In the last couple of years the US has averaged around 40,000 deaths by firearm. Most of those are suicides which doesn’t make them any less meaningful. Somewhere around 30 people per year are killed in mass shootings.

These small numbers drive the gun control narrative. The idea is that if we could only remove guns from existence there would be no more people killed with guns. Q.E.D.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it is again a utopian vision. You are never going to remove firearms from the general populous much less the criminal population. You are never going to remove the knowledge of how to make firearms from the population.

Technology is so much better today it is much easier to make a firearm from scratch than ever before in history. Even crappy steel of today is so much better than the steels used with the first firearms. Removing guns from the population is wishful thinking, it isn’t going to happen.

The arguments of “Self defense is a right” also doesn’t work with the gun grabbers. They are true believers in the deity of government. They believe that only the government should have the right of violence. Only the government has the right to arrest, judge and punish a person.

This is why you will hear people screaming that the man shot dead by a bleeding beaten and raped woman should have had a trial. That it isn’t right for his victim, at the moment of the crime, shooting her rapist dead dead dead. The rapist hasn’t been convicted by a jury of his peers so he is only an alleged rapist. She took the law into her own hands and executed him without a fair trail.

Yes, there are times when mistakes are made. We are not talking about that. They aren’t talking about that. They aren’t talking about her shooting the wrong man. Of her shooting somebody that wasn’t involved. They are explicitly saying that a woman shooting the rapist with his cock in her body is her taking the law into her own hands. He should have been given a fair trial, not executed in cold blood.

As part of this hatred of people using force to defend themselves, there is also a huge industry in hiding the successful use of force or threat of force to defend yourself.

Lower-end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, which estimated approximately 55,000–80,000 such uses each year

A May 2014 Harvard Injury Control Research Center survey about firearms and suicide completed by 150 firearms researchers found that only 8% of firearm researchers agreed that ‘In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime’.[

Note that in the second quote they aren’t actually telling you the number of DGU per year, they are only telling you the opinion of 150 researchers. How those researchers were chosen will have an impact on that percentage. With a large number of “researchers” employed by gun control advocates, of course the number of “researchers” that believe that DGU out number criminal use of guns per year is going to be skewed.

Some of the issues with measuring DGU include:

• Nobody killed or wounded so no official record of the event
• Neither party reported the incident
• Memories of DGU will seem more recent than they are so “in the past year” might get response going back multiple years.
• People lying in surveys
• Survey questions being unclear
• Survey answers being discarded because researches can’t get outside confirmation

Regardless, nobody knows the real number and when the CDC published their number it was so high that they were told not to repeat the study.

A new report, published 2022-05-13 concludes that there were approximately 1.67 million DGU in 20221.

This report summarizes the findings of a national survey of firearms ownership and use conducted between February 17th and March 23rd, 2021 by the professional survey firm Centiment. This survey, which is part of a larger book project, aims to provide the most comprehensive assessment of firearms ownership and use patterns in America to date. This online survey was administered to a representative sample of approximately fifty-four thousand U.S. residents aged 18 and over, and it identified 16,708 gun owners who were, in turn, asked in-depth questions about their ownership and their use of firearms, including defensive uses of firearms.

Consistent with other recent survey research, the survey finds an overall rate of adult firearm ownership of 31.9%, suggesting that in excess of 81.4 million Americans aged 18 and over own firearms. The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2%) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner’s home, and approximately half (53.9%) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten (9.1%) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of thirty (3.2%) occurred at work.
2021 National Firearms Survey: Updated Analysis Including Types of Firearms Owned

With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a handwritten letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person he believes to be responsible for the death of his family in the death camp to kill him himself.

My wife and I watched this film today with no great expectations. We are both into watching historical movies and this one caught her eye. The acting is ok. I am not one to judge acting. Christopher Plummer does a good job of portraying an elderly man with dementia and Martin Landau does a good job portraying his friend.

But that’s not why it is worth talking about this particular movie.

Everybody in Hollywood just knows that you can walk into any store that is selling firearms and for a few dollars just walk out with a gun, ready to kill. Or if not that, then they go to a “gun show” and buy a gun from somebody at the show and walk away with a gun, ready to kill. Everybody just knows it is easy to buy a gun.

We know that it is not that easy. While most people really do believe it is more difficult to buy cold medicine than to buy a gun the reality of making a gun purchase is almost never shown.

This show didn’t show the protagonist filling out a 4473. “Here fill out this form, I can’t help you. If you make a mistake I’ll shred it and you can start over.” is never explained to the public. Nor the 10 minutes of writing followed by 30 minutes to a few days of waiting before the “instant” background check comes back with a proceed. It isn’t shown in this movie because it is BORING.

Instead they told the story. The FFL asks for the old man’s drivers license and then walks to a computer and starts entering information from the DL. The old man asks what is happening and the FFL then explains that a background check is going to be done and what they are checking for.

He explained it naturally. It was made clear that nobody, not even a harmless looking old man, just hands over money and walks out the door.

The FFL then sold the gun and didn’t proceed until he said the background check had been completed.

The only thing they got wrong in that scene was that I don’t know a single FFL that would have completed that transfer given that the old man was showing signs of dementia in just the few interactions.

Finally, they did a good job of having good people in the movie. I’m so tired of movies filled with nasty characters. In this story the old man was treated with respect and kindness through out. There was no evil corporation doing evil things, there were no evil thugs doing evil things. The son is portrayed as loving and carrying. More concerned about his father being missing than anything.

And it wasn’t that nasty “Dad is just making work for me” it was a loving son taking care of his father.

There are some small things that happen that aren’t all that realistic in terms of firearms and firearm laws but even those are plausible.

Oh, the other scene that got the wife, old man has purchased some clothes at a Walmart type store. As he is leaving the security alarm goes off. Security guy comes out to check. He is polite and well spoken. He explains he has to do this, gets the receipt verifies that they just left a tag on something and then goes to check the other bag the old man is carrying.

He opens that bag and finds the Glock. We all know that bad things are about to happen.

“Is that a Glock?”

“yes”

Long pause, you can see the security guard about to react.

“It just reminds me of my first gun.” Puts the gun back in the bag. “You have a great day.”

The American Federation of Teachers and its head, Randi Weingarten, is at it again.

A nonprofit organization called First Book, which said it has partnered with Disney, the American Federation of Teachers and other entities, provides free and heavily discounted books to low-income schools. Some of those listed in its marketplace contain sex imagery or have been challenged by parents for promoting gender ideology.
— Nonprofit partnered with AFT provides books with sex imagery, drag queens and gender ideology to K-12 teachers

They are also attacking Project Veritas’ Secret Curriculum series.

Once again, the conservative activist group Project Veritas is targeting public education with out-of-context and deceptively edited videos.

The group is trying to churn up the culture wars in schools, announcing that they have videos about public education’s “secret” curriculum. They want to smear teachers and school staff, trying to paint them as nefarious and public schools as places of indoctrination.
Project Veritas YouTube page with full letter

A few days ago Randi was out there talking about how the teachers unions were the ones working to keep the kids in the schools.

There comes a point when you have to look at somebody and know that they are just scum. Ranid has made the cut.

You know the drill, what sorts of things do you want to hear about?

What belt do you use for holding your EDC?

If you could go to any firearms training course, what would it be?

One less ghost gun retailer will be in the business of illegally selling gun parts in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Tuesday.

We have a rights granted to us by our creator. One of those rights is the right to self defense. There is no limit on how you defend yourself. Hopefully you will keep the collateral damage to a minimum.

In these United States that right is embodied in the second amendment. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The second amendment does not say muskets. It does not say muzzle loaders or firearms. It doesn’t even mention knives, swords, clubs or axes. It says “arms”.

A few years ago one of the gun hating state of Massachusetts had their ban on stun guns declared unconstitutional. Stun guns are arms and as such are protected under the second amendment. SJC: Stun guns protected under Second Amendment

The newest horrible, no good, double plus ungood, awful threat to the people of this country is a gun that doesn’t have a serial number on it. More importantly, a serial number that the BATFE has a record of. The number of crimes being committed with guns that have no serial numbers is increased vastly.

Mostly because when you go from less than 10 to more than 100 you get huge percentage changes. “Crimes committed with ghost guns has jumped 400% since 2019” could mean that they went from 1 to 4 or from 100 to 400 or from 1000 to 4000. We don’t know because they work hard to hide the true numbers. If the number had climbed from 4000 to 5000 you can be sure it would be described as “more than a 1000 more ghost guns were used in crimes last year…”

Emotional blackmail is a good description of this method of manipulating people to fear something they have no reason to fear. We use to call it “dead baby stories”. These are the stories that were told before the Internet to keep you from doing something. It always had the same form, “Your aunt Jill’s husband’s brother’s son-in-law knows a family whose baby died because he was fed a strawberry. Never give strawberries to a baby or it will die!”

The gun rights infringers are very careful to not actually tell you what they mean when the say “Ghost Gun”.

What they mean is parts. What they mean are objects that might become a firearm. The ATF is currently playing the same game, trying to make parts firearms so they can force registration.

There are a couple of books out there that describe exactly how to use bits and pieces purchased at the local hardware store to create a working sub-machine gun. While it would be nice to have fancy tooling to make them, they are designed to be made with the simplest of tools. A drill and file being the two primary tools required.

The problem is always going to be “When does this piece of metal go from being a lump of metal to a firearm?”

As part of a settlement, Salvo Technologies – doing business as Florida-based 80P builder – agreed to stop selling New York City residents the illegal and untraceable firearms known as ghost guns, which are assembled from gun part kits often sold online.

“Untraceable” is the fear word.

Police procedural shows are very predictable. NCIS was better than most but still. Just about every other week you would hear a conversation like “We’ve identified that the gun that fired the shot is a Glock 49. There are only 9 registered owners of Glock 49s in the area, we need to check them out.”

Or on a really bad day they might have over a 100 registered owners. So some magic nerd in the back would use arcane incantations to have the list filtered down to just left handed 39 year olds whose junk hangs to the right.

There is no gun registry. Some states have one but there is no federal gun registry. Many people believe there is but that’s because Hollywood told them that there is.

For a time Maryland required that every new gun sold in the state supply an example fired case from that gun. This was going to allow the police to solve more crimes. They would be able to pick up a casing at a crime scene and instantly track it back to the person that owned the gun.

Except that it didn’t work even once. They canceled the boondoggle after a number of years and millions of dollars.

The number of times that a gun trace actually leads to an arrest is unknown. The data isn’t collected.

The AG of New York is ordering companies selling parts kits to not sell to people in NY because they might be turned into a real gun and that gun might be used in a crime and they might recover that gun and they might not know who did the crime and they might have been able to trace the gun to the first buyer if only that gun had been registered and had a serial number.

There are firearms that are parts of collections that are multiple buyers removed from the last time that firearm was on an FFLs books. Everytime there is a gun ban scare people decide that a little horse trading amongst friends might be a good idea. So a firearm that was purchased 30 years ago is traded to somebody that in turn trades it to somebody else and forgets about it.

The only thing they have is the emotional blackmail. We have to stand up to their screeching and whining.

[In 2011], the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as “assault weapons,” and two million plus high-capacity magazines. Many more have been sold in the gun-buying boom since then. But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for “assault weapon” registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.

Non-compliance is an act of defiance. The law is “shall not be infringed”. Be prepared to fight for your rights.

Settlement blocks another company from selling ghost guns in NYC

Language is so neat. You can say so many things without saying them by just picking the right words with the right connotations. You didn’t actually say that a person is a moron that looks like she escaped from the set of Beetlejuice because that would be an insult to morons and beatles.

In the 70’s and 80’s the term was “illegal alien” and it meant an alien person that was in the country illegally. The left wanted more people to vote democrat so the wanted more immigrants from third world countries. Senator Ted Kennedy (IIRC) pushed strongly for this.

There still wasn’t enough coming in through legal immigration but there as a flow that was entering the country illegally and their children were US citizens. And they would vote (Democrat?) when they came of age.

It was so down right mean to call somebody illegal so they became “undocumented aliens” and then “undocumented workers” and the migrants.

We are now starting to see the emergence of the term “illegal migrants” coming from the mouths and pens of the left.

This seems to be because of the horrible gamesmanship that Gov. Abbott is partaking in. You see, he’s asking illegal aliens if they want a free bus ride to DC, NYC and now Chicago.

According to Mayor Eric Adams of NYC the 3000 or so illegal aliens that Abbott had bussed to NYC has overwhelmed their social safety net. It is a humanitarian crisis that was manufactured by the heartless Texas Governor. At the very least Texas should inform NYC when they send a bus north, so that NYC can deal with it.

No mention about the 100s of small towns and cities on the southern border that see 1000s of illegal aliens per day. No mention of the illegal aliens being flown to different parts of the country and then sent out in busses. Maybe that doesn’t count.

Mayor Muriel Bowser of DC is saying some of the same things. It is just horrible that Texas would forcibly ship these poor helpless people to DC. It is inhuman to bus them to DC. DC just isn’t equipped to handle the 100s of illegal aliens showing up every week.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago had her name invoked three times by a reporter and she appeared with a soft bang and a cloud of smoke.

“My frustration comes from the actions of the governor of Texas,” she said at a press conference. “There could be a level of coordination and cooperation, but he chooses to do none of those things. Instead, he chooses to send human beings across the country to an uncertain destination. That’s unacceptable.”

He is manufacturing a human crisis and it makes no sense to me

Mayor Lori Lightfoot lashes out at Texas Gov. Abbott after 50 more migrants are bussed to Chicago

1570 James Stewart, 1908 King Carlos I of Portugal, 1919 General Emiliano Zapata, 1963 John F. Kennedy, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr., 2003 Zoran Đinđić were all assassinated. Other than some coups these are the very few that were assassinated with rifles.

Yet this is the thing that terrifies security details. It is the thing that TV and movie plots are made of. The lone gunman in his perch taking that multi yard shot from outside the parameter and killing their principal.

A good sniper is almost impossible to spot prior to the shot and is often not seen after the shot. The gun barrel pushed out the window advertising the location should never happen. A real sniper knows that it is patience that is his strength.

This country is full of men and women that have rifles perfectly capable of taking a deer at 500 yards. There are people that are capable of long distance shooting where they hit targets at well over 500 yards. The M-16 with a 20 inch barrel is perfectly capable of putting rounds on a man size target at 500 yards with iron sights.

In 1966 some asshole climbed the University Texas clock tower with multiple rifles and started shooting at people. He shot for 96 minutes, killed 15 people and injured 31 people. Civilians and police rushed to take him out. Civilians with rifles in their cars started returning fire to try and prevent the asshole from shooting as the police rushed up the tower to finally take out the shooter.

Unlike the cowards of Uvalde, these men rushed to the sound of gun fire.

Bonus: