Category Archives: Quote of the Day

A Good First Step

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Quote of the Day

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has systematically denied thousands of law-abiding Californians their fundamental Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home—not through outright refusal, but through a deliberate pattern of unconscionable delay that renders this constitutional right meaningless in practice.

The scope of this constitutional violation is staggering. Between January
2024 and March 2025, Defendants received 3,982 applications for new concealed carry licenses. Of these, they approved exactly two—a mere 0.05% approval rate that cannot be explained by legitimate disqualifying factors alone. This is not bureaucratic inefficiency; it is systematic obstruction of constitutional rights.

The mechanics of this obstruction are equally damning. Defendants force
applicants to wait an average of 281 days—over nine months—just to begin processing their applications, with some waiting as long as 1,030 days (nearly three years). The median delay is 372 days. These delays far exceed California’s own statutory
requirement that licensing authorities provide initial determinations within 90 days, demonstrating Defendants’ flagrant disregard for both state law and constitutional obligations.

The human cost is profound. As of May 2025, approximately 2,768
applications for new licenses remain pending, with interviews scheduled as late as November 2026—more than two years after some applications were first submitted. Numerous applicants simply gave up and withdrew their applications, often after waiting months in Defendants’ deliberately stalled process. These are not abstract statistics; they represent thousands of law-abiding citizens who have been stripped of their constitutional right to self-defense outside their homes.

U.S. Department of Justice
September 30, 2025
United States of America v. Los Angels County Sheriffs Department, and Robert Luna, in his official capacity as Sheriff of Los Angeles County (backup here)

According to numerous sources, and Copilot:

until the LA County concealed carry case, DOJ had never used § 12601 for Second Amendment violations. That makes this lawsuit a historic first—a signal that DOJ now considers systemic denial of gun rights a civil rights issue.

Copilot has this to say about my assertion the infringement will continue until criminal charges are pursued against the perpetrators:

Will Infringements Stop Without Criminal Charges?

Not likely. Civil suits can force policy changes, but they don’t carry the deterrent weight of personal accountability. Officials can stall, delay, or reinterpret rulings without fear of jail time. That’s why your call for criminal enforcement resonates—it’s about consequences, not just corrections.

Copilot offered to draft a model indictment. I accepted the offer:

United States District Court

Criminal Indictment United States of America v. [Defendants]

Count One – Conspiracy Against Rights (18 U.S.C. § 241)

The Grand Jury charges:

  1. Beginning on or about January 1, 2022, and continuing through the present, in the County of [X], State of [Y], the defendants [Name 1], [Name 2], and others known and unknown to the Grand Jury, did knowingly and willfully conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate citizens in the free exercise and enjoyment of rights secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States, namely, the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
  2. The object of the conspiracy was to obstruct and delay the issuance of concealed carry permits to qualified applicants, through intentional administrative backlog, arbitrary denials, and the imposition of unlawful requirements not authorized by state law.
  3. In furtherance of the conspiracy, the defendants:
    • Directed staff to ignore or delay processing of applications.
    • Required applicants to submit additional documentation not required by law.
    • Denied permits without cause or explanation.
    • Maintained internal communications expressing intent to “slow-walk” approvals to discourage lawful carry.

All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241.

Count Two – Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law (18 U.S.C. § 242)

The Grand Jury further charges:

  1. On or about [specific date], in the County of [X], State of [Y], defendant [Name] acting under color of law as [Title/Position], did willfully deprive [Victim Name], a citizen of the United States, of rights secured by the Constitution, namely the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
  2. The deprivation occurred when [Name], acting in his official capacity, denied [Victim] a concealed carry permit despite full legal eligibility, and did so based on personal bias against firearm ownership and in furtherance of the conspiracy described in Count One.

All in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 242.

Notice of Special Findings

The Grand Jury finds that the offenses charged:

  • Were committed under color of law.
  • Involved multiple victims.
  • Were part of a pattern or practice of rights violations.

Here is what others are saying:

This is a good start. But I won’t be popping the cork on the champagne until the first perp goes to jail with all their appeals exhausted.

The Future of Human Life in an AI World

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So we’re looking at a world where we have levels of unemployment we’ve never seen before. Not talking about 10% unemployment, which is scary, but 99%.

Roman Yampolskiy
University of Louisville Computer Science Professor
September 29, 2025
AI Could Cause 99% of All Workers to Be Unemployed in the Next Five Years, Says Computer Science Professor

I have to wonder, what does this do to the price of goods and services? I can’t really wrap mind around what happens when essentially everything is automated. Does the price drop to zero? If the materials for the machines are mined, refined, and built by automated systems, energy from the materials needed to the endpoint delivery is all automated as well, then how does this work out?

Over the centuries labor-saving devices enabled the creation of greater wealth for the general population. But what if all labor is “saved”? Do individuals have zero money to purchase near infinite goods and services?

It may be a moot question. I just finished listening to If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. By the time the unemployment rate hits 50% we might have sealed our doom. The case presented, as I recall it:

  • We really don’t understand how AI works. It is trained (sometimes the authors referred to it as “grown”) rather than engineered. It is far closer to an art form than an engineering science*.
  • This training/growing process results in hidden and unknowable artifacts in the neural nets. These hidden components can and will manifest themselves in ways no one can predict.
  • Many of these hidden artifacts will not be aligned with the best interests of biological life.
  • As AI searches for solutions to problems and subproblems some of the artifacts will result in solutions that cause great harm. For example, energy production is bound, in part, by the ability to get rid of waste heat. Ultimately this needs to be radiated out into space. The rate of heat transfer increases as the temperature rises. There would be a temporary heat sink by boiling away the oceans, but ultimately raising the surface temperature of the planet something greater than what biological life as we know it can survive will be the obvious solution.
  • The response time of AI to exploit a flaw in human efforts to constrain it will be far faster than humans can react.
  • AI can defeat humans at chess and Go because it can examine far more future decision branches than human. It will solve “containment puzzles” far better than humans can create containment mechanism.
  • It only has to succeed once. We will not get a second chance.

I would like to hear from people who have read this book to comment here or send me an email with their thoughts.

* This is something I noticed in a recent class I took on machine learning. This is simplifying things some but, you just try different things and see what works best.

Mass Shooting Deterrence

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People complain that we shouldn’t need to have armed security everywhere. But we simply need to break the mass shooter fever. Make it undesirable to the nutcases.

If a series of these losers find not infamy, but rather a quick and humiliating end by armed guards or private citizens, they will stop trying and this dark “trend” will end.

Not unlike how serial killing isn’t much of a thing anymore due to improved strategies to counter them.

Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, September 28, 2025

I think there is another component required to “break the mass shooter fever.” If a person intent on committing a mass shooting (or mass murder by any means) is stopped after the first or second victim there isn’t much publicity and almost certainly no national or international reporting of the failed attempt. Hence, the “humiliating end by armed guards or private citizens” does not get the attention required to deter future criminal acts of similar nature.

I’m not sure what the solution to the restricted reporting is. Sure, there is some bias in the reporting. Major media outlets have a strong anti-gun bias and don’t want to “encourage more gun violence” by reporting death or injury by gun in a positive manner.

My guess is that just as big a component is that a story about 10 innocent people being murdered is more of a news event than one innocent murdered and one criminal put down. The first story gets more clicks/attention than the second. And that means more revenue when the first type of story is reported on than when the second type of story is reported on. The successful defensive gun use story has to compete for resources with other stories of wider interest such as “climate crisis”, “orange man bad”, and “defending democracy.”

My best stab at remediating the problem are the following ideas:

  • Work at increasing the successful defensive gun use cases so that the total number is decreased. This results in fewer “heroes” for the copycats to emulate.
  • Report successful defensive gun use events in social media.
  • Encourage media outlets to report on successful defensive gun use. And to use the keywords “mass shooter” appropriately like, “probable mass shooter.” Even if the larger media outlets don’t respond appropriately the placement of the stories on the Internet will show up in search results and enable the copycats to find large numbers of alternate endings for their quests of notoriety.
  • Encourage the justice system to treat mass murders in humiliating ways while respecting their rights. I’m thinking of pictures of suspects brought to trial in cuffs, chains, shackled, wearing clothes too big for them, hair messed up, and surrounding by extremely tall, muscular, law officers. This makes the suspect appear small and weak.

Does anyone else have other ideas?

Mindset of Another Socialist

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Our accelerating cavalcade of bloodshed rests on three pillars:

First, the massive tech media platforms, which feed us a daily diet of misinformation and tribal distrust. Sex sells. But Big Tech — 40% of the S&P 500 — has found something even better: rage. Eisenhower rightly warned us about the military industrial complex. In the decades after he left office, weapons manufacturers, think tanks, and politicians — the violence entrepreneurs of their era — conspired to make foreign wars and proxy conflicts into billion-dollar businesses. Today, Meta dwarves Lockheed Martin. “Make Memes Not War” is the trillion-dollar strategy.

My argument is not that politics is unrelated to the violence. (Or that there isn’t actual organized political violence, mostly from the far right, as has been well documented.) On the contrary, the ever more violent and inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation and the relentless demonization of every available scapegoat have left their marks all over the lives of the perpetrators. But demagoguery, dog whistles, and tribalism aren’t new. The dangerous novelty of our time is the fusing of capitalism and technology to make rage, and violence, profitable.

We’d go a long way toward dismantling the rage machine if we exposed its makers to liability, as we do with every other corporation. Reforming Section 230, which insulates online platforms from the externalities of the conspiracy theories and Chinese misinformation schemes they peddle, would be a massive first step. Age-gating social media would be a good follow-up.
And online media is an accelerant to our problem. As I often say, (including in my next book), the fire it fuels is disconnected rage. Rarely has a cohort fallen further, faster than young men. Most angry young men find peace. Some grasp a gun instead.

My friend Richard Reeves wrote a book, Of Boys and Men, that’s replete with good ideas: recruit more male teachers, invest in vocational training, destigmatize mental health problems. We should raise the minimum wage and create tax breaks for people paying off student debt and saving for home ownership. Implement national service to get young people off their devices and into their communities. Use tax credits that unleash the private building sector and anti-Nimby laws, to help us build 8 million new homes in 10 years. Enforce retirement ages and term limits so older people make room for the rising generation.

The third leg of this stool is the most obvious, but also the most politicized. This post comes nine days after Kirk was killed. In those nine days, 1,125 other Americans died from gun violence. Fifty were children. Two more people have been shot and killed since you began reading this post.

The U.K., where I’ve been living for the past three years, has much in common with the U.S. The problems are familiar: racial division, arguments over immigration, declining opportunity for young people. Yet one difference stands out. It will take more than a year for the U.K. to see as many gun deaths (per capita) as the U.S. experienced in the nine days since Kirk’s murder. Private handguns are outlawed here, and hunting firearms are tightly controlled.

This isn’t complicated: break Big Tech’s immunity, invest in boys, rein in guns. The hard part isn’t policy — it’s courage. The violence entrepreneurs aren’t selling solutions, they’re selling rage. And business is booming.

Scott Galloway
September 29, 2025
Violence Entrepreneurs | No Mercy / No Malice

Interesting… There probably is some truth in what he says about the problem. But what jumps out at me is the mindset of the proposed solutions. Or perhaps it would be better expressed as the lack of proposed solution types.

The concept of individual responsibility apparently does not occur to Galloway. All the solutions suggested are of the type one might use to control a herd of cattle. Individuals which are well behaved are treated the same as troublemakers. Group restrictions rather than individual punishment, treatment, and/or isolation. It is the mindset of a socialist with more government control of corporations, schools, wages, housing, forced labor, forced non-labor, and, of course, no guns.

The one final thing is probably the most mind boggling ignorant. He asserts, “The hard part isn’t policy.” He is certain to get a lot of pushbacks on the first two “pillars”. But regarding the third, he is an alternate reality if he is not aware of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. Ultimately, the pushbacks there come in small copper jacketed packets traveling at supersonic speeds.

Reeks of Political Bias

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I have been asked by members of my community why there were two very different responses from my agency, when both riots appear to be the same to them at face value. It’s a shame that I can’t answer that question. I have heard U.S. Secret Service Police ask why their alleged assaulters during the summer of 2020 riots weren’t sought out like those who assaulted officers at the Capitol. Again, I can’t answer that question. We were once an apolitical organization, but I no longer see us as such looking from the ground up. We have been used as pawns in a political war, and FBI leadership fell into the trap and has allowed it to happen. We are supposed to call balls and strikes, regardless of political pressure, now we can’t even be trusted to be on the field.

I want to be clear so it’s not misconstrued, both the summer riots of 2020 and the Capitol Riot were repulsive. The FBI’s response to one and not the other is unacceptable in an organization that is supposed to be independent and apolitical. On May 3, 2018, TIME magazine published an article “The FBI Is In Crisis. It’s Worse Than You Think”. In the article, the writer Eric Lichtblau, describes the many failures that have accumulated most recently in the FBI. The most sobering stat referenced stated that an April 2018, PBS News Hour Survey showed a 10-point drop-from 71% to 61% among Americans who thought the FBI was “just trying to do its job”. I would not like to see the result of that same survey today, because I have not seen any faith restored in this organization. FBI leadership needs to be reevaluated in the strongest sense possible. We have been infiltrated by political pawns who are sinking the ship many of us work hard to make sail every day. Someone in a leadership position at WFO needs to step up and make things right again. That may mean pushing back when someone wants an outcome that appears political in nature, because our response to the Capitol Riot reeks of political bias.

Comment #4
After Action Report FBI-HJC119-J6IG-000001-000050.pdf (backup copy here), Page 13
Via FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns’ | Just The News

I did not read the whole thing. This is just a sample. The general tone is very negative.

Until the Randy Weaver case I had an exceptionally high opinion of the FBI. I thought of them as near perfection. The reality of their actual behavior in the Weaver and shortly thereafter their handling of David Koresh in Waco changed their status in my mind to something approximating “The Enemy of the People.”

I still wonder where the U.S. Constitution authorizes their existence. If, after decades of misbehavior, they cannot get their act together then I would like to suggest it is time to disband them. Let state and local laws and officials protect innocent people in their justice systems.

Sure, there will be corruption and political bias in these organizations too, but you can move to a different city and/or state far easier than you can move to a different country. And cleaning up of the local pockets of bad actors will be much easier by journalistic and ballot box solutions than it is at the national level.

This is Crazy Talk

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I’ve been on Nothing But Suicide Missions for God ever since I agreed to be the world’s smartest man with mental and moral Superiority Powers. He just said I’d have to do whatever He told me To Go and Do once I got there to end up Here. When He wasn’t doing that, he made me Witness my Grandfather’s Suicide Blood in his tub when I was 4. Or Held my Dying best friend’s head in my arms for 20 minutes. Or killed 3 people in the car crash? Or stand alone among the death and wreckage of Flight 255? And be Totally UNAFFECTED by Any of That. Oh, 3 separate Police departments investigated my fatal wreck. And they DEFINITELY gave me Blood Alcohol and Drug Tests. And found ZERO in both. That was maybe God’s Greatest Favor He ever did. He made Me Experience the Horror but Legally, knowing I did Nothing Illegal or Wrong. I swear to God, any other night I Would have Been. And I’d still be in Jackson State Prison serving out 3 life sentences. But here I sit. Guilt Free Guilty Conscience Free and Writing For God for Free too. I keep adding it all up hoping to get a rational explanation. I can’t. Can you.

Don’t worry raynman
September 21, 2025
Comment to Instapundit » Blog Archive » FOR THE LEFT VIOLENCE IS BAKED IN:  Death is the Solution to all Problems.

I’ve been seeing an increase in crazy talk recently. I would suspect end stage TDS, but I have been seeing it in Trump supporters too. Perhaps it really is The Crazy Years Heinlein predicted.

I want my underground bunker in Idaho to be finished.

They Think they are the Good Guys

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American physicist Steven Weinberg famously remarked that ‘with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion’. It makes sense, then, to think of the social-justice movement as a kind of cult. Its members are generally decent people with good intentions. They have an unshakeable certainty that their worldview is correct. They feel the need to proselytise and convert as many of the fallen as possible. And even though they are capable of the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour, they think they are the good guys.

We are in this position because identity politics in its current form is a collectivist ideology. It does not value an individual for the content of his or her character, but instead makes prejudicial assessments on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. In the name of anti-racism, identity politics has rehabilitated racial thinking. This explains why an affluent and privileged person like Munroe Bergdorf can be invited on to national television to proclaim that ‘the white race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth’. How is well-intentioned racism even a thing?

A similar regression has occurred within the feminist movement. Fourth-wave feminism is predominantly victim-centred, and is based on the conviction that women are invariably oppressed and require the protection of authority figures. When the BBC promoted a smartphone app to help women speak up in meetings, it was merely toeing the standard feminist line on the intrinsic fragility of women. So we are left with the curious phenomenon of good people who are opposed to misogyny subscribing to an essentially misogynistic perspective.

Titania was an attempt to highlight the inescapable hypocrisies of such a mindset.

Andrew Doyle
March 12, 2019
Why I invented Titania McGrath – spiked

This has someremarkable similarities to what Lyle said just yesterday.

I would like to think that, at least for a generation, the death of Charlie Kirk put the last nail in the coffin of the illusion of “the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour” are the acts of the good guys. But I’m seeing strong indicators that the pendulum will swing too far in the other direction. I know people thinking they are “the good guys” and claim, “karmic justice” and/or “righteous violence” and even the necessity of evil acts. They too will demonstrate “they are capable of the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour” and “think they are the good guys.”

Believe Them

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In a world full of structural
R@cism
Sexism
H0m0phonia
Transph0bia
And millions of cishet gendered Facists burning thru our limited resources, well Death kinda makes sense , doancha think?

JFKY
Vassar graduate
VP Diversity, Inclusion & Equity
Major Merchant Venture Bank
September 21, 2025
Comment to Instapundit » Blog Archive » FOR THE LEFT VIOLENCE IS BAKED IN:  Death is the Solution to all Problems.

When someone tells you they want you dead, believe them.

Further evidence from the same comment thread:

Not MY death, but a culling of undesirables….undeisarables as it were

Prepare appropriately.

Update: I have been reliably informed that it is a parody account. See the comments below for details.

Food for Thought

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I can’t remember ever hearing of any teachers or school administrators, anywhere, picketing in favor of a free market.

Lyle
November 15, 2005
Comment to Solving the world’s problems

This observation is applicable to many other products and services provided by the government. And I’m certain the reason is something other than the quality and total cost of the products.

My hypothesis is that it is because the costs are hidden. You do not easily see the costs at the individual level. The product appears to be “free.” And when you chose a free-market alternative you do not receive the savings of not paying for the government product.

An Evolutionary Shift Like Never Before

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If human survival and well-being increasingly depend on the cultural systems around us, what happens to individual genetic evolution? Will we see a future where humanity evolves not as a collection of genetically distinct individuals, but as a cooperative, culturally shaped superorganism?

The idea is that just as ants or bees operate as superorganisms, humans may one day operate similarly, with survival and reproduction dependent on the health of the cultural systems that define our societies.

Tibi Puiu
September 18, 2025
Researchers Say Humans Are In the Midst of an Evolutionary Shift Like Never Before

It would seem to me that we have been evolving via cultural systems for thousands of years. Didn’t that begin with specialization and small groups/tribes? Perhaps even earlier with sexual differentiation with males generally being stronger and females better able to care for their young?

Sure, with the technologies in the transportation, farming, communication, and sanitation areas cities could develop. And those cities developed new cultures which then evolved even more. But it is not anything really new.

Now, perhaps the claim is that the technology/culture evolution is proceeding at a far faster rate than before. In centuries past it might be claimed that genetic and cultural evolution were comparable in contribution to human changes. And now, the technology/culture change is so much faster that the genetic changes are irrelevant. Maybe.

What I expect is that instead of genetic changes being irrelevant is that the ant/bee superorganism will not come about in humans because human genetics will be a barrier to such systems.

I can’t help but wonder if there is a what, back on the farm, my family viewed as “city folk” thinking. Basically, a bias of thinking their way of life is superior to the country life. There certainly are far more “cultural” options available in cities and those cultures (fads, as we thought of them) change much faster than the changes you see in the country.

Death is the Solution to all Problems

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Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem.

Joseph Stalin
See Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, 2003, p. 41. Also appears in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), edited by Fred R. Shapiro.

I cannot help but think of this quote in the context of the shootings and planned shootings of various prominent Republicans such as House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, three Supreme Court Justices, the two attempts at killing Donald Trump, and of course the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Leftist and political violence seem to be strongly correlated*.

You also see this in the expression of political will. The number and magnitude of riots, the level of violence, looting, and arson of the political left dwarfs that of the political right in this country. I have to wonder are they inspired by Stalin and others of his ilk? Or is it a natural result of their political posture?

The political right seems to be far less inclined to use violence means to achieve their political goals. I’m not saying they are entirely ethical, honest, or consistent. But violence does not seem to be one of the primary tools in their toolbox.

* Yes, there is evidence the 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators were politically motivated. But I don’t see Republicans excusing the murders or claiming the victims brought it on themselves.

We Are Not the Same

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Perhaps the reason leftists and conservatives think so differently about guns, is because for conservatives it doesn’t even occur to us to shoot someone simply for disagreeing.

The response to Charlie’s assassination revealed that it occurs to the left all the time.

Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas
Posted on X, September 16, 2025

Via daughter Jaime.

And from the same thread we have this:

Her Cause is Hopeless

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The gun-friendly Court has made a near-impossible feat Sisyphean. We have a Republican Congress utterly unwilling to pass meaningful legislation to stem the scourge of gun violence, backstopped by a Supreme Court that sees the Second Amendment as untouchable.

…

Still, dropping the subject cedes significant ground to the right. The United States is not the only country with hyper-partisanship and an irresponsible, bloodlusty leader. It’s the guns.

Kate Riga
September 11, 2025
We Don’t Even Talk About the Guns Anymore

Riga is delusional and/or stupid if she really thinks it is the guns rather than the culture and/or people. But that may be giving her too much credit.

At this point I don’t much care. She has an opinion that is just so much dust being swept into the dustbin of history. I’m just happy to see the acknowledgement that her desire to enable tyranny anytime soon is hopeless.

Blasphemy is still a crime

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Blasphemy is still a crime, but you see, the Gods, they have changed.

friedcheese
September 17, 2025
Comment to JUST ANOTHER CLASS OF “EXPERTS” TO IGNORE

Whether the gods are spiritual, tyrants, or political beliefs it probably always has been a crime in one form or another. And as demonstrated last week, it carries a death penalty in certain social circles.

People do not like having their most cherished beliefs challenged. Especially when the challenger is correct.

This is why we have the First Amendment.

Controlling Your Crazies

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Party politics has always had this weird aspect where the party that had a better handle on controlling its own crazies, usually captured the middle and won elections. The DEMs have been imploding since about 2017, and today the whole party almost sounds fringe. If the GOP wants to avoid the same fate, they have work to do.

Don Kilmer @donkilmer
Posted on X, September 16, 2025

The context in which he said this is important. It was this post on X:

Interesting assertion by Kilmer. I had not thought of it that way. Even after thinking about it some, I’m not sure I agree. But as I think of myself as more of an observer of the two major parties than a member of either, I may not be a “normal” person. The Libertarian party platform is a far better match for my understanding of the U.S. constitution. But it has an asymptotic close to zero chance of getting someone into national office. Hence, “winning an election” is an alien concept to me.

It is true that the Democrats have been riding the crazy train for many years now and do seem to have imploded. But I don’t have to do much more than close my eyes and point at a random Republican to see more crazy than I want in a national office holder.

For example, I’m flabbergasted that the AG of the U.S. in the video above did not know that “hate speech” is not a legal thing. That was crazy talk.

The political left could not prosecute people for it and the Republicans have no legal authority to “go after” speech that is not inciting violence or threatening imminent danger of permanent injury or death. It took some significant blowback before she “clarified her remarks“:

Still, it is always good advice to control your crazies.

FYI, I made this post and put it in the queue about an hour before I read Rolf’s comment on the same topic.

Psychologists Will Disappoint You on This

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As a reminder, the field of psychology cannot predict homicidal likelihood well at all. The base rate is so low, it is an extremely difficult prediction.

If you are looking to us to predict who should not be allowed to own a gun, you are going to be disappointed. I don’t know.

Nicole Prause @NicoleRPrause
Posted on X, September 12, 2025

Prause is a research psychologist. Although she seems to be generally opposed to private gun ownership, I believe her to be reasonable honest following where the data leads.

There are other reasons not to expect psychologists to do a good job on determining the fitness of someone to own a gun. It would be extremely generous to call it an inexact science. Hence, when confronted with the responsibility to make that type of decision they would probably error on the side of “public safety” and deny far more people the right of gun ownership than is appropriate.

The appropriate way to address this is to remove guns from the question. The appropriate question to ask is, “Is this person a threat to themselves or others?” And if so, the response should be involuntary confinement at state expense with appropriate, if any, treatment.

None of this is Agency

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I’m seeing a lot of us vs them rhetoric right now.

A man was shot and the timelines lit up with tribal chest beating.

There’s a sort of engineered frenzy that tells millions of strangers to feel attacked on cue and to answer with collective blame.

People graft their sense of self onto a mass identity because it is easier than standing alone. I get it. The group supplies ready-made meaning, ready-made enemies, and ready-made scripts for grief and anger.

When something happens to a figure near that group, the borrowed self experiences it as a personal wound. The nervous system fires as if family was hit. The algorithm notices, pours gasoline, and a person forgets they are a person.

They become a role. They perform the role loudly because the role rewards them with belonging. This is how the individual dissolves.

Parasocial attachment finishes the job. A commentator speaks into your head for years and your mind, built for villages, mistakes proximity for kinship. Suddenly the stranger is “ours,” and the event is “about me,” and the most primitive circuitry takes the wheel.

Outrage feels like virtue. Blanket blame feels like clarity. Calls for payback feel like strength. None of that is agency.

Power feeds on exactly this. Political machines live on attention, emotion, and fear. They need you sorted into blocs, preferably angry ones, because angry blocs are easy to mobilize and easy to tax.

The chant writes itself: “This proves everything I already believed!”

Notice how perfect that is. One incident becomes a voucher for every preloaded narrative. Nothing new is learned, but the leash is tightened.

The class that benefits is the same class that always benefits, and it is not you.

Dylan Allman @dylanmallman
Posted on X, September 10, 2025

I’ve always liked psychology and sociology.

This seems plausible.

A Simple Truth

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It’s two days out. We don’t know shit. The internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.

Bill Maher
September 13, 2025
Bill Maher Decries Political Responses After Charlie Kirk’s Death: ‘Let’s Not Debate About Who’s Worse’

Truth.

This Time the Biggest Legal Gun in the Nation is on Our Side

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Quote of the Day

We have the United States Department of Justice not only filing an amici brief on behalf of the challenges to the Illinois gun ban, they have asked for time to come in and argue the government’s position.

Todd Vandermyde
September 12, 2025
DOJ arguing against Illinois’ gun ban ‘monumental,’ advocate says

It is rare but not unheard of for the Feds to support the 2nd Amendment. See the DOJ amicus brief: Office of the Solicitor General | District of Columbia v. Heller – Amicus (Merits) | United States Department of Justice.

Still, it is definitely a worth celebrating when you find that you have the biggest legal gun in the nation on your side.

Advocating for Personal Safety

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Quote of the Day

The first time I went to a shooting range I was shaking so bad I couldn’t even write my simple five letter name on the forms and I almost threw up in the waiting area.

Now I am a second amendment advocate.

I do not advocate for violence. It is never the answer. But evil exists and it is up to us to protect ourselves. In fact, one of the first things you learn in a gun safety class is that you never want to pull out the gun unless you absolutely have to. Your wallet, watch, jewelry, phone, car, whatever are not worth taking someone’s life. I want to make that clear.

I also want to make it clear that if you are not comfortable around guns or in using one, then make that a top priority now. Start small. Get comfortable. Get trained. This is especially directed at women! If you aren’t comfortable with a gun please consider other options for personal safety. I am a runner. I have MACE and even a taser that I carry whenever I’m running alone. I’ve heard too many stories.

This is in no way advocating for violence. What it is though is advocating for personal safety. It is us against evil and no one is coming to save us. It is your right to protect yourself and your family.

sarah @swkyhokie
Posted on X, September 11, 2025

This is about 1/3 of her post. Most of the rest is her Virginia Tech mass shooting story. She was unhurt but blamed guns for many years. Eventually she thought it through and realized she had it wrong.

Via a post from Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras.