Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

Network news is all over the shooting in Denver where the only fatality was the perp, but as to the six road workers killed in Maryland... bupkus.

I understand about editorial judgment and that I have no more right to tell them what stories they cover than do you, Gentle Readers.[1] First Amendment and all that, y'all.

Having said that, there is a belief among gunnies that the "mainstream meadia" is conducting a PR campagaign to denigrate gun owners and agitate against civilian ownership of firearms. Stuff like this plays into that belief.
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[1] Though some have tried, from time to time.

Those groups that held re-enactments of the battles of the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 have found out, in no uncertain terms, that Gov. Hochul has outlawed doing those re-enactments.

Unless they want to do them with rubber guns and wooden cannon, of course. Which isn't going to draw in the tourists who want to see the smoke and hear the cannons' roar. Otherwise, it'll look like a Ren Faire with Redcoats.

Across America, Black women are taking up arms in unprecedented numbers. Research shows that first-time gun buyers since 2019 have been more likely to be Black and more likely to be female than gun purchasers in previous years, a finding that aligns with surveys of gun sellers.

I can think of one recent editorial writer who basically conceded that one of the reasons behind making it more expensive to own a gun is to keep guns out of the hands of poor people:

As for the cost of meeting these firearm requirements making it more difficult for low-income individuals to obtain guns, that is probably true. However, my guess is that people living in low-income neighborhoods have many higher priorities — such as improving failing schools, access to quality affordable housing, improving health outcomes and lowering crime rates — than getting access to firearms.

That's pretty much the way it has been for a very long time. When gun control laws have been enacted in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the objective was to keep guns out of the hands of those people. When the Black Panthers began openly carrying long guns, conservatives tripped over themselves to pass laws to stop them from doing so. But when white, far-right folks did the same thing in the 2010s and into the current decade... crickets.

On another note, it seems that Jedgar Hoover was bereft of a sense of humor:

In December 1964, Buchwald turned his pen directly on Hoover, joking that then-President Lyndon Johnson couldn't fire the FBI director - because the lawman didn't actually exist.

"What happened was that in 1925 the Reader's Digest was printing an article on the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation and as they do with many pieces they signed it with a nom de plume," the column read. "They got the word Hoover from the vacuum cleaner - to give the idea of a clean-up. Edgar was the name of one of the publisher's nephews, and J. stood for jail."

Imagine the last administration with a director as fascist as Jedgar, coupled with a wannabee tyrant like Sir Scarfs-a-Lot.

Such as this:

Deleted pic.twitter.com/IPOiMFKaUt

— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) July 18, 2022

There was nothing illegal in what Mr. Dicken did. My understanding is that gun-free signs in Indiana do not have the force of law behind them. Mall officials can ask anyone they see with a gun to leave and, if the person refuses to leave, then they can be charged with trespassing.

Contrast to New York state, where that would have been a felony because the state has decided that it knows best about the default situation for private property owners. There, a mall shooter is free to do their evil deeds until the cops show up.

In a major expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.

I would be a bit more sympathetic about the hand-wringing if I wasn't away that the Sullivan Law in NY was enacted to deny gun rights to the political opponents of Tammany Hall as well as those people.

Then there is this bit of pernicious hand-wringing:

It has become necessary to dissolve the Supreme Court of the United States.

The first step is for a state the "court" has now forced guns upon, to ignore this ruling.

Great. You're a court? Why and how do think you can enforce your rulings?#IgnoreTheCourt

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) June 23, 2022

One might recall that the segregationists took the same stance as Olbermann now does when the Supremes handed down Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S.. They said the same thing as Olbermann, that the Supreme Court doesn't have the capacity to enforce its own rulings.

I get that a lot of people don't like this ruling. But to say "let's just disobey the ruling" means that people are making common cause with some of the worst people in American history.

Amy Schumer, Shonda Rhimes and Julianne Moore are among a group of more than 200 Hollywood creatives asking for a reconsideration of how guns are used on screen.

The open letter, released by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has been created in the wake of recent tragedies in Buffalo and Uvalde. This year has already seen over 250 mass shootings in the US.
...
The letter does not call for an end to guns on screen but for more responsible usage and lists issues for others to be mindful of when creating shows and films. Points include showing the consequences for reckless gun use, considering alternatives to guns pre-production without sacrificing narrative integrity and limiting scenes with children and guns.

Right. Maybe in the next Bond flick, Bond will run around with a boy and maybe throwing boomerangs and bolas at people. They could have a hulking bad guy with an atl-atl.

Let's sue Mexico.

Seriously. There is little doubt that the Mexican government is basically a narco-corrupted construct. The Mexican government has largely abandoned its citizens to the cartels. A result is a continuous flow of drugs across our borders, which results in crime, corruption and violence here.

Sue the bastards. Sue every living president of Mexico, every living justice minister, and anyone else that you can think of. Maybe the Mormons have standing. If you have a relative who has suffered from drug addiction or drug-related virus, maybe you do, as well.

First off, I'm having trouble just keeping up with stupid shit said by Trump, especially in the interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios.

As Seth Meyers points out, every time Trump steps out from the bubble of Fox News, it's a disaster for him.


So one has to wonder why Trump does it. At this point, we have two candidates that have a propensity to say stupid shit, but we only have one who lies with every breath he takes, over 20,000 lies in three and a half years. He's a fucking bully who specializes in making enemies of our long-term friends. He can't be bothered to do anything meaningful about this pandemic, because that requires steadiness of purpose and speaking the truth to the American people, two things he just cannot master.

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Now, to shift gears to the NRA.

You've probably read that the attorney general of New York is suing to dissolve the NRA. If you read any of the conservative media, you'll see a lot of teeth being gnashed over an assault by a liberal on a storied organization.

Let's be honest about that: There is a germ of truth in that charge by conservatives. Nobody sued to dissolve the Komen Foundation, TIGHAR or the Wounded Warrior Project after it came to light that they were big on feathering the nests of their bosses.

But let's also be honest about this: The NRA did it to themselves. You only have to surf the online firearms communities to see frank discussions of how much of a shitstorm the NRA has become. There a lots of allegations of how the CEO, Wayne LaPierre, has been treating the NRA as his personal piggy bank, to the point that he wanted the NRA to buy him a $5 million mansion in Texas, a purchase that fell through because it became a PR nightmare. Through the NRA's ad agency, an apartment was rented for a comely intern (allegations were that she was WLP's chippie) and over a quarter-million was charged for WLP's purchases at a tony boutique in Beverly Hills.

Second Amendment activists have been trying to clean up the NRA for years. But WLP keeps doing what he does, including purging directors who opposed his kleptocratic regime and rigging the board elections. The NRA has been shedding members. If you're a member (other than a life member), you've probably gotten one email after another offering reduced membership rates. But nobody can penetrate the armored bubble WLP and his acolytes have erected.

Maybe the NY AG can. It's likely a politically inspired lawsuit. But it's a lawsuit that would never stood a chance of success if WLP had not mortally wounded the NRA from within.

If we have an assault weapon and high-cap magazine bans in the near future, a goodly share of the blame should attach to WLP.

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Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff known for his controversial hardline tactics against undocumented immigrants, lost his bid to win back his former position in Maricopa County.

Arpaio lost Tuesday's Republican primary for Maricopa County sheriff to his former chief deputy Jerry Sheridan by about 6,000 votes, according to the results from the Maricopa County Elections Department.

Signals: Alfa! Mike! Foxtrot!




Adios, you fascistic motherfucker.

Right, buff guy with a neck the diameter of a fire hydrant sneers at those who have guns.

"Might makes right" is a very old concept. When a buff young punk takes it in his mind to have his way sexually with a 5-foot-nothing girl, what are her options for fighting him off? When a couple of thugs break into the house of an old man to steal his money and prescription drugs, what's that old guy's option for defending himself?

Guns take youth and strength out of the equation. Thomas Jefferson said that all men are created equal. Samuel Colt made them so.

"Never fear any man, no matter what his size. When danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize."

Which is why big-muscled men hate guns. At least, until they come across a guy who is bigger, stronger, and meaner.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Wednesday a bill that will allow school districts in Florida to arm teachers.

The controversial measure, SB 7030, is an extension of the guardian program put in place after the Feb. 14, 2018, Parkland massacre in which 17 high school students and staff were killed. That program allowed some employees — but not classroom teachers — to receive weapons training and then carry guns on school property. Twenty-five of 67 Florida school districts are taking part in the program, including Lake and Broward counties.

The new law signed by DeSantis would allow classroom teachers to take part, too, with local school board authorization.

There was a fair amount of hyperventilating over this issue from the Astroturfers Against All Guns, who have been saying that the bill requires arming teachers. It does not.

I suspect that the vast majority of teachers won't opt for the training, even if their district offers it. The kids would know which teachers have guns. Even if they didn't, a public records request for training records would show who took the weapons training.

This was their headline:

Nasim Aghdam’s Massacre Is Part of the Crisis of Big Tech

Maybe I'm just being picky about the use of the word, but I don't know how a writer can seriously use the word "massacre" without a bunch of people being killed. Boston Massacre. Deerfield Massacre. Malmedy. My Lai. Kent State. York.

It's linguistic laziness, pure and simple.

After the nation’s worst mass shootings, in Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; Orlando, Fla.; and Columbine High School in Colorado, gun control advocates rose to demand more rigorous laws: stricter background checks, limits on magazine capacities, bans on assault weapons and tougher controls on gun shows and online firearms markets — almost always to no avail.

But in the weeks after the June 14 shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice, the response has had a twist: Conservative lawmakers, some of whom were nearly the victims of gun violence, have pressed to loosen gun controls.
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[Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat and the District’s nonvoting House member] said she objected not only to the attempt to bypass the city’s strict gun laws, but also to the timing of the push.

“It says everything about my colleagues that they would use the occasion of a tragedy on one of our members to come forward the day after with one of these bills,” Ms. Holmes Norton said.

But it's OK to "use the occasion of a tragedy" to push forward her own agenda, I gather, so long as it's about gun control. I'll bet that you can search long and hard for a statement from her after other shootings, in which she said that Congress shouldn't act in haste, and I bet that you'll find nothing. Probably quite the opposite.

Ms. Holmes-Norton can suck it.

The California magazine ban is on hold, for now.

The gunman who opened fire on a GOP baseball team in Virginia had a local storage locker with more than 200 rounds of ammunition that he visited daily, including less than an hour before he shot more than 60 times at the team during a morning practice June 14.

200 rounds?? {cue heart palpitations} My stars! {rapid fanning}

200 rounds? Fucking piker.

Nevada's new private-party background check law is a nullity.

Seems that the anti-gun crowd there wrote their referendum to require that Fart, Barf and Itch do the background checks. They did it that way because they believed that their proposal would have failed if the state did it, because the state would have passed the cost along to the parties.

Thing is, the Feebies aren't going to do background checks unless Federal law says they have to. And since Federal law doesn't require background checks for transfers between residents of the same state, the Feds are effectively telling the Nevada anti-gunners to go shit in their hats.

Which means that Nevada's private-party background check law is a dead parrot.

(H/T)

The City of Chicago is continuing its expensive rear-guard action to try and keep shooting ranges out of the city. That is, shooting ranges that are open to the public. There are ranges that are in use by the Chicago cops and by private security companies, which the city admitted to, and which would not conform to the extremely restricted zoning that the city wanted to slap on public ranges. The city also wanted to forbid teenagers from shooting on the ranges, even though the city's own witness admitted to being to taught to shoot a rifle at age 12.

The 7th Circuit wasn't having any of it.

At this point, a rational entity would stop spending tens, if not hundreds of killobucks on legal fees and get with the program. But since Chicago can afford to spend over half-a-billion dollars in damages to people that their cops have beaten, tortured, imprisoned and killed, this is probably chump change to them.

(H/T1, H/T2)

I have said, over and over again, my friend, that the Democrats' love of gun control would cost them.

Morons, most, if not all, of them

Hundreds of gay activists will begin a campaign of civil disobedience and direct action against gun companies and their supporters on Monday, to demand an end to the epidemic of gun violence blighting the US.

Ya, sure, they all live in places where the cops and the courts will treat gay-bashing as a serious crime and the authorities all treat gay-owed bars and other businesses with respect.

Not true in a lot of places, guys.

This is how the conversation has been going recently:

Them: We want to take away assault rifles.

Us: What are you going to give us in return?

Them: Nothing.

Us: Go fuck yourselves.

Because as long as the gun control people say "we're going to take", my side says "hell no". And we have enough in Congress to make "hell, no" stand. A toddler or two gets eaten by some alligators and the media isn't paying attention anymore to you guys.

It doesn't have to be that way. But the gun control side has to commit to negotiating, and not on the Soviet model of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is up for grabs".

It's happened before. Thirty years ago, when my side wanted to fix issues that arose from the Gun Control act of 1968, the pro-gun control side agreed, if my side would agree to a ban on registering new machine guns. At the time, new machine guns could be registered to civilians. That bothered the gun-control crowd, because reasons.*

A deal was reached. Both sides got something out of the deal. Both sides could claim victory. Because that's how negotiation works.

Currently, I have the legal right to go to the local gun store and buy any semi-automatic that I want and enough magazines to go with it in an amount that would give Ted Nugent a stiffy. If you want me to agree to give up that right, what are you prepared to offer in return?

If the answer is still "nothing", then "go fuck yourself" is still my reply.
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* The use of registered machine guns in crimes was and is exceedingly rare.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of that shit today.

So ask yourself this question: If the NRA is really a domestic terrorist organization, then doesn't it have to be the most inept one in all of recorded history?

For if there are several million people who can be construed as "domestic terrorists" because they are card-carrying members of the NRA, then wouldn't the death toll be rather eye-watering if they were even sucky at the job?

Nah. The "NRA is a terrorist organization" line is, of course, bullshit from people who, without drawing a breath, will then condemn the likes of Donald the Grifter for insinuating that all Muslims are Terrorists (and all Mexicans are rapists).