This is what they think of self-defense with a gun

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Mayor Jim Kenney and DA Larry Krasner clash over charging man in South Street mass shooting:

Taking issue with a decision by District Attorney Larry Krasner, Mayor Jim Kenney said Wednesday that anyone who fired a weapon during Saturday night’s mass shooting on South Street deserved to be jailed — including the man prosecutors said had acted in self-defense.

Speaking at a virtual gun-violence briefing, Kenney said: “Anybody who fired a gun that day should be locked up.”

Krasner’s office took exception to the mayor’s comments. “He’s not a cop, he’s not an attorney,” said Jane Roh, Krasner’s spokesperson. “The DA and our entire office is incredibly frustrated with the gun violence that’s happening.

“But just like the mayor, we are bound by the law, we cannot invent crimes that don’t exist and facts that aren’t true.”

Would the Mayor insist someone who used a rock to hit and kill the guy who just shot him be locked up too? I’m betting the answer is no. The mayor is prejudiced against gun ownership and using a gun for self-defense.

If he somehow manages to someday get his way and anyone who defended innocent life against imminent danger of serious injury or death is prosecuted then it would be my desire that the mayor and anyone assisting him in such a crime be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

See also this article.

Quote of the day—Danny Westneat

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More than 400 officers have left while crime has soared. This past week The Seattle Times and KUOW reported new sex assault cases aren’t being investigated because of understaffing. Meanwhile, the softer approaches envisioned for community safety still are in the pilot stages.

This past week the city announced it is refunding 100,000 parking tickets and voiding another 100,000 because of an oversight — namely that the parking enforcement officers, who are civilians, were not regranted the authority to write tickets after they were switched out of the Police Department last fall.

Danny Westneat
June 4, 2022
Seattle’s botched experiment with defund the police keeps getting worse
[Emphasis added. I cannot believe these people are this stupid. It has to be intentional. These people are verifiably evil.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy

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We will stop you.
We will repeal your laws.
We will restore natural rights.

We are winning.

You will cope and seethe.

Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy
Tweeted on June 6, 2022
[Donate to the Firearms Policy Coalition here. I donate nearly $1700/year to the Firearms Policy Foundation and get a tax deduction.—Joe]

Implications

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Via a tweet from the JPFO:

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I’m tempted to respond, “Good question!” But, actually, their actions just confirm what I’ve known for decades. That is, the political left considers gun owners their mortal enemy.

Quote of the day—ENOUGH ALREADY! Wear a damn Mask! @moluvs2dive

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I’ll just leave this here for mr tiny dick!

ENOUGH ALREADY! Wear a damn Mask! @moluvs2dive
Tweeted on April 21, 2022
[It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier!

Via a tweet from In Chains @InChainsInJail.—Joe]

Insightful observation

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If found this very interesting:

Stop conflating mass shootings with mental illness

It’s important to understand the most common underlying factors that lead to violence: untreated anger, family violence, past history of violent acts, growing up where violence is used, and being young and male. To be clear, anger is not a mental illness. Hatred of others is not a mental illness.

It strikes me as probably true and gives us insight as to why Federal law against people who have been involuntarily treated for mental illness being banned from gun ownership is mostly useless and should be repealed.

A bigger issues is, “Can this this knowledge be leveraged in some way to reduce violent crime without infringing upon the rights of individuals?”

Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

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Economics has a concept called “revealed preference.” The gist is that a person’s observed actions reveal more about their preferences than what a person might profess to prefer. As applied to anti-gun politicians, despite all the noise they might make about stopping the criminal misuse of guns, their actions reveal that their policies are designed to attack the rights of law-abiding Americans.

…

For FY 2017 there were a grand total of 12 prosecutions out of 112,000 denials. When, all else being equal, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of being prosecuted for a crime in which the perpetrator necessarily offers himself up to the government, the goal isn’t public safety, it’s to control the law-abiding.

NRA-ILA
June 6, 2022
Gun Control is About Stripping Rights NOT Stopping Crime
[They are, of course, referring to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)..—Joe]

Schrodinger’s Gun

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Via email from Rolf:

SchrodingersGun

I think I could write the equation for the probability density function for that. Of course, it would violate mathematical law and prove the claims of the anti-gunners invalid. But, as they wouldn’t understand the concept, let alone the math, I won’t bother.

Getting a clue?

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The words and concepts are all there. But I’m not sure he is putting it all together to arrive at the obvious conclusion:

Nobody talks tougher on guns than the left. We want to regulate them, seize them, control them, even ban them.

The uncomfortable part of this stance is: Who is going to carry all this out, though, if not the police? Police who are stopping, searching, interfering — all the things various city actors have understandably said they are most skeptical police can do safely and without racial bias.

Recently, I wrote about how Washington state’s aggressive gun control laws, which ban AR-15 gun sales to people under age 21 and also institute a 10-day waiting period, would likely have prevented the recent Buffalo and Texas mass shootings (because both were committed by 18-year-olds who legally bought their guns).

What they don’t prevent are the types of gun crime that Seattle is awash in right now — where drug dealers, gang members or others steal guns or pick them up on an ample black market.

He needs to ask himself, and then his entire readership, just one question.

This makes perfect sense

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Michael Moore Urges 2nd Amendment Repeal: Get Dogs, Not Guns

“I know that there are Democratic Party leaders that do not want me saying this. … I make no apologies for it because I understand the history of this country, and I don’t think we should be afraid to say this: Repeal the Second Amendment. Repeal the Second Amendment,” Moore urged.

“You don’t need a gun,” Moore added. “If you’re afraid of somebody breaking in, get a dog.”

If a dog is going to be a deterrent to a violent predator then they have to be large and capable of inflicting serious, life threatening, damage. So, essentially you have the same level of damage as a firearm but instead of under your complete control it is under the control of an animal brain over which you have moderate control.

The way I see this is that if you believe a dog is better than a firearm it means you believe some dog brain has better judgement and is less likely to make a mistake in defending you and yours than you are. Plus there is the lack of availability when you go to work, the store, or the movies, etc.. That is also a “cost” of making that tradeoff.

For this increased reliability and decreased availability you are willing to a pay a lot more. This says to me that the increased reliability must be an order of magnitude or so better than what you have with a firearm 100% under your control.

This makes perfect sense in the case of Moore. But he should not be speaking for others who are not so mentally handicapped that, by his own indirect admission, he believes a dog is ten times smarter than he is.

Interesting

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Barb and I like cruises, but I’m not sure we like them this much:

When Angelyn Burk, a recently retired Seattle accountant, decided to crunch some numbers one evening last year, she made a stunning discovery: It would be cheaper for her and her husband to spend their retirement perpetually aboard cruise ships than to continue living on land.

“This is how I want to retire,” Angelyn, 53, decided in that moment. “Life is too short.”

She turned to her husband, Richard Burk, and said: “We can do this. Let’s make cruise ships our home.”

To her delight, he was onboard. The couple had thoroughly enjoyed the nearly 10 cruises they had been on together in the past, and they have a mutual love for travel as well as a shared disdain for airports.

They looked online and determined that, on average, they could string together voyages on various cruise ships for markedly less money than their collective cost of living on land. All they had to do was hop from ship to ship with some small breaks in between.

“We calculated that we can probably live reasonably well with about $100 a day together, with what we’ve saved up,” said Richard, 51, who retired as a computer programmer last month.

$100/day per person? At first thought that seems high but after some estimates and crunching my own numbers including infrequent things like home maintenance, vacations, and car purchases that probably isn’t far off. But looking at the cabin type and cruise lines we prefer the cost would be significantly more than $100/day per person. I did find cabins in that price range. So, if you didn’t mind having a tiny interior cabin with no view you could live your life like that.

The risk of being a victim of violent crime would be much lower. You would get maid service and great food with no time investment in shopping, cooking, washing dishes, etc.. My gun activities such as competition and reloading would be left behind. And we would not see our long time friends nearly as often.

I’m thinking the answer is no. But it is an interesting idea…

Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

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We have reached the point at which Democrats have to literally pretend Republicans don’t have better solutions.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on June 8, 2022
[I am inclined to dismiss “pretend”. All appearances are they are very serious. There are other hypothesis which match the available evidence better:

  1. They are delusional.
  2. They are deliberately lying (evil).

Of those two I’m inclined to go with the second option. They have been informed so many times by so many people for so many decades and there is so much evidence that must be overlooked by so many people that I have to rule out a mass delusion that infectious and lasting this long.—Joe]

I need some new t-shirts

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Don’t tell Barb, she thinks the 250+ shirts I had back in 2013 were sufficient, but I have found some shirts calling out to me.

Here is a small sample:

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Stack Up and Try

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SAVE THE DOGS – ABOLISH THE ATF

Wolves outside the door

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Via a tweet from NRA @NRA:

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Quote of the day—Amanda Marcotte

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Mass shootings are effective for Republicans at demoralizing their opposition and training their base to unlearn any lingering sense of empathy. Historian Ruth Ben-Shiat argued in October in the Washington Post, that gun violence “fosters political, social and psychological conditions that are propitious for autocracy.” A major GOP campaign message going into the midterms is that “woke” Democrats are letting criminals run amok in the cities. Dramatic gun violence really helps sell this message, which is why Republicans are guaranteed to block any bill that would make it even slightly harder for violent and unhinged people to get guns.

Amanda Marcotte
June 6, 2022
U.S. gun laws are causing mayhem and mass murder — and Republicans couldn’t be more thrilled
[This is what they think of you.

The way I remember the history of gun rights in this country over the last 30 years is that (mostly) Republicans celebrated the reduction in violent crime as it became easier to carry guns to protect yourself in public. Another contributor to that decreasing violent crime rates was the increased incarceration of repeat criminals. But, as numerous people have pointed out in the comments, the political left doesn’t know their history.—Joe]

Winning

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Support for ‘assault weapons’ ban hits all-time low following Uvalde shooting: Poll

New polling shows that support for an “assault weapons” ban in the United States has hit an all-time low despite calls from Democrats to implement a ban following a deadly mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

In a Quinnipiac University poll, conducted last week and published on Tuesday, 50 percent of registered voters support a nationwide ban on semi-automatic long guns compared to 45% who oppose which represents the lowest level of support since February 2013 when Quinnipiac began asking that question.

The highest level of support for the ban was 67% in February 2018, days after the Parkland school shooting that left 17 people dead.

From a legal and philosophical standpoint it doesn’t really matter if 99% of the population disagrees with you. And of course just because 99% of the population is totally convinced the earth is flat does not mean that it is flat.

But from a practical standpoint it sure helps if the number of people in opposition are relatively low. That only 50% of the population is in favor of violating our right to keep and bear modern sporting rifles and the trend is in our favor is good news. It will make it easier to get court decisions in our favor and to get legislators and politicians in the executive branch to stand up to the criminals. And ultimately, with enough support, to prosecute the criminals who have infringed upon our specific enumerated rights.

We are winning.

Quote of the day—House Democrats @HouseDemocrats

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Semiautomatic rifles are weapons of war. Refusing to act and save lives in this moment is an immoral abandonment of your constitutional duty.

House Democrats @HouseDemocrats
Tweeted on June 8, 2022
[I hope they enjoy their trial.—Joe]

AR-15 magazines for court battles

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SAF and Aero Precision have teamed up to sell specially marked Magpul PMAG® magazines:

2A Foundation Marked Magpul PMAG® 30-round Non-Window M2 - Black

In addition to getting a high quality magazine SAF and Aero Precision share this:

With the passing of SB 5078 we have partnered with the Second Amendment Foundation to help in the legal battle against this unconstitutional law. The net proceeds from each of these magazines sold will go directly to the Second Amendment Foundation to help fund legal action to defeat this unconstitutional bill.

I bought a few. You should consider doing the same.

Quote of the day—Marissa Edmund

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The technology is there, and it’s pretty basic, standard. To not have it implemented is kind of mind-boggling.

Marissa Edmund
Gun violence analyst at the Center for American Progress
June 3, 2022
Gun control after Uvalde: What could work, what won’t work, and what we can learn from the world
[She is referring to “smart guns”.

For someone who claims to be a “gun violence analyst” she is mind boggled by the wrong thing. It’s mind boggling that anyone who has studied the topic believes they will ever be accepted on anything more than a gun used for hobby purposes.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Matthew Yglesias

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Continuing to insist on new rules while shying away from enforcing existing ones, meanwhile, burns credibility with conservative voters, who see a left that’s eager to penalize their hobby and reluctant to punish criminals.

Matthew Yglesias
June 3, 2022
The flaw in the progressive stance on guns
[Via email from Chet.

Reading the entire opinion piece you can see he has a glimmer of self awareness about the weakness of the gun control position. But if he actually believes the 2nd Amendment, the specific enumeration of a basic human right, is just a hobby then he has no clue why so many people are opposed to restrictions on personal arms.

The mindset of the opposition is much closer to “people that wish to disarm me must be intending to inflect violence upon me and/or innocent people I care about.” This completely changes any attempts to get even minor concessions

Why would anyone grant someone they believe to be intent on murdering them to tie one hand behind their back? If, after saying “No!”, the person attempts to forcibly tie the hand it seems entirely justified to use lethal force to stop them.—Joe]