Category Archives: Politics

Quote of the day—Stephen Gutowski

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Gun sales soared in Virginia as Democrats passed several new gun-control measures during February, according to an industry report.

Nearly 66,000 background checks were performed in Virginia in February as the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature weighs a number of strict background checks—a steep increase from the 40,381 checks performed in February 2019. Virginia experienced one of the most dramatic upticks in background checks—a strong indicator of total sales—in the nation, according to data released by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). Gun sales are up nationwide with average growth rates of 16.7 percent, according to the report, but the surge was especially dramatic in Virginia where checks rose by 63.4 percent compared to 2019.

The spike in Virginia gun sales, which have increased for four consecutive months, shows that guns remain at the forefront of many residents’ minds.

Stephen Gutowski
March 5, 2020
Virginia Gun Sales Surge as Dems Pass Gun Control — Monthly sales up 60 percent from 2019
[If the anti-gun people were data driven and really believed “there are too many guns in the hands of private citizens” their behavior would be just the opposite of what they have been doing for decades. This is just one more datum demonstrating the error of their ways.

Spelling it out for them:

Every time there is serious talk, or the actually passage , of a law increasing the restrictions on the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arm the sales of firearms increase.

This was true during the Clinton administration and passage of the Brady Bill and the “assault weapon” ban.

This was true during the Obama administration and their frequent attempts to increase restrictions.

This was true in the fall of 2016 when it appeared Hillary Clinton was going to win the presidency and increase restrictions on gun ownership.

Increasing restrictions on guns cause people to buy guns!

The rate of sales would decrease if restrictions were to decrease because people would think they could always get a gun later if they really needed one.

One has to conclude they are not data driven and/or they don’t really want a decrease in the total number of guns in circulation.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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Biden’s mask is completely off. He’s not just a doddering Democrat pushing to become president, he’s an extremist anti-gunner who just promised to put a gun prohibition fanatic in charge of his administration’s gun policy.

Alan Gottlieb
March 3, 2020
Beto Will Be Biden’s Gun Grabbing Point Man; ‘It’s War,’ Says CCRKBA
[As if most of us didn’t already know this.

But, in political terms it does bring complete clarity to the issue. The leading Democrat candidate for President of the U.S. has made clear he intends to confiscate the most popular rifle sold today.

Respond appropriately.—Joe]

They want you dead

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Via Benny @bennyjohnson:

Solidarity

And how is this different than deliberately spreading smallpox to Native Americans* 150 years ago?

* Yes. I know. There isn’t convincing evidence to indicate Native Americans were deliberately infected.

Quote of the day—Carl Bussjaeger

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As I was reading the bill, an interesting point struck me. I ended up going through it multiple times to be sure, because something I usually see in these victim disarmament schemes doesn’t seem to be there.

There is no exception in the bill for law enforcement or the military.

Should this monstrosity pass, I’m going to invest in popcorn futures. The show, when law enforcement realizes this applies to them, will be extremely entertaining.

Carl Bussjaeger
February 29, 2020
New York Bill Would Mandate Individually ‘Coded’ and Registered Ammunition
[Interesting. There are multiple ways this might play out if were to become law.

Here’s how something similar worked in Washington State.*

Suppressors were legal to own but illegal to use in the state. There was no law enforcement exception. The cops either didn’t notice or didn’t care and happily, and openly, purchased and trained, with suppressors.

No one said anything (or at least not so that it drew a lot of attention). The private citizens purchased suppressors and went “out of state” to use them. They also quietly took video of the cops using them at the public, in state, ranges. The local gun rights groups had a big video stashes of cops using suppressors.

The guns rights groups asked the legislature to change the law making suppressors legal to use in state. Quietly pointing out the existing law was unenforceable because the first time some prosecutor attempted to enforce it against an otherwise innocent private citizen the defense attorney was going to get a pile of video tapes of cops committing massive numbers of identical crimes.

Suppressors became legal to use in Washington state and remain so to this day.

What should, but is unlikely to, happen is that we all buy popcorn and enjoy watching the lawmaker’s trial. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save then information for his trial. Just in case.—Joe]

* There is certainly some “poetic license” taken in this story. It’s my interpretation of what might have happened, based on some casual plans told to me several years before suppressors became legal.

Public safety

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Via sofa @room101_

PublicSafety

It was, of course, in response to Rolf.

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions

…

Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) page 174.
[Via Extreme Retribution Punishment Orders: ‘Red flag’ laws are the death of due process and the Constitution.

We have some extremely evil ideologies in the world whos followers believe they are the good guys.

Nearly 170 years ago Thoreau put it more succulently.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rolf

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The other side doesn’t care about facts. They care about power. The normies don’t get that. My approach now is to push the appropriate buttons.

I know why the cavalry wanted the disarm the Indians. I know why the Soviets wanted to disarm the Kulaks. I know why the KKK wanted to disarm the blacks. I know why the Nazi wanted to disarm the Jews and Gypsies. They all did it in the name of ‘public safety.’ Why do YOU want to disarm people so only the cops to have guns? You sound like a rapist telling his victim ‘don’t make a scene and come along quietly.’

Rolf
February 29, 2020
Comment to Quote of the day—Tamara K. @TamSlick
[Nice!

I’ve been formulating my question strategy for the next Townhall meeting.

I’m thinking something along the lines of:

  • What will it take to get to the point where we can ban all private gun ownership and confiscate all of them? And are you working to get us there?
  • What are you doing behind the scenes to further gun safety?

This, in conjunction with posting the video of the answers online, should be useful in the next election as well as their trials.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tamara K. @TamSlick

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Party politics today is a race to the boxcars; first team there gets to make the other team ride.

Tamara K. @TamSlick
Tweeted on February 21, 2020
[There is a certain amount of ominous truth to that.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Adam Baldwin @AdamBaldwin

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The 2020 Bumper Sticker battle –

Trump: “Keep America Great!”
vs.
Dems: “Beat Trump!”

Adam Baldwin @AdamBaldwin
Tweeted on February 22, 2020
[I had my phone Twitter app email this to me the next morning. Last night I got around to looking at it and preparing to make it my QOTD for today. I found this tweet no longer exists. I reviewed Baldwin’s tweets. He only has 114. What?!! That’s not right. But yet that is what I see. The first tweet was on June 19, 2019. Then there is a retweet of something from November 29, 2015. Then a tweet from February 24, 2020.

What’s even more “interesting” is that neither Bing nor Google can even find the exact phrase “The 2020 Bumper Sticker battle” anywhere on the Internet.

One must conclude that I emailed it to myself from an alternate universe and/or timeline. The alternatives are just too farfetched to be believable.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Molly Carter

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What has the 20th Century shown us about gun control? That an unarmed country is not a safe country. That when citizens don’t have the right to bear arms, governments can and do grow too large and become a threat to their people. That in the 20th Century, governments murdered four times as many people as those that were killed in all the world’s wars during that same time period. That millions more people were killed by their own governments than by criminals.

Molly Carter
American Gun Ownership: The Positive Impacts of Law-Abiding Citizens Owning Firearms
[The first publication of this essay is unclear to me. It was sometime in 2019 or earlier. I found it on many sites with the most recent being Zero Hedge (via email from Tony P.).

Reading it I was struck by so many references to materials from the 1990s that I suspected it was over 20 years old. Even the quote above appears it may have been derived from an article written by the late Mike Vanderboegh in June of 1999. This, however, does not detract from the substance. The truth is still the truth.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

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I have no intention of being objective about Bloomberg’s presidential run. If I can be a small part of helping you imagine him less as a president, and more like a desiccated turd in a punch bowl, wearing a tiny suit, I have served karma.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on February 24, 2020
[Sounds fair to me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day

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Eventually, after the Left has won significant gains at the ballot box and in civil society, the capitalist class will take the gloves off against socialists and do whatever it takes to destroy our movement. We’ll need to fight back. The democratic road to socialism seeks not to elide this confrontation, but to make it possible.

Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day
February 22, 2020
Why Bernie Sanders is just the beginning of an American turn to the left
[Via email from Chet.

Remember when I said the other day that these crazy laws have to be deliberate attempts to destroy society?

Take appropriate action.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tana Senn

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I’ve never thought about it.

Tana Senn
Washington State Representative, 41st District
February 22, 2020
This was in response to the question, “What sort of gun law do you think would violate the Washington State constitution?”
[The Washington State constitution says:

SECTION 24 RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.

My guess is that she has never read it. Another guy at the town hall meeting asked a related question and she went off with something about the militia. Which, of course, might have been relevant if we didn’t have the Washington State constitution protection for the right to keep and bear arms clause and the Heller decision. The Heller decision, of course, making it very clear the militia clause does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to the militia.

I got the last question of the meeting and I decided to directly ask her to address the Washington State constitution clause. The QOTD above was the beginning of her response.

The rest of her response was about hunters, she has “no problem” with hunters—as long as they don’t use “military type guns” which are only for hunting humans. She was a bit more hesitant but also said she didn’t have a problem with people who wanted to have a gun to defend themselves.

But, of course, the Washington State constitution does not give lawmakers a “military type gun” loophole to write laws restricting individual possession and use of firearms.

I find her response very telling.

If she has never concerned herself with the limits to the power she has under the constitution this isn’t going to stop. Whatever restriction she and her type can get passed this year or next, or the year after is just another step toward the practical, if not literal, elimination of the right.

I was telling someone else about what Senn said and I got a surprising response:

Crazy must run in the family.

It turns out that Senn is is a first cousin, once-removed of former Washington state Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn. Deborah Senn had a reputation such that many people suspected she was a sociopath and perhaps had other psychology issues.

My live tweeting of the meeting:

This should be good evidence. I hope she enjoys her trial.—Joe]

Quote of the day—UBY: @ZubyMusic

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Nazism was attempted once. It killed 6 MILLION+ people and the ideology was abandoned. Those who promote it are rightly shunned.

Communism has been attempted multiple times, in multiple nations. It has killed 100 MILLION+ people. Yet many still think it’s a ‘good idea’.

UBY: @ZubyMusic
Tweeted on February 20, 2020
[It’s amazing the price people are willing to pay for “free” stuff.

It would appear to me that the only way to avoid repeating the many lessons in the history of communism and socialism is to increase the cost on those who attempt to implement it rather than on those it is implemented on.

Never give up your guns.—Joe]

It’s back….

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Two days ago I reported the good news that an oppressive gun control bill severely restricting magazines with capacity more than 15 rounds was defeated.

In the comments John Hardin suggested:

they could just convert it into an Appropriations bill, which has a longer deadline

This is exactly what they did:

A proposal to ban the sale of high-capacity gun magazines in Washington died after not receiving a vote by a key deadline Wednesday evening, but gun-control advocates quickly reloaded with a new proposal.

House Democrats failed to put a bill up for debate that would have banned magazines holding more than 15 rounds. It needed to pass the House by Wednesday to continue being considered in the 2020 session.

The bill was pulled from consideration by the full House after Republicans filed 120 amendments to be debated before a final vote on the bill could be taken, Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma said.

…

Later Thursday a new bill calling for a ban on the sale of magazines holding more than 15 rounds was filed in the House with a provision that would allow it to ignore the deadline.

Along with the policy that limits the number of rounds, it also calls for a buyback program that would compensate gun owners who turn in as many as five high-capacity magazines to the Washington State Patrol between this July 1 and June 30, 2021. To pay for the program, it proposes repealing the tax exemption for the sale of precious metals or bullion.

Bills that require the state to spend money or levy new taxes aren’t subject to Wednesdays if they are included in the General Fund budget. The House and Senate will release their supplemental budget proposals Monday.

I find it “interesting” they plan to tax sales of precious metals to pay for the confiscation of our magazines.

My representative and Senator have a townhall meeting tomorrow:

10:00 – 11:30 AM
Saturday, February 22
Bellevue College
Room N201
3000 Landderholm Circle SE
Bellevue

. I plan to attend. I already submitted questions via a webpage they provided.

Quote of the day—Lyle

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The underlying message in such talk of “gun violence” and “felons with guns” etc. is that violence, per se, is not the problem. If violence were the problem then the particular weapons being used wouldn’t be the central focus as they are now. They wouldn’t even be an issue.

Turning the populace into cattle, for the benefit of the “common good” (the rulers’ good) is the issue, and that means there must be disarmament.

So of course this is not, and has never been, about crime or violence or “public safety”. In the minds of the power-mad, common criminals are not the problem. Rather, YOU are the problem which needs to be “solved”; the more principled, peaceful, law-abiding and productive citizen patriot. The truth is a threat. You are the threat.

Lyle
February 20, 2020
Comment to Quote of the day—ReelFun.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—ReelFun

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the shooters in seattle a week ago have over 60 felonies between them and several each with firearm convictions. Why are they out of jail and on the street with more guns after those convictions? anyone with more than one conviction with firearm should be in jail for decades, not on the street after 30 days. Start there and there is all the data you need. put in jail felons with firearms period.

ReelFun
February 19, 2020
Comment to Pass bills to reduce firearm violence through research, limiting magazine capacity
[Truth. But, almost for certain, it will never happen in Seattle.

One of the reason this suggestion is almost never heeded by the progressives is because such criminals are their demographic. Remember, felons in prison who identify as Democrats outnumber all other political affiliations combined by a factor of two to one. Another reason is that firearm restrictions are not about reducing violent crime. It’s about making the average citizen more dependent upon the state and giving power and control to the government.—Joe]

Washington office of firearm violence prevention

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Via email from Luis we have this:

This bill just passed the senate, the implications are that, is almost certain that it will passed the house and become law.

This is a tax payer funded, new agency, to take your 2nd amendment rights, capable of issuing  grants to Bloomberg gun control organizations.

Heavy sigh.

If it were an agency with a charter to prevent criminal violence I won’t mind too much. But the way it is worded they could easily conclude that eliminating the use of firearms for self-defense is a positive goal and spend taxpayer money to achieve that goal.

Quote of the day—Julia Musto

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Criminal justice reform is a lot like gun control. It’s not about changing the rules for everyone. It’s about selectively enforcing them along political lines.

So for example, the left will lecture you for hours about gun crime and how afraid they are of guns and they hate guns and guns are bad. But they don’t really feel that way. They oppose stop and frisk, which saved thousands of lives by taking many thousands of guns off the street. But they’re totally opposed to that.

Meanwhile, they’re working deep into the night, for example, to disarm law-abiding Virginians in rural Virginia who commit essentially no violent crime and are a threat to no one.

They’re not for gun control. They are for punishing people who don’t vote for them, and the same thing is happening here.

The left doesn’t want criminal justice reform. If they did, they’d be on Roger Stone’s side. No. What they really want is to send their political enemies to jail and that’s what they’re trying to do.

Julia Musto
February 15, 2020
Tucker Carlson: Roger Stone case is about the left wanting to send political enemies to jail
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—David Kopel

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Tiers of scrutiny (strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and the variants thereof) might sometimes be appropriate for judicial review of non-prohibitory gun regulations. Under Heller, bans on common arms are categorically unconstitutional, without need for use of the means-ends balancing tests of strict or intermediate scrutiny.

David Kopel
February 12, 2020
What arms are “common”?
Amicus brief challenging California rifle ban
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]