Category Archives: GUNS

UPDATED: Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera (British Press Serves It Straight Up)

Britain, Crime, GUNS, Individual Rights, Islam, The Zeitgeist

“Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera” is the current WND column. An excerpt:

A “frenzied machete attack.” “The most appalling crime.” “Sickening.” “Barbaric.” “A deluded, deranged act of violence.” “Gruesome and shocking.” These were press-cited descriptions of the butchering of a British soldier by a black man with a meat-cleaver, on a south-east London street.

By the sound of the killer’s common vernacular and accent, he, too, was British. The slaying occurred in Woolwich, just yards from the Royal Artillery Barracks.

Not content with carving up his countryman on the pavement, the savage also managed to carve out for himself a Speakers’ Corner, away from the famous, and once so civilized, corner in Hyde Park. …

… As my lead-in would suggest, the British surpass Americans in adjectival creativity. This time, however, the Queen’s English fell flat. Or, rather, the English language was perfectly up-to-the-task. It is the English-speaking people who are incapable of distilling in words the significance of the scene.

Jihadi chasers complicate the task; they are part of the problem, because they mask the salient issue here. Shouting about abstractions from the rooftops—”Jihad, Jihad”—serves only to conceal a concrete reality, and that is that Islam is but a catalyst.

Islam is muscular and murderous all right. It feeds those with compatible cravings. That these murderers mouth Muhammadan mantras is, however, incidental to the fact that they know they can act on their fantasies with impunity… they live among an emasculated, enfeebled people, lacking in core beliefs. (Invading Muslim countries does not constitute a respectable creed.) …

… The affinity for Islam these made-in-the-West murderers exhibit is secondary to their contempt for our helplessness. They are killers first, who prey on the kind of people who look to Big Brother to rescue them, dupe them; and tell them what’s what, i.e., manage the message …”

The complete column is “Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATED (5/23): British Press Serves It Straight Up. These headlines would not appear in the American mainstream. (On WND, yes.) The headlines are from the Daily Mail:

* Betrayal of a hero father: How MI5 spent EIGHT YEARS watching violent ex-prisoner who preached outside Poundland just yards from murder scene only days before soldier was hacked to death

*MI5 had been monitoring two fanatics responsible for SE London killing
*One fanatic was photographed behind hate preacher Anjem Choudary
*Michael Adebolajo, 28, was also a member of a banned terrorist group
*He was said to have preached jihad in Woolwich just earlier this week
*Close to where married father Lee Rigby was beheaded on Wednesday
*Second suspect named last night in reports as Michael Adebowale, 22

Betrayal. Fanatics. Beheading.

The image of a couple of women milling about with the murderer is disturbing. It is a snapshot of the Zeitgeist.

O’Reilly Embarrasses Our John Stossel. Yes, It Happened.

Crime, GUNS, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Race

It doesn’t often happen that Bill O’Reilly makes our John Stossel look, well, silly. But “Billy” did just that (April 31). I can’t find the TV clip, but when asked to explain why blacks were vastly overrepresented in violent crime statistics, Mr. Stossel, essentially, came up with the standard libertarian reply: The state made them do the crimes. As I put this reasoning in “Beware of ‘Absolut’ Libertarian Lunacy”:

“For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians saddle the state. ‘The State made me do it’ is how Stossel’s social determinism can be summed-up.” (June 6, 2009)

Stossel Matters Segment
What is the root cause of violence in Chicago?
Guests: John Stossel

Last year Chicago had more than 500 murders; the vast majority of both victims and killers were black males. The Factor asked John Stossel to evaluate the stats. “It’s wrong to focus on Chicago,” Stossel asserted, “because other cities are worse and it’s also wrong to focus on race. It’s much more your fault because if you weren’t supporting the drug war the drug laws would go away and most of this crime would go away.” Stossel turned to the fact that most violent crimes are committed by blacks and Hispanics. “Monica Crowley talked about the wreckage of liberalism and you talk about welfare chaos. We’ve sent the message that you’re a victim and you can’t participate in the white capitalist world. People used to lift themselves out of the ghetto but now they’re being told that they can’t.” …

I wonder if John Stossel “enfeebles his own kids with PC pieties,” rather than warn them of dangers they may face, as described in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”

Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America

Barack Obama, Constitution, Feminism, Founding Fathers, Gender, GUNS, History, Homosexuality, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Sex, Terrorism

“Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Whereas American media has shed mostly darkness on the “apparently” mysterious motivation behind the ruthless, savage, April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon—a Chechen leader offered some valuable insights about these homegrown terrorists:

[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?,” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together?

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief—what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time. ….”

Read the complete column. “Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is now on WND.

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Legal Doublespeak About National Gun Registration

Barack Obama, Constitution, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law

Gun owners must be wondering what in bloody blue blazes the malfunctioning media is talking about when referring to the gun legislation just defeated in the Senate as a background-check bill.

“Don’t we already have those?”, they’d be asking themselves. And they’d be right.

If you’ve purchased a gun from a dealer, and you have a Concealed Pistol License, you’ve undergone a background check. I have. According to the law in my state, the firearms dealer must run you through the NICS—National Instant Criminal Background Check System— for an instant check prior to delivery.

Most states have similar laws.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered a canned performance of righteous indignation, with activists beating on breast behind him over the defeat of the savior bill. A “shameful day for Washington,” raged Obama, who is master of the cliche.

The defeated Manchin-Toomey amendment has been misrepresented by the jokers of the media as no more than “a compromise on a fraction of the comprehensive gun control package the president called for after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.”

However, the extent of the Obama media’s doublespeak becomes clear when the legal implications of Toomey-Manchin are unpacked by Second-Amendment scholar David Kopel.

The “badly miswritten” Toomey-Manchin Amendment was “in fact a major advancement for gun control,” writes Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog written by law professors.

Particularly interesting is what Kopel has discovered with respect to “The provision which claims to outlaw national gun registration.” It “in fact authorizes a national gun registry”:

Let’s start with registration. Here’s the Machin-Toomey text.

(c) Prohibition of National Gun Registry.-Section 923 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(m) The Attorney General may not consolidate or centralize the records of the
“(1) acquisition or disposition of firearms, or any portion thereof, maintained by
“(A) a person with a valid, current license under this chapter;
“(B) an unlicensed transferor under section 922(t); or
“(2) possession or ownership of a firearm, maintained by any medical or health insurance entity.”.

The limit on creating a registry applies only to the Attorney General (and thus to entities under his direct control, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). By a straightforward application of inclusio unius exclusio alterius it is permissible for entities other than the Attorney General to create gun registries, using whatever information they can acquire from their own operations. For example, the Secretary of HHS may consolidate and centralize whatever firearms records are maintained by any medical or health insurance entity. The Secretary of the Army may consolidate and centralize records about personal guns owned by military personnel and their families.
The Attorney General may not create a registry from the records of “a person with a valid, current license under this chapter.” In other words, the AG may not harvest the records of persons who currently hold a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Thus, pursuant to inclusio unius, the AG may centralize and consolidate the records of FFLs who have retired from their business.