The Big 2A

Like everybody else arguing in favor of a framework of sensible gun laws, I always get a lot of pushback from ammosexuals that eventually boils down to: "shall not be infringed - that's the phrase that matters, Libtard - SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ".

(notice how I left out all the typos and spelling errors and grammatical hernias, in order not to make fun of the knuckle-headed rubes who're dumb enough to think that way - cuz I'm just a nice feller)

So anyway, their 4-word absolute-ittude has been a real stopper (in that they think that's all they need), but I think this might be a pretty good rebuttal:

You're ignoring 85% of what the 2nd amendment says - so we get to ignore 85% of the rights you claim the amendment confers on you.

In fact, I'll cut that back to just 50%. You can have either "keep" or "bear" - your choice.

This popped up on Twitter and it's what got me thinkin':

The Conversation, Saul Cornell:

The Second Amendment is one of the most frequently cited provisions in the American Constitution, but also one of the most poorly understood.

The 27 words that constitute the Second Amendment seem to baffle modern Americans on both the left and right.

Ironically, those on both ends of our contemporary political spectrum cast the Second Amendment as a barrier to robust gun regulation. Gun rights supporters – mostly, but not exclusively, on the right – seem to believe that the Second Amendment prohibits many forms of gun regulation. On the left, frustration with the lack of progress on modern gun control leads to periodic calls for the amendment’s repeal.

Both of these beliefs ignore an irrefutable historical truth. The framers and adopters of the Second Amendment were generally ardent supporters of the idea of well-regulated liberty. Without strong governments and effective laws, they believed, liberty inevitably degenerated into licentiousness and eventually anarchy. Diligent students of history, particularly Roman history, the Federalists who wrote the Constitution realized that tyranny more often resulted from anarchy, not strong government.

I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations.

Consider these five categories of gun laws that the Founders endorsed.

#1: Registration

#2: Public carry

#3: Stand-your-ground laws

#4: Safe storage laws

#5: Loyalty oaths

Today's Tweet

We got a copy of his insurance card, right? And let's run a credit check on his mom to make sure she can handle the co-pay. 

Oh yeah - call the guys in IT just in case we need 'em to set up a GoFundMe page on this one.

Our #hero has a long road to go, but he's looking better. Anthony Borges (age 15) was shot 5 times using his body as a human shield to protect classmates and save lives! He deserves the highest honors & best medical care we can give another human being.#FloridaSchoolShooting pic.twitter.com/wpEVcddaSg

— John Moffitt (@JohnRMoffitt) February 25, 2018

Today's Quote

(Pass this one along to your congress critters)

"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don't belong here."

--California Treasurer Jesse (Big Daddy) Unruh, referring to lobbyists

Good Guy Punished

Houston Chronicle, Jay Jordan:

Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.

The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police.

"There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life."

The weird part (which isn't weird at all): He started out as a good guy without a gun, but by the time the cops got there, he was the good guy with a gun, and the cops shot him because he was the guy with the gun.

Weird part #2 (which also isn't weird at all): I'm wondering if this is going to make NRA-TV.

At first I tho't they wouldn't wanna be anywhere near this one. But those guys are pretty remarkably good at selling, so I think we can fully expect a Turnaround. 

"If Mr Garces had been appropriately armed, then the would-be shooter is the only one to have been shot."

But it still comes down to this: Gun violence in this case was thwarted by unarmed people - and we don't know that the perp really intended to shoot anybody in the first place.

Amy Siskind

The Mueller probe made news this week with new indictments, and the probe’s fourth and fifth guilty pleas. A comparison of public knowledge on where the probe was headed was made to the “tip of the iceberg,” as charges against a previously unknown Dutch man whose father-in-law is a Russian oligarch came Tuesday. Trump’s White House continues its high-drama chaos with continuing threats of firings and actual resignations, and amid controversy over access to highly classified materials.
Week 67 hi-lites:

1. On Saturday, at the Munich Security Conference, US lawmakers from both parties and top national security officials told Europe’s foreign policy elite to ignore Trump’s tweets, Trump’s main mode of communication.

11. Trump tweeted that the FBI missed “signals” sent out about the school shooting because the agency was too focused on Russian collusion, drawing widespread condemnation, including from survivors on Twitter.

12. Asked about Trump, Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland student who is helping organize gun-control marches in DC and other cities on March 24 said, “the best thing for us to do is ignore him,” calling his words “disgraceful.”

15. On Monday, WAPO reported according to a White House official, after the flurry of negative news to hit the regime in the last week, the school shooting which killed 17 was viewed as a “a distraction or a reprieve.”

18. Politico reported the Trump regime is trimming language on women’s reproductive rights and discrimination from the soon-to-be-released State Department annual report on global human rights.

19. By order of the regime, passages which deal with women’s access to contraceptives and abortion will be removed, and a broader section which chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination will be pared down.

20. The State Department report is relied on by a range of people, from U.S. lawmakers to political activists. Officials say these late, unusual revisions reflect Trump regime orders while many key roles remain unstaffed.

75. BuzzFeed reported Mueller’s team has now identified more than $40 million in “suspicious” financial transactions to and from companies controlled by Manafort. Mueller’s October indicted listed just $18 million.

82. Manafort and Gates received large amounts of money for their work in Ukraine from 2006–2015 which they laundered by bringing it into the US as corporate loans, also avoiding reporting the money as income.

83. When the money dried up, Manafort and Gates lied to lenders about their finances, and set up a real estate scheme under which they were able to obtain millions in financing in 2015 and 2016.

84. Lawfare reported while there are no allegations about the Trump campaign directly, the indictment alleges bank fraud between 2015 and 2017 during which Manafort and Gates were both involved with Trump.

Silence

Lemme see if I've got this straight. The community - students, cops, school admin etc; the community, following protocol and due process, exerted its collective authority over a few individuals and suddenly, there were no kids shot to pieces at school.

I'll make a radical assumption and say most of the cops in Leonardtown are all for their 2A rights. And yet, there's the chief talking pretty proud about taking those guns away from citizens - when there's good reason for doing it.

It's not simple, because it's never simple, but:

• If there are no cars, nobody dies in a car crash.
• If there are no airplanes, nobody dies in an airplane crash.
• If there are no 10 story buildings, nobody dies falling 10 stories to the sidewalk.

And nobody has ever died from being hit with a hand-thrown AR15 bullet.

So get fuckin' real, ammosexuals.

BTW, makes me wonder a little why the Press Poodles chose not to point this one up.

Refresher

Good guys get killed too - even the guys with the guns. And sometimes they get killed because they're the ones with the guns.

Yeesh

Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky has been speaking out, expressing his opinion on how we need to get something done - maybe something as radical as gun safety laws - to prevent mass shootings.

Cameron Kasky has been getting death threats from NRA supporters.

Think Progress:

Kasky isn’t the only teenager getting death threats for their activism against the NRA. David Hogg, also 17, has fiercely advocated on television for improved gun control laws in the wake of the mass shooting which left seventeen of his classmates and teachers dead. Over the last week, he has been a central target for conspiracy theorists believing that he is in fact not a student but a “crisis actor”. One video claiming Hogg was an actor got more than 200,000 views and was the top trending video on YouTube before it was taken down.
Let all that soak in for a minute.

Just fuckin' yeesh.

Today's Face Palm

45* says Gun-Free Zones are dumb things and only poopy-head libruls think they're OK.

ABC News:
Donald Trump spoke in favor of gun rights at the National Rifle Association convention today, but security and staff at several of his prized hotels and golf courses told ABC News that guests are not allowed to carry guns there.

The Trump Organization, meanwhile, claims that’s not true.

“We strongly believe in the 2nd Amendmentand are against gun free zones. While laws vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, we allow security personnel and other licensed individuals the ability to carry a firearm in an effort to protect themselves, our guests, associates and the general public,” a spokesperson told ABC News by email.

A few Trump properties where guests are not allowed guns:

Trump National Doral = (305) 592-2000
Trump National Jupiter GC = (561) 691-8700
Trump International GC = (561) 682-0700
Trump International hotel - Las Vegas = (702) 982-0000
Trump Mar-a-Lago = 561-832-2600.

Today's Tweet

I keep insisting "conservatives aren't all that stoopid." Cuz nobody can be that fucking stoopid.  And they keep proving me wrong.

Here’s what happens when nothing but white guys write history books. pic.twitter.com/ywbvsVwXtV

— shauna (@goldengateblond) February 25, 2018

 

What We're Aiming At

18 U.S. Code § 201 - Bribery of public officials and witnesses

(a) For the purpose of this section -

(1) the term “public official” means Member of Congress, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner, either before or after such official has qualified, or an officer or employee or person acting for or on behalf of the United States, or any department, agency or branch of Government thereof, including the District of Columbia, in any official function, under or by authority of any such department, agency, or branch of Government, or a juror;

(2) the term “person who has been selected to be a public official” means any person who has been nominated or appointed to be a public official, or has been officially informed that such person will be so nominated or appointed...

Margaret Carlson, writing in The Daily Beast:

It’s all well and good for Paul Manafort to spend 15 years in prison for money laundering, and Rick Gates to plead guilty to cut a deal, and Alex Van Der Zwaan to miss the birth of his first child because he lied to the FBI.

But it would be an injustice if, once again, those around the president suffer and he is left unscathed. He was the beneficiary of the highly questionable Russian contacts his campaign made and desperately tried to keep secret leading up to the 2016 election, which speaks of collusion and much worse. Trump couldn’t have chosen two top advisers with more contacts with the Kremlin than campaign manager Manafort and national security adviser Michael Flynn. He could hardly have praised Russia President Valdimir Putin more. And he could have hardly benefitted more from Russian interference than to win.

- and -

...It is Title 18 United States Code, section 201 that specifically makes it a crime for a public official to take “anything of value,” a bribe, in exchange for government action, which can be prospective.

Note that above I wrote “public official.” That’s because the law is generally wielded against public officials. Problem: Mueller is investigating conduct before Trump became one. Enter Waxman. He points out that in 1962, Congress extended the bribery law to cover activity prior to the assumption of office. It did so, he says, in order to close a “loophole” afforded those “who assume public office under a corrupt commitment.” The upshot? Trump became covered by 18 USC not when he was sworn in but as of July 21, 2016 when he became his party’s nominee in Cleveland, Ohio.

And one last tasty little tidbit - It could be a coincidence, but Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin lawyer who was at the Trump Tower meeting, had long been fighting a money laundering case in New York and suddenly won a favorable settlement after Trump’s election.

What It Did

The 1994 moratorium on assault rifles did what it was intended to do - it drove down the  numbers of dead Americans due to mass shooting incidents.

WaPo, Christopher Ingraham:

Critics of bans on assault weapons, however, say they do little to save lives. The NRA correctly points out that assault weapons are used only in a tiny fraction of gun crimes. The gun rights group also notes that a federally funded study of the previous assault weapons ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Similar points have been made in arguments against a new ban in publications running the ideological gamut from Breitbart to the New York Times to HuffPost.

But the 1994 assault weapons ban was never intended to be a comprehensive fix for “gun violence” writ large. Its purpose, according to gun violence experts and the lawmakers who wrote the bill, was to reduce the frequency and lethality of mass shootings like the ones in Parkland, Sandy Hook and elsewhere. And on that front, the data shows it had a significant impact.

In the last few days, I've had people tell me (people I've known for a long time) - they've told me I'm lying to them when I present facts about things. It's almost like they've decided the numbers themselves don't even exist anymore, much less the facts those numbers illustrate.

I had one guy tell me I was lying when I pointed out that congress, in the mid 1990s, had cut the funding for CDC to study gun violence as a public health issue (they did it in a sneaky way, but they did it), and they added an amendment to a spending bill instructing CDC not to "advocate or promote gun control". So, of course, any study where the authors conclude that their findings suggest gun control measures might be appropriate is deemed in violation of that "non-advocacy" rule.

You may also have heard a while back all the noise about family docs and ER clinicians being told to shut up and stop asking patients about guns in the home.

I pointed to all of that when discussing the gun issue on several sites, and got nowhere.  I went back and dug up some of the articles available in the archives, and showed them to my debate opponents, who dismissed them out of hand simply because they were Washington Post, and so they couldn't be trusted.

As usual, this gets worse before it gets better.

Today's Randy

Randy Rainbow

Today's Pix

(click to embiggen)

Well And Truly Fucked

Wanna know how fucked up this joint is?  How well and truly fucked we are?

WaPo, Travis Anders:

The Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday considering several issues. These included a motion to debate a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk.

The House chose not to consider the gun-control bill.

It later passed the resolution claiming that porn is dangerous.

And this, from the Tamba Bay Times, Jeffrey Solocheck:

With the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting still looming large, its students in the Capitol to lobby for gun controls, the Florida House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday its sponsor said aimed at bringing "light" to the schools.

The bill (HB 839) would require all public schools to post the state motto, "In God We Trust," in a "conspicuous place."