This is a 13 minute excerpt from the June 5th episode of Life, Liberty and Levin. I highly recommend it for those buying the drivel coming out of the White House and Media about gun control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA19oQCjjAA&t=703s. Cut and paste the link or press “Continue”>> below for easy access to the excerpt.
Scanning the headlines this morning I continue to be sickened by the politicization of EVERYTHING! Biden’s idiotic, hypocritical, sniveling and prevaricative diatribe about gun control is just one example of the bile producing nonsense that passes for news. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The facts be damned that in places where gun laws are the most strict, the most gun crime occurs. And the shrill, whining notion that guns are only for hunting is more drivel. No, the 2nd Amendment is there to prevent TYRANNY, exactly the demonic principle the Democrats are so desperately trying to foist on the American people! They are for Self-Defense and the protection of others when assaults occur. And they are occuring with increasing frequency. Armed guards with controlled access at schools (JUST LIKE AT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS!!!!) is what’s needed. Metal detectors may also be needed, and systems that will remotely lock doors. Eternal vigilance is necessary, not “gun free zones” which are invitations!
The shooting in Boulder, Colorado yesterday immediately generated a tsunami of ‘news’ reports which included references to an “assault rifle” used by the perpetrator. Before the facts were even known, Biden already had his teleprompter ready to decry “high capacity magazines” and “assault weapons”. He boasted that he previously authored the 1994 ban on “assault weapons” which was allowed to expire in 2004. Why was it allowed to expire? Because it didn’t work![i]
Setting aside the hysterical white male supremacy drivel that spewed forth from the Leftist press, I’d like to remind my readers of some hard facts:
1. AR, as in AR-15, does NOT stand for “assault rifle” as so many ignorant politicians and reporters allege. It is a reference to the Armalite Company’s model AR-15, which was a scaled down version of the earlier AR-10 rifle designed by Eugene Stoner, a design engineer. Thanks to Stoner and Armalite, the M16 military version capable of fully-automatic (a.k.a. “select-fire”) was developed. Over 8 million M16’s have been manufactured and most of the U.S. military adopted it at one time or another as standard issue.
2. The AR-15 style rifle, which is manufactured by many companies, is NOT capable of fully-automatic/select-fire operation. It may LOOK like an M16 or M4 (another military version), but it is, by definition, NOT an assault rifle. It is a semi-automatic weapon, which means the trigger must be pulled each time it is fired. An assault rifle, by contrast, has the fully-automatic capability of a machine gun. For a layman’s discussion of what IS and what is NOT an assault weapon, here’s an excellent article on the subject. It is incredibly naive, inaccurate and misleading to equate the term “assault rifle” with any rifle that looks like an M16, M4 an AK47 (the other of the two most popular military rifles in the world) or any other semi-automatic or even a “scary looking” single shot pistol. I was appalled to see in the officer’s report on the Boulder shooting the misuse of the term, which shows just how successful the anti-gun-lobby has been in bastardizing the definition!
3. If the shooter hadn’t used an AR-style semi-automatic pistol/rifle in the incident, are there other weapons he could have used? The answer is YES! Here are some examples of very powerful semi-automatic shotguns that don’t look scary but could have indeed been used, with the same tragic effect.
4. As an aside, it is a fact that the greatest school mass murder in U.S. history was not Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, University of Texas – Austin or Columbine. It was the 1927 Bath, Michigan bombing, which claimed 44 lives, 38 of them children. In other words, a committed murderer has many weapons available to him (or her). If the Boulder shooter didn’t have ready access to a semi-automatic, AR style rifle and was bent on murdering innocent civilians yesterday, he had lots of other options.
5. If all 300 million-plus guns in the hands of private citizens vanished on a Monday at the snap of a finger, how many guns would there be in America by the end of the week, and in whose hands would they be? The answer, many, and they’d be in the hands of criminals who would have free rein.
6. While it’s a slogan, it’s nevertheless a true one: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” While the anti-gun lobby wants you to believe this isn’t true, this article describes just a few, documented examples of this principle. Had another good guy with a gun (officer Eric Tally was obviously one) been present yesterday, how many of the ten lives that were lost might have been saved?
7. “Of all murders recorded in 2018 by the FBI, rifles accounted for 297 deaths. Handguns accounted for 6,603 deaths, and shotguns and all firearms not described otherwise accounted for 3,365 deaths[ii].”
So when all the hyperventilation and anti-gun rhetoric spews forth over the next days and weeks, quoting directly from the article referenced in the footnote:
“The last point to declare once again and for all is the inarguable fact that prohibits a piecemeal or total gun ban from ever working: A criminal intent on committing a mass shooting, murder, or other crime will not decide against it because he or she must use a handgun, or shotgun, or some other gun instead of an “assault rifle.”
An assault weapon ban never has not changed that and it never will. The only thing a gun ban does is restrict the Second Amendment rights of Americans. To argue a certain type of firearm should be prohibited from ownership by Americans in a factually useless attempt to reduce shootings is to fail to grasp the scope and intent of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was not written by those who escaped tyranny for the purpose of hunting. Nor was it written to provide a means for the individual’s self-defense. It was written to ensure American citizens will always have the physical force which might some day be required to once again protect liberty and their Constitutional rights from tyranny. In 2020, perhaps even those on the far left of the political spectrum would concede such a necessity exists.”
[i] For a comprehensive exposé, see the article here entitled “Did the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban Work?“) And if you want to read the official federal sponsored study entitled “Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003” you can read it here.
[ii] ibid.
None, and I mean none of the cable or broadcast news media question the outcome of the election anymore. “President Elect Joe Biden continues to forge ahead with plans for his cabinet despite unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud by Trump,” is typical of the banter one hears. The tsunami of fait accompli saturating the airwaves drowns out the 70 plus million of us who are seeing with our own eyes the affidavits alleging fraud and the investigative reporting that provides further evidence of Leftist malfeasance. Add to them our intuition that there’s no way that the weak, demented and corrupt Joe Biden received 78 million legitimate votes, more than Hillary Clinton and more than any candidate in history! And finally, don’t try to convince me that Joe Biden “ran away with the election” when the down ballot results showing wins in highly competitive races and gains in the House and state legislatures were all in the Republicans’ favor.
I’ve said before, here and on Parler, that I will not concede or accept Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the President and Vice-President elect until either the House says so in a contingent election, the Supreme Court decides by rule of law, or Trump himself concedes.
So count me among the stalwarts who don’t believe the election “results” and hope, pray and in my gut believe that Trump did indeed win in a landslide only to have been declared the loser by a corrupt media and due to fraudulent voting, and that either the courts or state legislatures will do the right thing and ensure the true winner is inaugurated in January.
Count me among the citizens of this country who welcomed the reversals of Obama/Biden-era regulations, weakness, capitulation to adversaries and attempts to “fundamentally transform” our nation, and among those who, despite unease and sometimes even revulsion at Trump’s style and methods, believed and still believe his actions vastly improved our country and set us on a course back to the top of the hill and peace and prosperity for all.
Count me among those who do NOT believe there is systemic racism in our country and who are infuriated by the rioting and looting and desecration we see in our cities, as well as the physical assaults with impunity on those who support Trump.
And count me among those skeptics who look at the coronavirus data and see how it has been manipulated and exploited to achieve political ends, and among those who are sickened by the tyrannical, short-sighted diktats of state and local despots hypocritically imposing lockdowns and mask-wearing to the destruction of so many businesses and livelihoods and the detriment of our school children and their families.
Count me among those who are not so stupid as to think that if all 300 million or so guns in the United States were taken off the streets tomorrow, there would be no more gun violence. Common sense tells us that within a few days there would be hundreds if not thousands of guns back on the streets, in the hands of criminals.
Count me among those who have turned off professional sports because of its genuflection to “wokeness”. What a load of horse you know what!
Count me among those who want smaller, not larger government and who want lower, not higher taxes.
Count me among those who have seen the good our country has done around the world and who stand at attention with their hands over their hearts when the flag goes by or ‘Taps’ are played.
Count me among those who believe in God, that there is good and evil in the world, and who choose to try to do the former and eschew the latter.
And finally, count me among those who pray He will bless us in our endeavor to fight against and eradicate evil and gain back our rapidly eroding freedom.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of the three types of people: sheep, wolves and sheep dogs, I strongly urge you to read about it in Lt. Col Dave Grossman’s book, “On Combat”. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell which category a person falls into until circumstances or events make it plainly obvious. One of the things the COVID-19 situation has done is make the distinctions more transparent.
Very briefly, and quoting from the book…
“If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.”
The vast majority of people are sheep. This isn’t a pejorative term, unless of course we’re referring to “sheeple”. Sheeple are docile, fearful, easily-led, easily-manipulated, often ego-centric, gullible and seek the approval of others, particularly “expert authorities” and some kind of outside validation for their actions.
The truly evil sociopaths are of course wolves, but we can characterize scammers, demagogues, fearmongers, ‘hypercrits’ (.sic), ‘patronizers’, ‘condescenders’, megalomaniacs, holier-than-thou types, petty bureaucrats and of course, the majority of politicians as wolves too!
FInally, there are among us, thankfully, sheepdogs: combat soldiers, intelligence operators, police, firemen, first responders, much of the medical community, community emergency response teams and myriad volunteers who seek to serve others.
Look around you these days and you’ll clearly see who’s who.
What does this mean for our new lives… our during and post-COVID lives?
If you are a sheep. I strongly urge you to seek out, get to know, listen to and if need be, follow one or more sheepdogs whom you can trust and try to help as they seek to protect and serve others.
If you are sheepdog, I strongly urge you to embrace your role and let people know you care about them, will try to look out for their well-being, will defend them (with violence if necessary!) against evil and will lead from the front, not from your behind (.sic).
A few years ago a regional newspaper run by wolves and staffed by sheeple, in a fit of anti-Second Amendment pique, published an online, interactive map of those of us with concealed carry gun permits. Their attempt was to ostracize and shame us. It backfired.
No less than three of my neighbors, after seeing that I (and no-one else within a radius of about five miles) had a carry permit, quietly told me something to the effect of, “If the s— hits the fan, I’m coming to YOUR house.” Besides offering to mentor them on firearms training and permit acquisition (usually met with a “noooo, I could never do that…”) I reassured them they could indeed rely on me to help them in a dire situation, and if necessary, I’d given them on-the-spot training!
If you are a Sheeple, you’re not reading this but if perchance you do I urge you to wake up, shut up, engage your brain and do something useful instead of whining, weeping, wailing and gnashing your teeth!
Finally, if you’re a wolf, you too are probably not reading this. But I would strongly urge all wolves to be mindful of the rapidly increasing number of sheepdogs who are coming out of their doghouses to confront the evil you represent. We’ve thrown the bulls— flag on the field and while we haven’t seen apocalyptic civil unrest at this time, we’re ready to confront you and will not hesitate to defend our families and our friends from everything from petty unrighteous dominion to violent threat.
This crisis has clearly brought out both the best and worst in people. I have no data to support this, but I would not be surprised if the number of sheepdogs reading these words is greater than for most blogs. Why? Because people who would actually take the time to read the reflections and musings of an old, traditional fart like me probably care deeply about their loved ones, their communities and our nation. I expect many of you are courageous in the face of hardship and would, like a sheepdog, step up when called upon (if you’re not already doing so) to defend the flock.
May God bless the Sheepdogs and the Sheep. May He help the Sheeple and may He render the Wolves impotent…
In the coming months there’s going to be a lot of talk about the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, the NRA and “assault rifles”. The limp-wristed Leftists who think a gun magazine is something you read will stomp their feet and gnash their teeth crying “we have to get guns off the streets” and “Republicans want guns so they can kill our kids” and similar nonsense.
The ignorance on the subject of guns is truly astounding. Hollywood has had much to do with creating false perceptions, and hypocritical, power-hungry politicians, many of whom have armed bodyguards, try to use this to their advantage. It’s a subject that can and will be discussed far beyond this election cycle, and there are so many facets to it, from the constitutional to the economic, to the ethical and moral, to the pragmatic…this article is only a tiny toe-in-the-water attempt to dispel some of the more glaring falsehoods and mis-characterizations of both guns and gun owners that permeate the airwaves.
First of all, guns are only one means to either inflict injury or death. In the hands of a determined killer a gun is actually one of the least efficient ways of carrying out an evil act. A bomb or driving a car into a crowd is far more deadly. Just ask Timothy McVeigh or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Similarly, guns are only one means of self-defense, but they’re an equalizer. A trained, 115 pound gun- wielding mom defending her children against a threatening 250 pound home invader has a far better chance of protecting them with a gun than without one. Yes, locks, alarms, pepper spray, a fireplace poker or baseball bat and “retreating to a safe place” are all possible defensive alternatives, but they’re hardly as effective as a gun against a perpetrator intent on harm.
The constant whining about “assault rifles” is sickening to responsible gun owners and enthusiasts. From Colorado Democrat Representative Diana DeGette’s idiotic statement that if there is a ban on magazines eventually the number of bullets would diminish “because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available,” to Nancy Pelosi’s bill to ban “assault magazines”, I could go on and on but I’ll simply point you to this article entitled “Top Ten Most Idiotic Anti-Gun Quotes from Politicians”.
For those of you who are NOT knowledgeable about guns, a magazine is the part of the gun that holds the bullets or shells, and is continuously re-used, so banning magazines doesn’t ban or reduce the number of bullets! And, by the way, the difference between bullets and shells is the difference between rifles and handguns and shotguns. Shotguns use shells, the others, bullets. Magazines can hold either but each is specific to the precise ammunition used!
Another common absurdity spewing from the mouths of Leftists is the suggestion that the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle”. In fact, it stands for ArmaLite, the company that has been around since 1954 and that designed all kinds of rifles, each named with the prefix AR.
An assault rifle is a weapon that is capable of ‘select’ or in other words, fully-automatic fire…essentially, a machine gun. That’s what the police and soldiers have hanging from the straps around their necks. The Left would have you believe that ANY gun that looks scary, i.e. one that looks like a military rifle such as the AR-15, or the most widely available gun type in the world…the AK-47 and its variants, is an assault weapon. No! Fully-automatic, true assault rifles are already illegal. The kind of AR-15 or AK-47 that can be bought and used are semi-automatic. The difference is that pressing the trigger of a real assault rifle when in fully-automatic mode will cause it to shoot bullets continuously until the trigger is released. On a semi-automatic rifle such as the kind owned by hundreds of thousands of gun-owners, the trigger must be pressed once for each firing of a bullet. The infamous “bump stock” used by the Las Vegas shooter was a device that allowed a semi-automatic rifle to simulate a fully-automatic one, but such a device could be used on lots of different semi-automatic rifles, including ones that don’t look scary!
Ironically, the M-1 Garand – the principal rifle used by the U.S. military during World War II, seems to be ok with the Left because it doesn’t look like scary but rather more like a classic hunting rifle. However, just ask many a dead German or Japanese soldier whether they considered the M-1 to be an assault weapon!
The justification for owning an AR or AK style rifle should not be, as some pro-gun advocates suggest, for hunting. Sure you can hunt with one, and many do, but for pure hunting purposes, a specific hunting rifle like the Winchester Model 70 with a scope on it will likely fill your freezer with venison more efficiently than an AR-15.
No, the justification for owning an AR or AK “assault-style” weapon is that they are dual-purpose – they are effective both for hunting AND self-defense. As the Winchester Model ’94 (the lever-action saddle “Gun that Won the West” featured in Western movies) was the dual-purpose rifle of the late 1800 and early 1900’s, the AR-15 and AK-47 are the dual-purpose rifles of today. Can any of these be used in a mass shooting incident? Yes, and so can a pressure-cooker bomb!
Under the heading PROPAGANDA, you may have seen a spot on television from the Ad Council where a little boy talks to his dad about the handgun hidden under the sweaters in the father’s closet. The clip is intended to shock the viewer into thinking “Oh my God, the child has access to a handgun and could do so much harm to himself or others! We simply have to ban guns.” What’s so ridiculous about this portrayal is that no responsible gun owner leaves a gun in a place accessible to children! And while there may be some irresponsible gun owners who have an easily accessible loaded gun in the house, they take other precautions, of which there are many, to ensure it doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
But this is but one example of the ignorant bias of such “public service” depictions. The barrage is continuous and serves no-one save the felons who would like nothing more than the assurance that they won’t encounter an armed citizen when they perpetrate their crimes.
I once sat at dinner with a conservative Englishman with whom I agreed on just about every topic except guns. “How could you allow so many guns in America and pass legislation supporting their ownership? That’s absurd”, he said. In reply I calmly pointed out, “Let’s say we were instantaneously able to get all 350 million plus guns in the hands of American residents off the streets on a Monday. How many guns do you think there would be on the streets by Friday, and in whose hands would they be?”
The suggestion that all guns are inherently dangerous is analogous to saying that all cars are dangerous! It is a true statement, irrespective of whether it’s uttered by the NRA or an individual gun-owner, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And while rarely publicized, the number of times annually that guns in the hands of responsible gun-owners have stopped crimes dwarfs the number of times guns are actually used in the commission of a crime. What is never reported, because it can’t be, is how many times the presence of a good guy with a gun DETERS a crime, or the times a criminal abandons a crime and flees when confronted with the barrel of a gun in the hands of a good guy.
In summary, it is absolutely true that “guns don’t kill people, people do”. In the U.S. there are far more responsible gun owners than criminals with guns, and that in and of itself deters many more crimes than might otherwise occur.
So demagogue politicians can and will denounce guns, and fracking, and cow farts and whatever else comes along that is the “cause du jour”. Their stupid memes and crusades aren’t going to help anyone but those who live off the grant money and donations of people trying to “feel good” about “doing something”.
There, I feel slightly better now. Someday I’ll tell you how I really feel!
The hyperventilating politicians can’t help themselves. Doing something, ANYTHING whether it makes sense or not, is not only predictable, but to every thinking American, laughable. We see this in children desperate for attention, except these are supposed to be adults. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Insidiously true!
First come the cries of “We have to have a serious conversation…”. Almost immediately thereafter comes the search for a scapegoat, “It’s the [fill in the blank]’s fault!” Then come the condescending vituperations and finally, if enough celebrities jump on the bandwagon, come the protests and sometimes riots.
For example, let’s take the current “mass shootings”. Even though it’s been said a dozen times over that all the legislation needed to enforce gun laws are already on the books, and nothing being proposed would have made any difference in the great majority of the incidents, the theatrics are omnipresent. The 2020 presidential candidates’ hand-wringing, eye-rolling, blame-their-opponents, gnashing of teeth, weeping, wailing, demands to “do something”… it’s all unadulterated nonsense.
Why? Because if every gun in America were eliminated on a Monday, how many guns would there be on the streets by Friday, and who would have them? Of course, the answer is hundreds, if not thousands, and it’d be the criminals and the madmen! And then we’d have to defend ourselves with baseball bats. I submit you’d have to have a hellavu swing to knock out of the park a 9MM bullet shot by a determined gunman threatening your family.
But on the Left, the rhetoric is tantamount to “confiscate all guns and America will be a safer place”. More nonsense. It’d be like giving everyone in the country a tee-shirt with a target on it and the words, “shoot here”.
“We’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them,” is another familiar cry. Enacting legislation that tries to do this would create more injustice to responsible gun owners. Whether a responsible gun owner goes to jail or not would then be dependent on how good the victimhood act from the aggrieved party is. “He (or she…let’s not be sexist here) is an angry old white man who’s threatening me!” Of course, the spouse making that allegation may have just had his or her belongings destroyed by that baseball bat or some other infliction, and the threats were made by the non-gun-owner party. Who gets arrested?
No, the solution to the mass shooting problem is not more legislation. The solution is easily described but terribly difficult to achieve. It is the return to and practice of traditional values in society. Fundamental morality has to become popular again. The teaching of right and wrong has to be the norm. Heroes have to be good rather than evil, and the Golden Rule has to prevail. In the late sixties, before the pendulum swung completely to the left, it would not have been such a herculean task. Today, with the pendulum so far left it’s near the 270 degree mark, it is.
We are repeating the mistake of history. Every great civilization: Egypt, Athens, Rome, Western Europe and now America, has gone through the same pattern: growth, prosperity, indolence, moral decay, the rise of deviant, destructive hedonism and demagogues, challenges from envious nations, the crumbling of traditional family units, the celebration of evil and immorality, the eventual decline of the culture, sovereignty impugned until its demise and replacement by another civilization in an earlier stage of the cycle.
Where do you think we are in this continuum?
The rampant demagoguery we’re witnessing is the sad symptom of a great civilization that is very ill. Is our situation fatal? Absolutely not. There are many among us who are speaking out and trying to push that pendulum back the other way. We do so by word and deed. In public we no longer speak in whispers or hushed tones about the rabid and caustic influence the Left is having on our society. When we walk our dogs, we don’t just pick up after them, we take an extra bag along and collect wrappers and cans and plastic water bottles along the street as well.
Sadly, but inevitably, it takes an outside shock like a world war, a natural disaster, a pandemic or some other cataclysmic event to wake us up and propel us to pay attention to the basics again. And by basics I mean the STUFF THAT MATTERS.
But the one thing we need more than anything to turn our civilization around is MORAL LEADERSHIP. The fact that so many would scoff at the previous sentence is symptomatic of how great the need is.
The 2016 presidential election was a cataclysmic event and it indeed caused us to reflect on what matters. Now we need to pick up the pieces of our society broken by the events of the last 11 or so years and MAKE GOOD COOL AGAIN.
And we have to somehow get rid of demagogue politicians and replace them with serious adults who ACTUALLY care about our country and its future rather than power, influence and money – ones who will sometimes stand there and do nothing instead of making things worse.
