Quote of the day—John R. Lott & Rujun Wang

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Three states that have detailed race and gender data for at least a decade show remarkably larger increases in permits for minorities compared to whites. In Texas, black females saw a 6.3 times greater percentage increase in permits than white males from 2002 to 2020. Oklahoma data from 2002 to 2020 indicated that the increase of licenses approved for Asians and American Indians was more than twice the rate for whites. North Carolina had black permits increase twice as fast as whites from 1996 till 2016.

From 2015 to 2020/2021, in the four states that provide data by race over that time period, the number of Asian people with permits increased 93.2% faster than the number of whites with permits. Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 135.7% faster than whites.

John R. Lott & Rujun Wang
Crime Prevention Research Center
October 6, 2021
Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2021 (alternate link here)
[People demanding more restrictions on concealed carry permits, or the existence of such permits to begin with, are racist.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Daniel Bostic @debostic

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I’m still grappling with the fact that we live in a country where you can be banned, censored, and investigated for calling out irregularities and demanding audits of an election.

Truly terrifying.

Daniel Bostic @debostic
Tweeted on January 11, 2021
[Prepare and respond appropriately.—Joe]

Good news

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Independent from the morality and constitutionally of abortion Texas S.B. 8 needs to go down in flames. As expressed by a FPC brief (from here):

This case is important not because of its specific subject matter of abortion, but instead for Texas’s cavalier and contemptuous mechanism for shielding from review potential violations of constitutional rights as determined by this Court’s precedents. It is one thing to disagree with precedents and seek their revision or reversal through judicial, congressional, or constitutional avenues; it is another simply to circumvent judicial review by  delegating state action to the citizenry at large and then claiming, with a wink and a nod, that no state actors are involved.

From Amicus‘s perspective, if pre-enforcement review can be evaded in the context of abortion it can and will be evaded in the context of the right to keep and bear arms. While the political valences of those issues seem to be opposites, the structural circumstances are too similar to ignore. As with Roe and Casey, many States view Heller as wrongly decided. Those States, with the help of many circuit courts, have showed an ongoing refusal to accept the holding in Heller and a continuing creativity in seeking to circumvent any protections for, and to chill the exercise of, Second Amendment rights.  It is hardly speculation to suggest that if Texas succeeds in its gambit here, New York, California, New Jersey, and others will not be far behind in adopting equally aggressive gambits to not merely chill but to freeze the right to keep and bear arms.

The First Amendment would also be subject to almost immediate attack if the Texas scheme were allowed to stand.

I suspect SCOTUS also sees the danger because:

The Supreme Court Court acted quickly to grant certiorari before judgment in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, the two primary challenges to S.B. 8, the controversial Texas abortion law.

…

This is an important legal question that extends well beyond the issue of abortion. It could, for example, implicate the federal government’s ability to challenge state-level Covid policies (as both the Trump Administration and Biden Administration threatened to do, although concerning different sorts of policies).

H/T to Law Firm of SolitaryPoorNastyBrutish&Short @AubreyLaVentana for the tweet alerting me. I knew about the Texas law and the risk. I did not know about the FPC getting involved.

Quote of the day—Kimberly McHale

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Not once does Abbott ever mention any actual gun policy change to help this from happening again. He especially doesn’t acknowledge the passing of his new permitless gun carry law that directly affects Texans’ ability to easily access guns more than ever.

Sen. Ted Cruz has also echoed similar sentiments and never touched on the actual issues that have led to the increase in school shootings throughout the state and country.

It is apparent that these politicians’ thoughts and prayers are not enough anymore. We must also hold our government to a higher standard. They must provide better laws, policy change, and gun regulations to our state and country. Our students, parents, and school faculties deserve better than just a familiar script of empty promises without any real changes ever being made.

Kimberly McHale
October 20, 2021
When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough
[Not once does McHale ever mention that gun control has never increased public safety. Not once does McHale ever mention that more government control is sometimes the wrong answer. Not once does McHale ever mention someone are willing to shoot innocent people is not going to be deterred by a legal requirement to get a permit to carry. Not once does McHale even mention that infringing specific enumerated rights is a felony punishable by death.—Joe]

Useful numbers

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I find some numbers very useful.

From pages 12 and 13 in Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2021 (alternate link here):

There are three relevant sets of numbers from the Pew survey:

— 30% of American adults say that they own a gun.

— 72% of the people who own a gun, say they own a handgun or a pistol.

— 11% of handgun owners say that they carry all the time, 26% say they carry most or all the time, and 57 percent say that they carry at least some of the time.

With a little multiplication, we find that:

— 2.4% say that they carry all the time.

— 5.4% carry most or all the time.

— 12.3% carry at least some of the time.

To summarize, the total number of permits in the US is at least 21.52 million. Add in people who legally carry without a permit, and the number clearly becomes much larger. While 8.3% of the adult population has permits, the percentage of Americans who say that they carry most or all the time is about 5.4%.

What does this mean in practice? It means that in most places where people are allowed to carry a concealed handgun, there will be someone carrying a concealed handgun. If the probability that any one person has a concealed handgun permit is 5.4%, in a room with 10 people (assuming that the probabilities are independent), the probability that at least one person will have a permitted concealed handgun is 43%. In a room with 20 people, that probability goes up to 67%. With 40, that probability rises to 89%.

I usually express it a little differently. I would translate and distill the numbers above into, “On average, about one out every 19 people you pass on the street is carrying a firearm.”

Quote of the day—kot-begemot-uk

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Hal, put your signature on the patent application
I am sorry Dave, I can’t do that

kot-begemot-uk
September 24, 2021
Comment to UK Appeals Court Rules AI Cannot Be Listed As a Patent Inventor
[Interesting topic. Currently the world courts are divided on the subject.

In August, an Australian Court ruled an AI can be an inventor. A U.S. court agrees with the UK ruling that an AI cannot be listed as an inventor.—Joe]

You cannot comply

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Via Matthew Bracken:

ComplyYourWayOut

You can vote your way in but you have to shoot your way out.

Quote of the day—David Codrea

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The Patriots at Lexington and Concord who refused government arms confiscation orders were all criminals in the eyes of the law. Coincidentally, their firearms all qualified as “ghost guns.”

… there is no reason for the government to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms unless it is going to be committing tyrannical offenses.

David Codrea
October 18, 2021
‘Ghost Gun’ Comments Show Sheriff Can’t Imagine Freedom
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

History buff

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Via Rolf and @LaughtingEyes::

HistoryBuff

Right to Bear Arms

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Via email from Rolf:

Recommended Age Range: 4-12

The Right to Bear Arms is a tool designed to assist parents in teaching children about the Second Amendment and constitutional liberties.  It highlights the time Charisma Cat attempted to take over the forest by using tricks, social shame, and manipulation to convince other animals to give up their teeth and claws.  Only the Bears refuse to surrender their arms.  You can guess what happens next.

I just ordered a copy for a Christmas gift for my grandson.

Speaking of propaganda

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What the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says about itself:

Metrorail provides safe, clean, reliable transit service for more than 600,000 customers a day throughout the Washington, DC area.

“Safe” and “reliable” they say…

Compare the above with what the National Transportation Safety Board says:

Metro officials have been aware since 2017 of equipment problems that appear to have caused the train derailment last week in Northern Virginia, a preliminary investigation by federal safety investigators showed.

Metro train 407, which derailed on the Blue Line on Oct. 12, had two other minor derailments the same day and was able to get back onto the tracks, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said at a news conference Monday morning.

The train derailed and re-railed itself once near the Arlington Cemetery station at about 3:20 p.m. and again near the Largo Town Center station at about 4:15 p.m.

After the third and final derailment, the train with 187 people on board got stuck in a dark tunnel near the Arlington Cemetery station. Riders had to walk the equivalent of about six football fields to get to safety.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has known of problems with the wheel assemblies of 7000-series railcars for years, Homendy said.

“We were made aware that WMATA was aware of this situation with the wheel assemblies going back to 2017,” she said.

I wonder what the consequences will be to the government run Metro compared to a non government entity which did something similar.

A Boeing test pilot is being prosecuted over 737 Max crashes. I expect no prosecutions because of the Metro railcar issues and the probability of people being fired is low.

H/T to Paul K. for the email.

Quote of the day—Caitlin Johnstone

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It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.

Caitlin Johnstone
October 10, 2021
The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced
[True.

I’m at a loss for a solution as is Johnstone.

Sometimes I wonder if a major reset (economic collapse?) would improve things. But when I give it more than a moment’s thought I decide things will get worse under those sort of circumstances.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ethan Siegel

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  • The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past.

  • However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe.

  • Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever.

Ethan Siegel
October 13, 2021
Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore
[Data exists back to about one second from the beginning.of the universe! Prior to that it’s speculation. The Big Bang from a singularity hypothesis doesn’t match some of the early data. Cosmic inflation is a better match.

Fascinating.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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Nothing more clearly illustrates gun control lack of success than the situation in King County. It is reflective of the national trend revealed in the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2020, showing murders up by 30 percent nationwide. If restricting the gun rights of law-abiding citizens worked, this should not be the case.

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
October 13, 2021
KING COUNTY, WA MURDER SPIKE TYPIFIES NATIONAL GUN CONTROL FAILURE
[Gottlieb’s statement presumes facts not in evidence. Namely, that the goal of gun control advocates is a reduction in violent crime.

Gottlieb knows their goal has nothing to do with reduction of violent crime. He said so 25 years ago. But the useful idiots and the mainstream media (yes, I’m repeating myself) believe that is the reason for and the achievable result of gun control.

I think it’s long past time to make the useful idiots aware of the truth and have them confront the liars. It would be a good first step toward the trials.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tom Ozimek

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he New York Fed’s August survey of consumer expectations showed that Americans anticipate food prices to rise by 7.9 percent in a year, higher than the overall inflation expectation of 5.2 percent.

Federal Reserve officials have repeatedly characterized the current bout of inflation as “transitory” though they have increasingly expressed concern about the risk of a de-anchoring of inflationary expectations. That’s where confidence in the “transitory” narrative falls and people start to believe and behave as if inflation will be far stickier than previously believed, impacting wage and price-setting behavior and potentially even sparking the kind of upward wage-price spiral that bedeviled the economy in the 1970s.

Tom Ozimek
October 9, 2021
Food Prices Hit Highest Level in a Decade
[See also Biden’s Inflation Now Costs Families $2.1K A Year And About To Get Worse.

One of the things about economics, the stock market, and retails sales that was difficult for me to accept was that significant components are emotion driven. It wasn’t that I rejected that it was true. It was that I wanted it to be false.

I wanted to believe that “everyone”, at least a sufficiently high percentage of people, would act rationally enough that most of the time shortages, crazy housing/tulip-bulb/Dot-Com/whatever bubbles and extreme economic cycles wouldn’t occur. I would think, “How many times must these lessons be taught in the school of hard knocks before people learn the lessons?” The answer I didn’t want to accept was that the majority of people will never learn the lesson.

I’ve become more cynical (realistic?) in my old age.

If people believe there is high inflation coming then they increase the odds that it will happen.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jesse Kelly @JesseKellyDC

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Rest assured, we ARE separating. It’s already in the works. Sane people are fleeing the blue areas as blue areas become East Germany. There is no reversing this trend. The country WILL come apart. It is only a matter of dates.

Jesse Kelly @JesseKellyDC
Tweeted on October 10, 2021
[While I can see the trend and understand the desire to be separate I’m not convinced that a separation will actually occur. There was an even stronger trend and desire for the North and South to separate in the early 1860’s and that separation wasn’t really completed and certainly wasn’t even semi-permanent.

There are a number of ways we could become unified again. An external threat could do it. A military coup quickly wiping out the leadership of one side and/or the other would be another roadblock to a separation. And that isn’t even considering things like an extinction class asteroid.

It’s really difficult to figure out what might happen. There are so many different ways things could go. Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Pigdowndog @Pigdowndog

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The “you” was generic. If anyone thinks they need a gun for ordinary daily living then that’s the very definition of paranoia. You’re wrong, I don’t want to ban a specific type of rifle, I want all guns banned for the general public. Fewer guns, fewer gun incidents. Simple logic

Pigdowndog @Pigdowndog
Tweeted on October 10, 2021
[Simple logic for simple minds. Logic only gives you correct results if you have the appropriate data.

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

Mass murder with bow and arrow

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Assailant with bow and arrows kills 5 people in Norway

A man armed with a bow fired arrows at shoppers in a small Norwegian town Wednesday, killing five people before he was arrested, authorities said.

The police chief in the community of Kongsberg, near the capital of Oslo, said there was “a confrontation” between officers and the assailant, but he did not elaborate. Two other people were wounded and hospitalized in intensive care, including an officer who was off duty and inside the shop where the attack took place, police said.

Almost silent and certainly deadly. These weapons of mass destruction have been available for 1000s of years. It’s long past time for civilized society to eliminate their possession by civilians. The weapons should be limited to the police and the military.

I wonder if they have universal background checks on the purchase of arrows and registration of all bows and bow owners owners. If not, are there bow safety advocates pushing for such legislation? It’s just common sense. Do it for the children. It’s a good first step.

Quote of the day—Memorandum of Understanding

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The ability of law enforcement agencies to share crime gun data across state lines will assist in their efforts to detect and deter gun crime, to investigate gun crime, and to identify and apprehend straw purchasers, suspect dealers, firearms traffickers, and other criminals.

Memorandum of Understanding
October 7, 2021
MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING AMONG THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY, THE STATE OF NEW YORK, THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT CONCERNING RECIPROCAL SHARING OF CRIME GUN DATA
[See also here.

Heavy sigh. There is so much fail (presuming good intention of the document writers) in this document. In just the short quote above it presumes several facts not in evidence:

  1. It presumes crime is a gun problem rather than a people problem. As Col. Jeff Cooper (IIRC) pointed out if you could eliminate all the guns you would still have a crime problem. If you locked up all the criminals you wouldn’t have a gun problem.
  2. It presumes some sort of magic happens when sharing data beyond criminal investigations (which is already possible without this MOU).
  3. It seems to presume there is some sort of advantage for criminal gangs to bring guns from out of state to sell in the individual states. But how can there be an advantage for a criminal in New York to obtain a gun from New Jersey and simultaneously there be an advantage for the criminal in New Jersey to obtain a gun from New York? Once the criminal commits a violent crime with (or without) a gun in either state they can be prosecuted for that crime regardless of where they obtained the gun.

But the presumption of good intentions is not justified.

One has to conclude, once again, that this isn’t about crime. It’s about demonizing gun ownership and terrorizing gun owners. If a gun is stolen from an innocent person this may assist the political criminals in the respective states to harass the victim of the property theft. They can and almost certainly will, be accused of selling the gun to criminals. I’ve known people who have had a dozen or more guns stolen. If a half dozen or more guns sold to a single person show up at crime scenes then law enforcement from these states are likely to be to making a very unpleasant visit to the innocent gun owner.

It’s clear these politicians view innocent gunowners as their enemy and it takes little imagination to believe they view the real criminals as their allies in their war against private gun ownership.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Matthew Piepenburg

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By 1997, I had graduated from a steady, iconic and expensive list of higher educational institutions which emphasized critical thinking, objective data, historical context and basic math.

But had I told a single professor back then that one day we’d see the simultaneous occurrence of Treasury Yields at 1.35%, and an “official” YoY CPI (inflation) growth rate of 5.4%, and an S&P reaching all-time highs above 4000, despite negative annual GDP rates, and consumer sentiment tanking, it’s likely they’d ask me to return my diplomas.

Why?

Because everything I (and all the rest of us) had been taught long ago was that rising risk assets reflect healthy economic growth, vigorous natural demand and a robust confidence in continued productivity and hence free-market price discovery.

That, at least, was the “reality” that nine years of secondary (post high-school) education gave me before I began my first toe-dip into the public exchanges (i.e., asset bubbles) of 1999.

…

Nothing I learned in school was “real” and nothing about our current moment in time has even the slightest resemblance to anything remotely characterized as natural, free-market or fair-price-driven.

Nothing. Not even close.

Matthew Piepenburg
September 14, 2021
Nothing is Real: A Visual Journey Through Market Absurdity
[Emphasis in the original.

We live in interesting times.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]