The clock is ticking for the 2018 session of the Florida Legislature and SB 7026, a bill that the NRA wants deader than dinosaurs.
Now comes the weekend and suddenly we are only 5 day away till the Senate and the House close their doors for the legislative year.
I have been checking the calendar for today and I don’t see SB 7026 up for discussion today (cross thy fingers) or even Monday or Tuesday. That does not mean it won’t be introduced, but I want to be optimistic just a tad and say we won’t see movement till Monday.
So, with the time short, why are the Democrat piling amendments to the bill? As far as I know, each has to be read, explained, voted on and approved or rejected. That takes time, a lot of time and it is irritating since they are repeating the same items over and over.
As of this moment (10:05 AM EST) there are 85 amendments attached to the bill.
Are the Florida Democrats looking to kill the bill? It appears so and I don’t think we would be sad about it. About the only good part of the bill being arming volunteer teachers is hated by Governor Scott, so basically there is nothing left for anybody, at least anybody interested in the Bill of Rights.
Just last night I was talking to a friend about Florida’s Governor Rick Scott’s chances to beat Sen. Bill Nelson and the possibility that we would have not one but two (more or less) Republican senator representing us in D.C.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida has a narrow lead over his state’s governor Rick Scott, a Republican and Nelson’s would-be challenger in the Florida Senate race, according to a new Quinnipiac University Poll. The poll found Nelson edging out Scott with 46 percent support to the governor’s 42 percent.
And then, this morning we find out we are still gonna “enjoy” Bill Nelson’s works in Washington. Why?
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott added a new hurdle to the Legislature’s efforts to respond to the Parkland high school massacre, repeating Thursday that he opposes any attempt to arm teachers at schools.
“I’ve been very clear,” Scott said Thursday. “I want to make sure we have significant law enforcement presence at every school. I want to make sure we harden our schools. But I don’t support arming teachers.”
Listen, I understand that you may have some moral (albeit misguided) concerns about arming teachers. I actually believe you really don’t care one way or the other, but somebody in your Senate Campaign, probably a leftover from the Jeb Bush team, told you that you need the teachers to win the Senate, that you need to be a compassionate Republican and save the teachers from this imposition because the Teachers’ lobby said so and you need to look palatable to the Democratic voters.
But what you don’t do is piss off the hard-core voters: Gun Owners. For fuck’s sake, man! You do not ignore at least 1,874,015 certified gun owners (Feb 2018 – concealed weapons permits alone) to kiss the ass of lobbyist only representing 180,442 teachers! And God knows how many more that do not carry but are Gun Enthusiasts anyway and that right now are looking at the shit show in Tallahassee and reckoning of the Legislature is gonna screw them.
Dear GOP Candidates: A if a Democrat Voter is given the chance to cast a ballot between a Democrat-Acting Republican or a true Democrat, It does not take a genius to figure out which way that piece of paper is gonna be marked.
You all know my guiding principle: Don’t trust anybody, read the source. Well, Keeping eye on the amendments being piled up by the Democrats on the “Please add more shit to the bill” I ran across this section of 7026 about Risk Protection Orders that is quite illustrative:
You are only dangerous if you pose a significant threat with a gun, that’s it. Is your son hearing voices and cooking batches of ANFO while screaming to the sky how he is gonna go blow the local Methodist Church? Sorry, no Risk Protection Order (RPO.) Cousin Chuck stopped taking his meds and now is filling a backpack with short machetes after he posted in Facebook that he is gonna slice customers at the nearest Publix? No RPO, sorry. Brother In Law Irving is modifying his F 350 with metal spikes all around and announcing he is gonna shish-k-bob the shit out of every cyclist in the next Critical Mass ride? If it ain’t a gun, you cannot apply.
Stupidly, the Legislature trying to appease Anti Gunners have left a door wide open to pass at least two Broward Sheriff patrols car side by side. Instead of making it a real safety bill (misguided and invasive to rights or not) into a narrow-tailored gun control bill.
After that, how much worse could the abuse of psychology be in the Trump era.
A lot.
Forget diagnosing one person as mentally unstable, despite never talking with him. Trump era psychology allows tens of millions of people to be dismissed for political reasons under the guise of medicine.
Why has support for gun rights become a hallmark of the Republican Party? There is nothing inevitable about the combination of economic and foreign policy conservatism with social conservatism. As late as the mid-1980s, conservative icons including Ronald Reagan supported gun control measures such as the Brady bill and a ban on assault weapons. Support for gun control legislation actually increased among Republicans in the 1980s. Unambiguous support for gun “rights” didn’t appear in the Republican Party platform until 1988. Even the National Rifle Association did not become fanatically opposed to any and all gun regulations until the late 1970s.
Well, after the slow erosion of our civil rights with little pushback, the Conservative movement pivoted and decided gun rights were worth protecting. For most people we’d call that a policy shift. Bill Clinton signed “work for welfare” into law with welfare reform. Obama ended that reform. Was that a policy shift or a sign of aberrant psychology?
During his 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama famously proposed a crude psychological explanation for why traditionally Democratic-leaning groups of voters were being drawn to Republican positions on social issues. Industrial jobs had disappeared from the small towns of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, he noted, and Republicans and Democrats alike had failed to address the distress of these communities. So, he said, it’s not surprising that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
That wasn’t amateur psychology. That was pure Liberal bigotry against Conservatives. Know the difference.
Obama’s explanation was superficially plausible (and has been widely adapted to explain the appeal of Donald Trump), but the facts provide little support for it. For one thing, the increase in attachment to guns that Obama lamented never actually happened. The percentage of American households owning a gun has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. For another, support for gun “rights” is actually stronger among more affluent Americans than among poorer Americans, the very ones who are supposed to be “bitter.”
I don’t know where this “declined steadily” comes from. I have a feeling people don’t admit that they own guns to NPR. We have month after month record NICS checks. I have a feeling these polls are as skewed as CNN polls.
Jonathan Haidt does a wonderful presentation on this topic. I trust him because is a good psychologist and not a partisan hack.
Unlike Slate, Haidt doesn’t dismiss Conservative values and their psychological roots as bad, and actually explains why they are good an necessary for society.
Yes, I know, Liberals are “better people” than Conservatives. We hear this all the time. Except… like everything Slate does, this is wrong or slanted. Conservatives do “value equality less” when we discuss equality of outcome. Conservatives value equality of opportunity. For example, everyone has the right to a public school education. If one student drops out, one gets all “C” grades, and one is valedictorian, their career paths and income levels will all be different. A liberal will want the valedictorian to be taxed on his six figure job to give more benefits to the dropout. The Conservative will say “they all had the same access, each chose their own path and now they have to live with the consequences of their actions.” The former opinion is not objectively better than the latter, and it may actually be worse.
As per empathy, empathy makes bad policy. When you craft policy based on empathy – say severely curtailing gun rights for law abiding citizens because of a bunch of mewling high school kids on TV, that’s bad policy. Empathy for “poor migrants” has turned Sweden into the rape capital of Europe. Empathy for illegals was what got Kate Steinle killed in a sanctuary city.
Personally, I don’t believe that Liberals think people are good and Conservatives think people are bad. Conservatives know that evil exists. We don’t blame the gun, we blame the shooter. We know it isn’t a lack of jobs but some awful tenants of Islam that is the reason there is so much terrorism from the Middle East. If Liberals thought that people are good, than why is it that Liberals love to micromanage people’s lives? Shouldn’t inherently good people deserve the most freedom?
Lastly, only a true Liberal would consider “loyalty, deference to authority, and moral and sexual purity” to be bad. A lack of Loyalty is what made Chelsea Manning a hero to the Left for treason against the US. A lack of sexual and moral purity is what leads to the normalization of pedophilia and pubescent drag queens. Liberal values have resulted in the wide spread number of fatherless home and the resulting destruction to children that has occurred. The Liberal lack of traditional morality is more responsible for gang shootings, toxic masculinity, and school shootings than any Conservative argument for gun rights.
And some of these differences appear to be directly expressed in divergent beliefs relevant to the gun control debate. For example, conservatives’ greater need for social order and greater acceptance of aggression as intrinsic to human nature may lead to their taking a more punitive stance with respect to crime, including support for longer prison sentences and for capital punishment. Similarly, the lower value placed by conservatives on empathy and on equality, combined with their greater resistance to change, may lead to their having less sympathy toward the argument that inequality and poverty are breeding grounds for crime and gun violence.
We don’t coddle criminals. Liberals do, which is why a person deported five times comes back and shoots someone in California.
But the connection between personality and political beliefs and beliefs about gun control is not entirely straightforward. If conservatives respect authority and rules more than liberals and have a greater need for order, why wouldn’t they demand gun control rather than gun rights?
A more complex exploration of the relationship between personality characteristics and political beliefs begins with the observation that all human beings, conservative and liberal alike, feel anxiety. And both conservatives and liberals have plenty of things to be anxious about, including financial worries, conflicts in interpersonal relationships, and concerns about physical health or mortality.
Good question. If Liberals believed people are good, why not trust them with guns?
Concern about violent crime, terrorism, and school shootings is legitimate, of course. Crime and terrorism are real sources of potential danger, and individual cases of “illegal immigrants” committing crimes are not fiction. But people tend to wildly exaggerate the frequency of crime and of terrorism, and the costs and dangers posed by immigrants. The exaggeration stems from several factors. First, we all overattend to especially salient events (and what could be more salient that school children getting mowed down?). We also all tend to overexaggerate the frequency of dangerous events. Second, the media have a profit-based incentive to sensationalize, and social media tends to amplify the panic.
Maybe banning AR-15s is a panic caused by the over sensationalism of mass shootings.
We all exaggerate risk, but conservatives are especially prone to exaggerate risks. For one thing, conservatives generally tend to see the world as a more dangerous place than liberals do, so they are especially vulnerable to these distortions. They also tend to repress their own aggressive and sexual impulses more and to identify with aggressors. These forbidden impulses may be projected onto others, justifying the decision to see others as a source of danger and legitimizing aggressive responses.
Anxiety about personal danger may resonate with other sources of anxiety. Conservatives are disproportionately concentrated in rural areas and small towns. These are the places that have been most hit by the decline in industrial and agricultural employment of recent decades, with concomitant economic insecurity and community disruption and breakdown. A brooding sense of grievance over no longer being central to American society and culture and a pervasive sense of disempowerment add to the feelings of anxiety.
Ah yes, Podunk Conservatives are scared of minorities. That’s not a bigoted argument if I’ve ever heard one. Why is it that Liberals freak out everytime national CCW is mentioned. Seems you are scared of Conservative law abiding gun owners.
Regardless of whether or not the sense of threat is realistic, intense feelings of anxiety are intolerable, so people use various overlapping and intersecting strategies to assuage these feelings, to soothe themselves. The healthiest response to realistically based anxieties and other negative feelings would be to address the external sources of the uneasy feelings. As the Injury Control Research Center’s director David Hemenway wrote in his book Private Guns, Public Health, “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide.” Contrary to widespread public belief, the high rate of gun violence in the U.S. has little to do with mental illness. Conversely, an enormous bodyof evidence shows that gun control—serious, sustained gun control, not merely banning bump stocks or closing the “gun show loophole”—effectively and quickly reduces the rate of gun violence of all kinds.
No they won’t. The AWB and waiting periods did nothing to reduce crime or shootings. Criminals do not buy guns at gun shows. The big problem in Chicago is older gang members getting girlfriends or people without convictions to straw man purchase guns for the gang. Chicago doesn’t prosecute those who straw man for the gangs.
Others, as NYU social psychologist John Jost and his co-authors have pointed out, adoptbeliefs that soothe. The beliefs any particular individual adopts must meet several criteria: First and foremost, they must be consistent with the individual’s own particular personality structure, which, in turn, has been shaped by genetics and by the individual’s upbringing and experiences of the world.
And then, when that same government that can’t be relied on for protection seems about to remove our right to protect ourselves, it becomes yet another source of pseudorealistic anxiety. Anger and commitment to “gun rights” are a sure way to soothe oneself, and it becomes quickly fused with the rest of the conservative agenda.
It would seem then that Liberals are the one with physiological issues about guns. Liberals love to impose gun control measures that feel good but don’t work to reduce gun crime.
Liberals use bans to soothe themselves. They can’t solve a problem, but they know how to ban things they don’t like.
But, if you want to understand the real underlying believe here, there are two reasons we love gun rights.
First, they are a litmus test for other rights. Notice how the groups that want gun bans also want NRA TV banned. It is always guns first, then speech codes and bans of Conservative public speakers. It is drowning out non-Liberal opinions on college campuses. If you can’t respect gun rights, you don’t really respect any right.
Second, we want to be left alone. We don’t want to force guns on anybody. We want to buy what we want to buy and carry concealed where we feel the need to carry concealed and after that be left alone.
It is Liberals who feel the need to meddle in our lives, tell us what we can and can’t buy and where and when we can have our guns. Liberals are obsessed with control. Our fight for gun rights is a fight for rights. Guns are just what that happens to coalesce around most frequently. Occasionally it is something else like when the gun-banner-in-chief Bloomberg wanted to ban 20 oz sodas, we same gun rights people fought him on that. The same impulse that said “no more than 10 rounds” made him say “no more than 20 ounces.”
Gun rights are the first steps over the line and we won’t let you have them, because once you have taken gun rights, there is no limit to the rights you will take. History has shown us that.
Senator Chuck Schumer said, quite explicitly, that he was voting against a Judicial nominee to the US District Court in South Carolina, because he (the nominee) is white.
Good job Chuck. I wonder how fast that will become an alt-right, white nationalist recruitment tool.
“See, it doesn’t matter how qualified you are, the Left is going to try and hold you down because the goverment is out to help only black people.”
Schumer couldn’t have bolstered that talking point more if he tried to do it deliberately.
This is the problem with the far Left. Schumer things what he was doing was noble. To moderate America he came off as a racist. To the alt-right, he’s advancing the cause of white genocide.
He did more harm than good to this nation with his statement, and he doesn’t even know it.
Rick is part of the blog family so he asked me to pass the info along and I am more than happy to do so.
Hey All.
Welcome to our first email blast. Unless you live under a rock, you are aware of the new push our “friends” in the legislature and on CNN are making towards trying to ban the AR-15. Well, if you are like me, you are thinking perhaps you should acquire one (or another one) before you can’t anymore. The problem is that they are next to impossible to actually find in stock right now, at least at a reasonable price. Our regular distributors do not have any and I cannot even back order/reserve any that might come in.
Well, I recently signed up with a manufacturer to be an authorized reseller of theirs. The company is Aero Precision and they are actually the OEM manufacturer for many of the budget AR brands, apparently including Palmetto State and Ruger (per some discussion boards I have read online).
Aero Precision has a wide range of parts and firearms and while not the lowest cost of all the ones out there, they are very high quality and thus we can get a better rifle for the cost an entry level one. More importantly, the key thing here is that we can actually get inventory from them. Yes, there is a 4-week lead time at the moment due to a lack of lowers, but we can “get in line” to get what we want.
We have put together a very nice base AR-16 556 with some upgrades including a Bushmaster 30-round magazine and a red-dot reflex sight from Sunmark. The cost of the rifle is $599, plus $25 to cover shipping and background check/transfer fee (credit cards are 3% extra to cover those fees). They go for $735 on the Aero Precision website with just regular sights. For $599 plus $25 fee, you get a very nice AERO AC-15 Complete Rifle. See it at https://aeroprecisionusa.com/aero-ac15-complete-rifle.html (same rifle but with upgraded optics and Bushmaster magazine)
Upper Features:
Upper: Standard M4 Upper Receiver
Barrel: 16″ 5.56 NATO, Carbine Length, 1:7 Twist, 4150 Chrome Moly Vanadium, QPQ corrosion resistant finish, M4 Profile
Sights: Sightmark Mini Shot Reflex Sight – 1-23x16mm Single 3 MOA Dot Red Matte
Handguard: Standard M4 Carbine Handguard with double heat shield
Gas System: Carbine Length Gas System and A2 Pinned Front Sight Block
Bolt Carrier Group: M16 Cut, 8620 Steel, Phosphate Finish, Properly Staked, Carpenter 158 Bolt, HP and MPI Tested
Muzzle Device: Standard A2 Flash Hider
Lower Features
Lower: Gen 2 Lower Receiver with flared magwell and upper tension screw
Lower Parts Kit: Standard AR15 Lower Parts Kit
Buffer Kit: Standard Mil-Spec AR15/M4 Buffer Kit
Stock: Standard M4 Collapsable Stock
Grip: Standard A2 Pistol Grip
Magazine: Bushmaster 93306 AR-15 Magazine 30RD
When you compare it to the cheapest Palmetto State Arms rifle ($599 but on sale at the moment for $499), you are only about $100 more expensive, and the reflex sight itself is over $60 on Amazon. So you get a far better rifle for less than $50 more than the cheapo PSA rifle. Also, if we purchase 6 or more them, we can pass along the price break and do them for just $599 with no shipping/background check fee. I did some looking around and found nothing but good things written about them. This is a good overview review of them from what appears to be an unbiased source: https://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/test-aero-precision-ac-15-rifle/
To the extent you want to play Barbie dress up we can customize your rifle, but this represents a pretty nice starter rifle that one can build on, or really enjoy as is. If you are interested in purchasing one, please let me know ASAP. I would like to place the order next Friday, March 9th so we can get in line ASAP. We can also order any parts or other items you see on their website, likely at prices considerably better than what you see there.
Feel free to forward this to any friends/family that might be interested. Interested parties should contact me via email at rick@305guns.com and we can move forward from there. Again – we plan to order after next Friday.
So when I see a sign like the one above I am insulted. Why am I being treated like a second class citizen? I have demonstrated my desire of independence by not relying on the government for my safety. I have jumped through the legal hoops to demonstrate I am a Good Guy. I spent money on a quality weapon and gear to protect myself and my loved ones. and yet, I am treated like a pariah because some idiots fail to see the difference between reality and their own impotent fears and in the process they put innocent people at risk by allowing the true sick and the criminals a target rich environment for their misdeeds and mayhem..
Gun Free Zones are nothing more than a modern-day Jim Crow. This has to stop. Now.
But it has not stopped. And now we are again going through another round of Modern Jim Crow posturing by the weak and the lame.
Companies do not want to do business with the NRA.
If we carry, we can’t be around others because we are a danger to women and children and they place signs that say “No gun here!” as if saying “Come, enjoy our business, thee Ugly People With Guns are not allowed here.”
Media does not want us around nor allows us an even chance in their domains. So we create our own and now they are upset about that and they want NRA TV removed from existence.
And we must prove and pay to exercise our God Given Rights: Permits, background checks, fingerprints. We are considered unworthy, Second Class.
Their “artists” cannot help themselves and have to ridicule us, to caricaturize us as less than human, no better than trash:
And if we get uppity and demand respect, we are threatened with government deeds, violence and death.
Ours is a righteous cause. We will win because the other option is unthinkable. We will take lumps, that is for sure. But we are ornery and keep moving forward till we push our Opposition over the cliff of Oblivion.
