cease all fossil fuel and military infrastructure shipments.

▪ Democratic control of the Port of Olympia by the community as a whole.

▪ A just transition for port and rail workers to good, green jobs, and for the economy of Thurston County as a whole to transition to a cooperative, fair and sustainable economy.

Franz asked the City Council not to order another violent attack on protesters, referencing police involvement in removing last year’s blockade.

Reed Wing also spoke during public comment. He pulled a fluorescent green hat over his face and identified himself as a Martian sent to Earth to speak out in favor of the blockade.

“I come from the representative of the United Federation of Mars, an ecological and utopian society where we have abolished fossil fuels, police, and the exploitation of one Martian by another,” Wing said.

I think “Reed Wing” is deliberately misdirecting people from his actual origin. The available evidence indicates he is actually from Luna.

When the political left calls their opponents lunatics it’s a textbook case of projection.

Quote of the day—Patrick Radden Keefe

Following the Newtown shooting, Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners for America, suggested that these massacres might be avoided in the future, if only more teachers were armed.

As Pratt’s sentiment should make clear, the United States has slipped its moorings and drifted into a realm of profound national lunacy.

Patrick Radden Keefe
December 15, 2012
Making Gun Control Happen
[The fact that the prohibition against teachers being armed is an infringement upon their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms and is a felony punishable by death doesn’t even enter into Keefe reality bubble.

Also, I find it very telling that anti-gun people derisively dismiss statements out of hand which could be either verified or refuted with a little research. Facts are irrelevant in their alternate reality and tell us who the lunatics really are.—Joe]

Lack of real men = violence

The on-going “pussification” of America is leading to more violence, this time in schools.

There was a time when this would not have been possible. That was when the principle and superintendent were both World War II veterans. When I was in elementary school, the principal and sup. were nice guys. They liked kids. They looked out for things. They never had to prove it, physically, and that is critically important, but it was universally understood that they were in charge and could handle anything.

The very idea of having any kind of violence perpetrated by students against a teacher would have laughable. Utterly impossible, in fact. Sure, two boys might get into a scrap during recess, but it would soon be over. Even the old lady teachers could handle them. It was understood that there were men in charge, just within shouting distance, if they should be required. Thus a frail old woman could take a scrapping, healthy boy by the ear and set him down, and give him a talking-to about playground etiquette, and he’d never fight back. He’d sit and pay attention.

In our litigious, pussified, Progressive society however, in which the term “strong man” either means “tyrant” or it has given way to the term “strong woman”, there’s no one left to prevent the violence. Not in some of the more leftist, public schools anyway.

It’s a Lord of the Flies situation we’re building.

I’m not saying women can’t maintain order, just that it’s far less likely, the farther away the men get. Put women in charge, AND give them a Progressive, passive, left-wing “non-violent” mentality, and all hell’s going break loose. Fatherless boys in woman-run public schools are being raised for a life of violence and crime.

The government then becomes the “father”, but a loveless and tyrannical one. That, I believe, is the plan. We can therefore refer to that Harrisburg, PA school as a success.

Frame of reference

On Twitter:

Donald Arant‏ @darant3 Replying to @NRATV @MrColionNoir

More poisonous gun rhetoric and PROPAGANDA! Since you brought up the idea of the evolution of guns…let’s allow all Americans the right to own tanks?

Many other people pointed out that it is entirely legal to own tanks. Expensive, but legal. I thought I could help in a different way. His frame of reference is totally messed up.

So this was my reply:

I think I see the problem here. You believe the government LETS people do things. It’s the other way around. The U.S. Constitution, written by “We the people”, granted the government certain powers. It didn’t grant them powers to infringe upon our right to keep and bear arms.

He has probably been stuck in his alternate reality for so long that I’m not sure he will be able to comprehend things as they really are. But, it was worth a shot.