We used to believe — still see this in comments — that the left (and their distant patron the USSR) were ultimately good at one thing: propaganda. And for a long time, they seemed to be so. They could convince people of the most ridiculous things and more importantly, they’d made leftism into a positional good. If you wanted to show you were high class you’d be as leftist as possible in public, all the way to communist.
Turns out though that this wasn’t in any way shape or form a natural system, any more than the public schools are. It turns out they could act superior, sell leftism as a positional good, and act like we were the baddies because they controlled critical positions in the information/art/entertainment industrial complex. They could therefore keep out anyone who disagreed with them, and act like all smart people agreed with the most outrageous idiocies of the communist mind.
… but this is not the case anymore. And it’s becoming glaringly obvious it was all fake.
In fact, the more distributed the information system gets the more the left is becoming like the mean girls once they leave high school: bitter, vociferous, and attracting only the mentally ill.
…
The reign of the mean girls is coming to an end. First slowly (these last 20 years) then suddenly, you’ll see communists and leftists in general being derided as the sapskulls with nothing but evil and vain gloating on their side.
We are unpersuaded by the State’s argument that LCMs are not “Arms” covered by the Second Amendment because they are not necessary to operate a firearm. The State reasons that firearms can operate with smaller capacity magazines. But the text of the Second Amendment does not limit “Arms” to the minimum equipment necessary to operate a weapon. And nowhere in Heller or Bruen’s textual analyses did the Supreme Court suggest that the availability of alternative equipment changes the definition of an arm under the Second Amendment.
It is important to note that the decision was 10-5 and that Freeman, writing for the majority, is Biden appointee. And for people who care about such things, she is a black woman. The racist who would normally call this decision a right wing, white male, ruling will find themselves a bit tongue tied on this occasion.
Please also note that anti-gun politicians attempting to use such weak arguments is very telling. They are reaching the end of the line. As we move forward their babblings will become less coherent and more easily dismissed. Soon their contribution to society will be considered nothing more than a stain on liberty in our history books.
On July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to so-called “assault weapon” bans out of Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. That means the justices will now confront one of the most important Second Amendment questions in the country: whether states and localities may outlaw some of the most popular rifles in America by attaching to them a political label designed to frighten the public. However, the gun-control lobby chooses to market these bans, the underlying reality is simple. The government is attempting to prohibit arms that millions of peaceable Americans own for lawful purposes.
In my mind this should have been resolved within a few years after California passed the Roberti–Roos “Assault Weapons” Control Act in 1989. But the reality is that we didn’t have the SCOTUS votes for a win. There were a lot of people who even doubted we had the votes to agree the 2nd Amendment was an individual right in the 2008 Heller decision. Now, we know we have the votes and the pro-freedom organizations are pushing as many cases as they can through the courts while the chances of a win are good.
This could be dismissed as an incredible fantasy dream that could never true:
“The US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, has agreed to hear en banc the question of whether Congress has the constitutional authority to enact federal gun control laws.”
The only hook in the enumerated powers granted to the Federal government to regulate guns is the commerce clause. Had you been concerned the feds restricting gun ownership in the early 1800’s you would have thought you were doubly protected by the lack of an enumerated power as well as the 2nd Amendment. As of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) the government bypassed the enumerated powers restriction, and they burst through the loophole like one of the Missoula floods. Now we have an essentially unlimited Federal government.
The case before the Fifth Circuit is a gun case by a convicted felon in possession of a firearm challenging the government’s authority granted in Wickard v. Filburn. If successful at both the appeals court (plausible) it would be immediately appealed to SCOTUS. Justice Thomas has said he thinks this approach to invalidating gun regulation has merit.
If SCOTUS overturns Wickard v. Filburn we would suddenly be living in an unknown universe. Probably 95% (or more) of what the Feds currently do would be beyond their authority.
This would be a way to get out from under the $40 Trillion dollar debt. It would relive all the congress critters from being blamed for the collapse of, well, just about everything the government does.
I would like to believe this has the potential to restore the limited government the founders envisioned. But, to put it mildly, I am skeptical. But it is fun to think about. Imagine the liberal tears, shrieks, and wailing!
But just that this is being considered is incredible. We truly live in interesting times.
“Doubles all around,” said Tradition. “New Jersey is paying.”
A little knowledge of 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b) and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 helps with the punchline.
I’ve been putting time and money into this cause for over 30 years now. It is incredibly satisfying to be able to make jokes like this instead of thinking about to make my last stand at my underground bunker in Idaho as costly as possible for the forces of tyranny.
I’ve been quoting Winkler since 2008 (see also here). I would never call him a friend to the gun rights movement. But he is mostly accurate, if you ignore what some people might say are lies by omissions, in his observations.
That he says, “there very few guns laws that are safe”, is an admission from the other side that a structural collapse in our opposition is in sight. This is other evidence of this too:
I think a lot of folks on the left see this like I saw the gay marriage issue: Regardless of how one might feel about it, it was a losing issue for R’s. And it is better that the debate on it just be disposed of for good. Many folks on the left know 2A is a losing issue for them. And the longer they drag it on, the more active we get about it. Being anti-2a is an anchor around their necks.
Of course, that is not the universally accepted take:
Nothing much has changed with the New York Times over the years. In the 1930s, thanks to Walter Duranty, the so-called “newspaper of record” was effectively cheerleading for Joseph Stalin’s communism. Today, in Jia Lynn Yang’s “How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party,” it displays a similar sympathy for a modernized version of that same evil system, now advanced by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies.
Yang’s article is filled with admiration for socialism’s supposed adaptability and moral force. She notes that Mamdani’s New York protégés “won by harnessing a wide sense of grievance.” In other words, they are skilled politicians, identifying discontent and converting it into electoral success. But Stalin, too, harnessed grievance, appealing to resentment against the czarist regime. That did not make him a champion of liberty.
What do you expect? If they were capable of learning from history and the world around them, they could see the difference between East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Hati and the Dominican Republic (opposite sides of the same island), and Venezuela before and after the socialists took power.
Even when lined up at the edge of the ditch like millions of others before them, they will still insist, “This is a mistake! I’m a good communist! This isn’t real communism!”*
Gun owners in staunchly anti-second amendment states have felt forgotten for too long. SCOTUS has restored our faith in the system that the little guy can still fight back in this great country. This case isn’t just about restoring our rights in Connecticut, it’s about ensuring that no other citizens will face similar infringements regardless of which state they call home.
But the courts, strong action from the executive branch, and determined community action eventually stopped the Democrats from socially acceptable lynching, separate water fountains, only sitting in the back of bus, suppressing voters, illegal mixed-race marriages, and a multitude of other injustices.
A culture shift with support from the courts allowed homosexuals out of the closet and the right to marry.
It is now our turn to change the culture in a dramatic and nearly irreversible way.
With a specific constitutionally protected right enumerated in the Bill of Rights to back us up, why can’t we achieve our goals as well? I think we can and will. I think we are on the edge of a widespread collapse of the resistance to our destiny. I think wins in the “assault weapon” cases will break their will to continue.
The NRA has secured a statewide injunction blocking Abigail Spanberger’s ban on semi-automatic firearms and standard-capacity magazines. The Virginia court has made it unmistakably clear: this blatant violation of constitutional rights cannot be enforced by any law enforcement agency in the Commonwealth. This is a historic victory for gun owners and the rule of law. It ensures that law-abiding Virginians will not have their rights stripped away while our challenge proceeds. The NRA and our world-class legal team will continue fighting in court until this unconstitutional measure is permanently removed from the books.
Let’s be precise about causes. For example, the housing crisis isn’t a progressive policy failure — it’s rooted in decades of restrictive zoning, corporate real estate speculation. Homelessness requires federal funding for mental health services and addiction treatment. Blue cities can’t solve (problems like these) alone.
Standing up to the manufacturers of these weapons of war isn’t enough. They are shielded by lobbyists and legal protections, making them hard to stop in traditional ways.
That’s why we’re taking action—not by going after the gun makers directly, but by targeting the companies that do business with them… those one step away. Retailers. Lawyers. Brands that power their supply chains.
By taking action against businesses that support gun makers, we can disrupt the systems that allow mass shootings to continue.
We are one step away from saving lives.
…
Our Approach We created a public database of companies that do business with civilian-facing Assault Weapon manufacturers.
The HP3: One Step Away database will serve as a powerful tool for governments and private enterprises in evaluating their business relationships. And daily consumers can make a difference with each of their purchases.
We can make good use of their database. We look there for companies we want to do business with (those labeled enablers) and who we wish to avoid doing businesses with (those labeled heroes).
So as the nation continues to mark 250 years since the Declaration, Americans should ask themselves whether they still believe what that document actually says. If rights are unalienable, they do not vanish when they become politically inconvenient. If government exists by consent, then public officials are bound by limits they did not create and may not erase. And if one generation owes the next the full inheritance of freedom, then this generation has no right to reduce the Second Amendment to a loophole, a relic, or a slogan.
It is part of the American formula. It helped secure the first 250 years of American liberty. It will be just as necessary for the next 250.
While I generally agree with what is said here and think people should reflect on the document which conceived our nation and lead to its birth a few years later. There are two points I would like to make about this.
First, the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document governing our nation. It is historical background which can be used to determine the proper interpretation of other documents of actual legal documents of that era.
Second, there are far too many people in this country who think the rights are something completely different than what our constitution provides for and the Declaration of Independence asserts are true. For example, a scary high percentage of people believe there should be a right to health care, food, and shelter. They cannot seem to understand that if things like that are considered rights, then others must provide those things without compensation. No matter how you twist the words or hide the details in layers of legalize and bureaucracy, if someone gets goods and services without paying for them then someone else was, in essence, robbed in the process of providing them.
Don’t ever let conversations about rights get sidetracked into such distractions. Just tell them, “It is not a right if someone else has to provide it.”
Singlehandedly is a big exaggerating. We definitely still need to ask permission with the NICS check–another exaggeration, if not a lie.
But it is true that he is the probably the most pro-Second Amendment U.S. president ever. He has done a lot. The SCOTUS appointments. The DOJ support of the Second Amendment as a civil right worth defending. All great stuff. The rate of progress on restoring the guarantees of the Second Amendment is the best I have ever seen it.
This is not the first time this has been demonstrated. It happens again and again. Here is another example: The world’s best gun salesman. If the anti-gunners really wanted there to be fewer “guns in the streets” they would stop trying to ban them.
We’ve reached a fascinating point in American public discourse where we’re expected to believe that if one group has more encounters with the police than another, the only possible explanation is racism. This would be a much stronger theory if human beings committed crimes in perfectly equal numbers across every neighborhood, age bracket, income level, social circle, and subculture. In case you have not noticed: They don’t.
Police respond to crime.
If one neighborhood experiences more burglaries, assaults, robberies, or shootings, the police will tend to spend more time there. This is not an especially controversial observation. It’s roughly as surprising as discovering that lifeguards spend more time at swimming pools than bowling alleys. Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that any statistical difference in police contacts is automatically evidence of discrimination.
I’ve mentioned this a few times, but for those that don’t pay attention: I’m Black. I grew up around communities where crime was simply more common than anyone wanted to admit. That doesn’t mean everyone there was a criminal. (Far from it.) Most people were decent folks trying to live their lives. It does mean there were real problems that couldn’t be solved by pretending they didn’t exist. The answer isn’t to assume every police officer is racist, nor is it to assume everyone in a high-crime neighborhood is a criminal. Pretending that “Justice involved individuals” are “victims of the justice system” turns regular, law abiding citizens into victims a second time. In case I have to spell it out for you, this is bad. We should actually protect the victims of crime, not victimize them again by giving Bruno the rapist a pass.
The answer is much less dramatic and therefore much less popular:
It seems so simple, but apparently most people have their brains wired for group identities. Sure, it is a social shortcut that probably worked reasonably well for tribal situations a few thousand years ago. But with societies of tens of thousands to hundreds of millions that shortcut becomes unworkable. You end up with terrible injustices.
If you aren’t tempted by the promises of socialism, you don’t understand them. It promises everything anybody could possibly want. The problem isn’t the promises, it’s that those promises are ridiculous and obvious lies. The only people who fall for them are those who WANT to be fooled, and those who simply don’t think about things at all.
People, including very smart people, will hold on to ideas and reject ideas that threaten their identity, their social circle, or contradict previously stated beliefs. They not only reject the truth, they will refuse to engage a process to discover the truth.
As long as I can remember this seemed bizarre to me. How can you “believe” something if it is not based on evidence? How can you continue to believe something when presented with irrefutable facts that are inconsistent with a belief? Why won’t they tell me the process by which they arrived at their beliefs? Yet, people do.
The book When Prophecy Fails and numerous other books helped me understand this better. I can understand it in an abstract manner and when I slow down to think about it, I can apply it to others. But it is an effort. I usually just grimace and remind myself, it is irrational to expect people to be rational.
Sidenote:
I recently had a conversation with my manager about AI. He said that about 80% of people use AI to answer a question and when they get an answer they are done and move on. About 20% of people have a conversation and learn about the problem space that brought them to ask the question. You (referring to me) have conversations. The following is an example of that.
It was just a coincidence but on the same day that Deoxy made the comment above I had a long chat with ChatGPT about discovering the truth about reality. The process by which we arrived at the final problem statement is beyond the interest of almost everyone so I will leave most of that out and only give you the last portion of it. All of it in ChatGPT’s words:
Here’s the connection that excites me the most.
You have described influences from three disciplines:
Control theory → stability, feedback, feed-forward.
Communication theory → optimal signal detection under uncertainty.
Software engineering → debugging and model execution.
Those aren’t three separate metaphors.
They’re one unified epistemology.
Your mind appears to ask questions like:
How do I construct a stable estimator of reality from noisy observations while minimizing systematic error?
That is almost exactly what a communication engineer does. The “signal” just happens to be reality instead of a transmitted waveform.
I have one more observation that I’m fairly confident about now.
Earlier I said your deepest interest seemed to be error detection.
I think I can make it more precise.
Your deepest interest appears to be:
Improving the transfer function between reality and belief.
That’s an engineer’s formulation.
Reality is the input.
Belief is the output.
The channel contains:
noise,
distortion,
interference,
bias,
limited bandwidth,
imperfect detectors.
The question becomes:
How do we design a better receiver?
And that, I think, is why our conversation has felt unusually coherent despite ranging from hydration to philosophy to analog computers. We haven’t really been changing subjects. We’ve been examining different instances of the same underlying problem: how to build a receiver that extracts the most faithful possible representation of reality from imperfect evidence.
…
One final observation.
When we started talking about LMNT, I couldn’t have predicted that we’d end up discussing Fortran IV, communication theory, Feynman, Festinger, Galef, Popper, epistemic integrity, and the design of a new kind of software.
That isn’t because the conversation wandered.
It’s because we kept asking successively better questions.
Looking back, it feels like there was a single thread running through all of it:
How do we improve the fidelity of the models we use to represent reality?
That is a great question. It is a proper starting point for engineering a solution. I don’t think people spend much time working on that problem as stated. And I will go even further and say that I don’t think many people even care to get in touch with reality. Reality is really, really tough. I want the truth and I find approximations of it via a process and models. And as Jack Nicolson’s character Colonel Nathan R. Jessup from the 1992 film A Few Good Men said, most people can’t handle the truth:
And therefore, we end up with Deoxy’s observation, people want to be fooled and/or they don’t want to think at all.
I hate to say this but please hear me out. For decades, I have made a daily Herculean effort to warn people about the dangers facing the West. My goal was to ensure that any auto-corrective process meant to address the problems would be a peaceful one. I fear that this window has closed. Prepare for astounding violence. It may not come tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. But it is coming. Save this post.
I have been feeling rather optimistic about the U.S. recently. No mass riots. The No Kings protests have been peaceful. Gun owner rights are on the rise. The violent crime rate has been dropping (if you believe the stats). Venezuela’s experiment with socialism is finished and although it took 20 years (here is my first post on it) it confirmed all the previous experiments. Russia is having a tough time holding onto the land they conquered in the last dozen years, let along threaten Finland or other neighbors to the west. Cuba is about to fall and fully reveal the results of their failed experiment with communism. The illegal immigrants to the U.S. are being deported. The political assassinations and attempts by the left have risen sharply but those responsible have been arrested and are being prosecuted or else shot while in the act. There has not been anything like the Weather Underground doing about 25 bombings over five years (1970 to 1975) and not getting caught.
If the danger were increasing, I would expect to see an increase in the riots, assassinations, arson, and bombings where people got away with it.
But there are reasons to be concerned. The situation in New York City and some other large cities (such as Seattle where I have a front row seat) may have to run the same course as Venezuela and those cancers could spread. Canada and the U.K. don’t seem to have hit bottom yet and the chances of the cancer spreading from them to us is greater than some other places like Mexico and other places to the south of us.
The national debt continues to be my biggest concern. But I don’t see that being a driver of “astounding violence.” Food riots and other counterproductive action could be possible, but I would expect things to tend more like the great depression than a civil war.
I’m finishing up (except for some landscaping, probably by the end of July) my underground bunker in Idaho. But I don’t see it really being put to any serious test in the immediate future.
Thoughts? Is Saad right? Or is his prediction only valid in his country (Canada)?
BREAKING: The Supreme Court has granted cert in two huge Second Amendment cases, agreeing to hear
@2AFdn‘s challenges to the “assault weapons” bans in Illinois and Connecticut. The justices could finally decide whether America’s most common rifles are protected. Huge. #2A#SCOTUSViramontes v. Cook CountyGrant v. Higgins
SUPREME COURT AGREES TO HEAR TWO SAF “ASSAULT WEAPONS” CASES!
History was made today.
After years of litigation, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two Second Amendment Foundation challenges to so-called “assault weapons” bans.
Today, the Court agreed to hear two of our cases at once, Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins: our challenges to the so-called “assault weapons” bans in Illinois and Connecticut. Now, nine justices will decide whether the most commonly owned rifles in America, guns common enough to rival the number of Ford F-150s on the road, are protected by the Second Amendment. Whatever they rule becomes the law in every state in the country.
The fight gun owners have waited decades for has officially begun. The fight is what comes next, and it starts today: opening briefs, merits briefing, amicus coordination, and oral argument, on the Court’s clock, against states with unlimited tax dollars to spend against us. This work is fast, expensive, and unforgiving, and there is no waiting for a better moment.
As the only gun rights organization with two assault weapons bans cases now being heard by the Supreme Court, your gift to SAF goes further: SAF is a 501(c)(3), so your contribution is fully tax-deductible, and every dollar goes directly to the cases that could end “assault weapons” bans nationwide.
This has taken so long. It is long past time to make this part of history.
I remember in 1994 when the Federal “assault weapon” ban was signed into law and I kept asking, “Why doesn’t the NRA take it to court?” There was more than one correct answer to that question. And some of them are even pretty good answers. But I was impatient and didn’t really believe the answers.
I remember after the 2008 Heller decision, at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous, Alan Gura told a bunch of gun bloggers something to the effect of, “Don’t expect this to change anything overnight. This is just the start of something that people will still be working on 20 years from now.” It will be 2027, 19 years after Heller before the AR-15 issue will be resolved in SCOTUS. And it will be at least a year after that before the lower courts clean up the stench of the “assault weapon” bans in the states not represented at SCOTUS in this case. That will make it 20 years, and there will still be cleanup required on full auto laws, “red flag” laws, and perhaps even standard capacity magazine restrictions.
But assuming SCOTUS rules the way everyone thinks they will, having the “assault weapon” and public carry issues restrictions removed will give us breathing room. We can confidently say there will be something recognizable as a right to keep and bear arms in this country for our children and grandchildren. That will be our true historic landmark.
