Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
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Some people need to stop playing with people.pic.twitter.com/vvIKKCMZPz
— Viral News NY (@ViralNewsNYC) January 19, 2023
I bet the inside front and back of his skull felt that one. He played a stupid game against a man who acted appropriately at the presence of a weapon.
As being older and “wiser”, I feel I need to get in this conversation. J.Kb. has made it clear that he has no love for the breed and he is not the only one out there. And there are the Pitbull lovers that will swear on a stack of bibles that the dogs are truly lovable and incapable of hurting another living creature unless trained for it. Some dog lovers consider the anti-Pitbull stance aking to an anti-gun position and say it is a bit hypocritical. I’ll expand on this later.
I am going to share a couple of experiences with you. A friend of mine in Venezuela had a small farm in which he raised sheep and pigs. Not that many, but enough to keep himself and his family fed and sell the excess. But he was suffering losses from thieves and decided it would be a good idea to have a fierce dog on property. Being of Italian extraction, he got himself a Cane Corso pup and trained him to be obedient and take care of the stock. The dog was raised among the sheep so they were not unknown animals that suddenly appeared in his life and could be considered either threats or prey. Everything was fine till one day when he was about 2 years old and for reasons unknown, the Corso attacked the sheep and killed several. He was obviously put down by the owner who did not relish doing so.
The other case was my own Dobermann, trained by me personally. Extremely obedient, bilingual and a great guard dog. But because of one silly experience he became a child hater. The next-door neighbor kid got his hand through the fence and the dog knowing him, simply approached him. The kid thought it would be funny to punch him in the nose for shits and giggles to which the dog responded by nipping him in the fingers. This happened in the presence of me and his parents, both on our own side of the property.
The kid’s mom raised shit about the dog biting the kid to which I reminded her that it was her bipedal vaginal excretion the one who inserted his hand in my property and attacked the dog. I went on to warn them not to harm my dog or else. They did not, mostly I believe because they have seen me for many years playing and improving on flammables. But as for the dog, he no longer trusted kids and saw them as outright threats to him and the household. After that, no kids were allowed on property, and we had to isolate the section of our land that butted into the neighbor’s house just to avoid future episodes. Our dog lived a long life in case you wanted to know.
If I had not be present the moment my dog was hit, I wouldn’t know why he may have attacked a child nor prepare for it. And here comes the point I wanted to make about the “equivalence” of being Anti-Pitbull and Anti-Gun: Dogs are capable of autonomous actions. Guns are not. Guns will not shoot anybody on their own if you leave them unattended. Dogs may attack if left to their own devices and specially if improperly trained and let loose.
That is the big difference.
Will I shoot a roaming Pitbull on sight? Nope, but you can bet your ass my hand won’t be far from my sidearm. More than one Pitbull loose? My hand will be on the gun, no shit. And if I detect the slightest hint of aggression, I will draw and the call to Animal Control or 911 be damned. And the same goes to any big ass dog bred for fighting.
For years I’ve been having breakfast conversations with my lady. I would bring her news from my feeds and my point of view. As a trusted source she had no problems engaging people in her feeds with the information, facts and opinions I gave her in the morning.
On one particular morning I told her about something I had heard. She forwarded it to her feeds and got slammed. What I had told her was factually incorrect. I had not checked my sources, I had not bothered to verify what I had heard. It was one of those “too good to be true” stories and it turned out it wasn’t.
I damaged my reputation with my lady with that one clumsy action.
To this day, if I have not personally verified something I will tell her that I have not verified it myself. If I have verified it and said as much she will trust my representation, but if I have not specifically verified the information she will before she uses it.
I am an opinionated S.O.B. I tried to ground my opinions in facts and figures. I don’t always succeed.
When I started to write here I took it upon myself to make sure that I very carefully delineated my opinion from actual facts. This has caused me to do deeper dives into content than I had originally intended. Most of my articles take hours to write. I’ve had some take 8 to 10 hours including all the research.
To that end I’ve attempted to make sure that I quote my sources and that I provide references.
So we need to talk about references or sources. There are three types of sources we deal with, primary sources, secondary sources and first hand sources.
If I report that I observed a particular thing, that is a first hand or first person source. I am reporting what I saw or heard. For example: I observed that nobody in my area had any issues with people destroying Trump yard signs. The local police didn’t do anything. The local media didn’t report it. When there were two or three BLM signs vandalized the police investigated, the police issued a statement and the local media published multiple articles regarding the evil of the right-wing.
Now if you repeat that story “AWA wrote an article about how destruction of Trump yard signs was treated differently from the destruction of BLM yard signs.” That is a true statement. People can reference my article and draw their own conclusions.
On the other hand, if you were to write your own article based on the information I provided you would be using a secondary source.
In order to help with this, I attempt to provide references to my primary sources. These would be links to local media, links to police announcements, links to images of destroyed Trump signs. Now I won’t do that because I really don’t want to say what “local” means.
Over the years of watching 2A videos and reading 2A articles I noticed that they often showed a document or the talked about a document but they never put links to the documents.
The reason for this is likely simple, PACER. PACER is Public Access to Court Electronic Records. The idea is that all documents that are filed in court are recorded in PACER for the public to access… at $0.10 per page.
While no one document will cost more than $3.00 there is a heck of a lot of documents that get filed. You would have to pay for all of them. In addition there is a price for doing searches. “Anytime a search is performed you are charged a fee based on the number of pages generated in the search, even if the search displays “no matches found.” There is no maximum fee for these searches.” So if you get a huge set of search results, you better save it as there is going to be a bill associated with it.
In addition, transcripts are charged at $0.10 per page. With the formatting on transcripts this can be pretty big.
The Second Circuit maintains its docket in the Case Management/Electronic Case-Filing (CM/ECF) system for all appeals filed on or after January 1, 2010. Anyone wishing to view docket entries and electronically filed documents for an appeal with a docket number starting with “10” or higher can access the docket by logging in the Second Circuit’s CM/ECF database linked with PACER.
It is the same for district courts as well. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, keeps their documents open and available and free.
What this means is that if somebody pulls a legal document from PACER they can’t just post a link to it and worse, PACER claims to own all of the documents they have, so sharing it is also forbidden.
This often times leads to extended searching in order to find primary sources for court documents. And the actual words of some of these documents make a difference.
For example, in my article about As the Narrative Turns – “Gun reform” Episode 32768 has a mention of the Supreme Court ruling for New York State in regards to the CCIA. In reading the actual opinion published by the Supreme Court you quickly find that it isn’t a victory for anybody.
Alito clearly says that the case is being left with the second circuit court to allow them to work through in the normal course of a court. He also tells the plaintiffs to reapply to the Supreme Court if the second circuit doesn’t give them the reasons for the current stay or if the second circuit doesn’t give them an expedited hearing on any appeal filed with them. Finally, the opinion mentions a number of district court cases by name regarding the CCIA. All of which is polite talk from the Supreme Court to the second to get their act squared away.
The words make a difference.
One problem with some of these documents is that I don’t have clean electronic copies of the primary references. The Gun Control Act of 1968 exists in PDF form on the net. It is a sequence of images of the act. In order to provide you with quotes from the Act I had to transcribe it by hand.
Regardless, references are important and you should all strive to use primary sources. Watch for weasel worded quotes. Anytime you find a quote with ellipses (…) you should ask yourself what was left out. We’ve seen many cases where the author of an article uses ellipses to cut out words that change the entire meaning of the quote.
That is one of the reasons my block quotes get so big. I want to provide you with complete context, or nearly so.
Finally, be careful of circular confirmation or single source items.
A circular confirmation is when multiple articles all report the same base set of facts. It seems like those are the actual facts. But the different articles often times reference back to each other. It isn’t that the NYT has independently confirmed fact B, it is that they read in the Washington Post that B was a fact. The Washington Post hasn’t independently confirmed fact B, it is that they read in the NYT that B was a fact.
Finally there is the single source problem. This is when multiple articles reference a single source. Then more articles reference the first set of articles. In a short period of time everyone is reporting the same set of facts. Unfortunately, all of the sources for that set of facts leads back to a single source, which may or may not be trustworthy.
When you write about a subject, you are adding the weight of your reputation to the that subject. Get your facts right before you begin. I really don’t want to admit the number of times I’ve deleted paragraphs from an article because my research showed that I was wrong about the base facts.
Finally, pay attention to your sources. There are people out there that want to make you and I look bad. They do that by creating content and attributing it to respected sources. Or pretending to be that respected source. If somebody tells you that Ben Shapiro said something that doesn’t match what you expect to hear from him, demand the proof.
I use to watch Glenn Beck, I was often told that he said horrible things. All I needed to do was to search youtube and the proof would be there. I did. What I found was a few dozen videos of Glenn Beck saying bad things. The total time he spent saying those “bad things” was around 5 to 10 minutes. So for a man with 1000s of hours of live broadcasts to have only 5 to 10 minutes of things that sound bad, out of context, that’s doing pretty good.
So check. If it doesn’t sound right, it likely isn’t.
And remember, there are people that will fake things just to mess with you.
“Other features of the Henry Homesteader include a 16” threaded barrel, which is topped by a ghost-ring sighting system. The receiver is also topped by a Picatinny rail for mounting optics. Suggested retail pricing on the Homesteader starts at $928.“
In the meantime, at Gunbroker:
Nothing coming out of Henty is cheap, we know. But that is stupid pricing.
At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments vow to defy state assault weapons ban
Just days after Illinois became the ninth U.S. state to ban assault rifles, the state already hit a roadblock to implementing the law: defiant sheriff’s offices.
At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments have publicly vowed to defy elements of a recent gun-control law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, which banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and switches. The offices have vowed to not check if weapons are registered with the state or house individuals arrested only for not complying with the law.
As the number of uncooperative sheriff’s offices increased, Pritzker has made his own vow – to ensure those members of law enforcement who fail to “do their job… won’t be in their job.”
The Illinois Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement Wednesday expressing continued opposition to the law. Simultaneously, dozens of sheriff’s offices began to post nearly identical messages promising they would not check for compliance with the law or arrest offenders of the law.
Many of the sheriffs defying the law have described their opposition to the law as akin to civil disobedience to protect the Second Amendment.
“We will not be enforcing it in this county; I will also not house anyone in my jail that has violated this act because we know it to be an unlawful act by the general assembly and the governor,” Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Bullard Sr. said in an online video.
Of course, the Left is going monkeyshit over this, demanding all these sheriffs be fired.
I’d like to see the Venn Diagram of people who think these sheriffs should get fired and those who thought it was wrong for DeSantis to fire Scott Israel after the Broward County Sheriff’s Office fucked up the Parkland shooting response. I bet it’s a perfect circle.
This reminds me of the fight over concealed carry in Illinois.
After Moore v. Madigan reqired Illinois to addopt CCW, Downstate sheriffs announced that if the state didn’t pass the law by the Court’s imposed cutoff date, they’d default to constitutional carry.
Southern Illinois is not Chicago.
These sheriffs clearly took their duty to uphold and defend the Constitution seriously.
This is good.
This video has been going around:
Full clip pic.twitter.com/6iZgG7RQgl
— BigblackniglI (@NigLlt) January 17, 2023
I have listened to this video several times.
I have no idea what the boy said to the girl.
It really doesn’t matter because at the time the girl threw the first punch, the boy had backed away, was not facing her, and had his hands full. He was not in any sort of aggressive posture.
The girl put on a pair of brass knuckles before sucker-punching the boy in the side of his head.
A hit like that absolutely has the potential to be lethal.
It looks like she hit him in the temple or side of the eye.
With brass knuckles, that could easily have done enough damage to cause blindness or the loss of the eye.
This was not defensive, this was assault.
The two things to note.
First:
It’s scary how many people in the comment thread think that a girl sucker-punching a boy is with brass knuckles is fine of the boy said something rude to her, and conversely, since she did punch him, he must have deserved it.
It’s that male privilege that you can take a sucker-punch to the dome with brass knuckles and everyone thinks you deserved it.
Second:
Watch the hands. This girl had time to put on a weapon and close distance while the boy was distracted. Your fight is not over when you decide it’s over but when your enemy decides it’s over. Just because you back away doesn’t mean your opponent will let you walk away. Maintain your situational awareness until you achieve safe distance.
You only need to look at the language used in order to understand what the infringers want. There use to be The Temperance Movement. It started in the early 1800’s and advocated for people to stop overindulging in alcohol consumption.
Most of these Temperance Movement members were female. Often they became members because they were dealing with alcoholic husbands and fathers. Alcoholism was generational. With one generation teaching the next to be “hard drinking men”.
At the same time recovering alcoholics were creating their own temperance groups. The difference being that they wanted total abstinence. It was a huge issue.
But the language was of “temperance”. That was the name of the groups. As one pundit put it recently, “It is right there in the name.”
By the beginning of the 20th century, these groups had morphed into demanding a complete prohibition on alcohol at both state and federal levels. Many members were violent, destroying bars and saloons. Destroying alcohol whenever they found it.
They believed in violent action to get their way.
The “Temperance Movement” soon demanded and got a complete ban on alcohol within the United States with a constitutional amendment.
In 1974, Mark Borinsky founded the National Council to Control Handguns. Its original mission statement is not easy to find. The general target at that time was for cheap, inexpensive guns, sometimes referred to as “Saturday Night Specials”. I.e. the target was those that had limited means to purchase higher quality firearms.
Just a few months earlier the Committee for Handgun Control, Inc. was founded. This group put members in other infringement groups to work for a common message. The message was “handguns are bad. Nobody but a criminal needs a handgun.” They advocated for licensing handgun owners, restricting certain handgun types, and creating a nation wide handgun owner and gun registry.
They wanted every handgun registered and every owner of a handgun registered as well.
They even went so far as to get the US Consumer Products Safety Division to define handgun ammunition as a hazardous substance and ban its sale. This required an act of Congress to kick the CPSD back into their place.
Congress was pressured into passing several laws banning “Saturday Night Specials” but they were unable to move any legislation forward on handguns in general.
The CFHC became renamed themselves as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). Reportedly because the NCCH was not advocating for strong enough gun control laws.
The National Council to Control Handguns become Handgun Control, Inc. in 1980.
The language was very clear, they wanted to ban all handguns.
After the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan Handgun Control, Inc. worked to get more gun control passed.
They were joined by Sarah Brady and using the image of James Brady got the Brady Bill passed, this established NICS and all of the rest of that mess.
In 2001 they rebranded again as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The messaging is clear at this point. They were no longer talking about “handgun control” or “gun control”, they were talking about “stopping gun violence”. Where the formal definition was “gun-related violence”. This is the same word game that the climate extremist use when they talk about lowering carbon emissions which are actually defined as carbon dioxide emissions.
Talking about stopping all those nasty companies from spewing black ugly carbon into the air sounds so much better than talking about a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that plants need to survive. Talking about stopping gun violence by restricting access to guns sounds much better than talking about stopping gun related violence by restricting access to guns.
Today the infringers talk about “Stopping Gun Violence”, “Introducing common sense gun safety regulations”, “Advocating for gun responsibility”, and general “gun safety”. They never step up and admit that they are attempting to ban all firearms from the people of the United States.
Even though more than a few have let that slip, as in “Hell Yes we are coming to take your AR-15s” from the presidential wannabe. Or Pelosie’s “If I had had the votes I would have take them all.” when she got the first federal AWB passed.
In order to push the narrative, the term used for “more gun control laws” is “gun [law] reform”. That sounds so much better than “gun bans”.
This language shows what we know. The laws, as written, are in favor of the right to keep and bear arms. They need more laws to infringe on that right. That’s why they need reform.
We, the people, don’t need gun laws reformed, we need them removed because they are in violation of the Contstitution.
The Guardian holds up the CCIA of New York State, the “Kill Carry” bill of NJ, the AWB of Illinois as examples of state level victories in gun reform.
In recent years, the US has seen a flurry of activity at the state level to combat gun violence, which the American Public Health Associations has classified as an epidemic. According to the Gun Violence Archive, guns claimed the lives of more than 44,000 Americans in 2022, including 24,000 who died by suicide. Gun safety groups say passing new laws like the Illinois assault weapons ban will become even more crucial in the coming months to address this issue: with Republicans now in control of the House of Representatives, the prospects for enacting additional federal gun legislation in the near future appear bleak.
At least they were honest enough to include actual suicide numbers. More people died of suicide by firearm than all other gun related deaths. Remember that gun related deaths includes all justified homicides as well.
That armed robber, moving towards room temperature, is considered a victim of “gun violence” by the gun rights infringers.
They fail to point out that any statistic from the Gun Violence Archive is bogus. The reason is that GVA uses media reporting to determine instances of gun-related violence. This equivalent of one “unnamed source near the investigation” leaking to four different media outlets the same story. And then all four of them report the story is true because they had “independently verified the story” Even though they all used exactly the same source.
As always, they never ever stop. Having gotten the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed, one group had this to say:
“That’s just the beginning, and we’re just scratching the surface there,” said Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for the gun safety group March For Our Lives. “That’s not the end all, be all, but it was really exciting to see that progress.”
They continue to use “gun safety advocates’ demands for more action at the federal level” rather than the older “Gun control extremists demand…”
Everytown brags about the number of infringing laws that were passed by the states.
Still, Yahya agreed that reform at the state level has become “even more important with the Republican control of the House”. In the past year, states have already enacted a number of new gun laws championed by groups like March For Our Lives. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, at least 51 new laws aimed at reducing gun violence were passed in 2022, while dozens of bills backed by the gun lobby were defeated.
If they can’t win at the federal level, they attack at the state level, if they are losing at the state level, they attack on the federal level. The only consistent function is they always want more.
And again, notice that anything we, as gun owners, advocate for is “back by the gun lobby” rather than any suggestion of a grassroots advocacy.
Of course they can lie by misdirection:
Last June, the conservative-leaning supreme court struck down a New York law that placed strict regulations on carrying a firearm in public. In response to the court’s ruling, New York legislators enacted a new law that included an extensive list of sensitive places where guns would be prohibited – such as schools, medical facilities and government buildings. The new policy is now facing legal challenges, although the supreme court ruled Wednesday that the law can remain in effect for the time being.
The Supreme Court didn’t rule on anything. They decided not to hear the request for an emergency action. Very different.
Just because they don’t hear a case doesn’t mean they have think the situation is correct, as it sits.
Gun safety advocates highlight New York’s legislative response to the supreme court’s ruling as a key example of how states can proactively address gun violence, even as federal legislation remains stalled.
Yep, they love those F’ You’s that the states are throwing towards the Supreme Court.
“This year, we’ll be doubling down on our efforts to go statehouse by statehouse to continue to pass life-saving laws,” said Monisha Henley, managing director of state government affairs at Everytown. “That is happening no matter what’s going on in DC.”
