Mediaite is a strongly Left-leaning news site.

They published this story on Sunday:

WATCH: NYT’s Charles Blow Calls Out Jake Tapper’s ‘Horrible Question’ About Gun Violence

(Video from IJR)

New York Times columnist Charles Blow went off on what he called a “horrible question” that CNN’s Jake Tapper asked of Senator Cory Booker this week about the gun massacre in Virginia Beach, a question that is frequently asked in the wake of such tragedies.

On this week’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher noted that “Cory Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him, a couple of times, what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach, and Cory Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer that question.”

“Can I just say this? Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question,” Blow said. “That is a horrible question.”

“Because what we’re doing is picking out one incident out of 30,000 deaths per year and saying ‘How could you solve this one thing?’” Blow continued. “That is not the objective of gun control. The objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed. And once you reframe it that way, maybe the proposal I have today will not solve that problem, but it cuts into this massive number of people that we are losing to gun violence.”

It’s not a horrible question, especially when politicians use a particular mass shooting to justify their gun control proposal.

Politician: “This latest mass shooting is why we need UBC’s.”
Reporter: “But how would UBC’s have stopped that shooting?”
Blow: “That’s a horrible question.”

Blow pulls the mask off the idea that gun control proposed after a high profile shooting is intended to prevent other similar high profile shootings.  It is a diversion to push gun control for the sake of gun control because the politicians making these proposals are NEVER able to answer that question.

The question rankles because it smacks of pro-gun talking points, but as Blow points out, it also suffers from a serious logical flaw. It’s like asking a scientist what his cure for lung cancer would do to prevent pancreatic cancer.

No, it’s like your doctor saying:

“You have pancreatic cancer so we’re going to perform a double mastectomy.  I know it’s not going to fix this issue, but we have to do something.”

Never mind that from pro-gun advocates, this is a pure bad-faith argument that doesn’t come up when gun massacres feature details for which specific gun laws would have made a difference, such as gun storage laws that could have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre and many other preventable child deaths, or a ban on extended magazines that could have saved the life of 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green.

Adam Lanza’s mother kept her gun in a safe.  Adam killed his mother and stole the keys.  How would gun storage laws done any more to stop that shooting?  Those are intended to prevent accidental child access, not a 20-year-old from stealing the keys.

Faced with examples like these, they revert to some other talking point, often by simply arguing that people will ignore these laws, so why have them? It doesn’t matter how much data you throw at these talking points, there will always be another one to take their place.

And that is not pro-gun-control people from arguing in bad faith?

A headline from last weekend:

Chicago experiences most violent weekend of 2019: 52 shot, 10 killed

Chicago’s violence also disproportionately affects several swaths of low-income black and Latino neighborhoods on the West and South sides.

On Monday, Johnson criticized gun laws and court policies that he says turn the county jail into a revolving door for gun offenders.

“Until we stop giving them (gun offenders) the sense that they can do this with impunity, then we are going to continue to have these press conferences,” he said.

Chicago gun crime is overwhelmingly gang and drug related.  So if the purpose of gun control is to reduce crime, that how with all the gun control that Illinois has on the books, is Chicago still awash in drug dealer blood?

It is not a “horrible question” to ask how a policy will fix what advocates say it will fix.

But even if you grant the flawed premise of the question, asked in good faith by a journalist testing gun policy arguments, there is a better answer than attacking the question. When you attack the question, you are signaling that you don’t have a good answer, and there is a good answer to this question, every time.

Translation: “stop calling us out on our bullshit, you’re supposed to be on our side.”

For example, the Virginia Beach shooter used extended magazines, which allowed him to fire many more rounds without reloading. Without those, some of the 12 deaths might have been avoided. And based on the pure hypothetical of the question being posed, there’s no way to know if the shooter would have engaged in this massacre at all without that advantage in firepower.

That’s a hypothetical load of shit.  The advantage of firepower wasn’t that he had an additional 4 to 8 rounds (he carried a two 45 ACP pistols, I don’t know which ones but the average high capacity 45 holds 12-14 rounds) more than he would have with 10 rounds mags. The advantage of firepower he had was walking into a gun free zone where nobody else was armed.

Mediaite seriously thinks a guy who supposedly snapped would have had the thought “I’d kill all those mother fuckers if I only had more than 10 rounds in each gun.”  No.

In fact, Booker could have argued that any number of his policies might have dissuaded the shooter from carrying out this act. A federal firearms registry might have made him think twice, a more stringent background check might have raised a red flag, a waiting period might have allowed him to cool off, and if he had taken steps to avoid the stricter laws, those laws might have caused him to be intercepted.

The guy was killed by cops, what would a registry have done?  Most of those shooters do this knowing they won’t be taken alive.  The guy bought his guns one and three years before the shooting.  His cooling off didn’t need to happen before he bought the gun.

Every proposal fails to prevent that shooting, and many more like that.

When these people argue that the question “how will your policy work” shouldn’t be asked, and instead turn to inane hypotheticals, it shows that they don’t really care about solving problems, they just want gun control for the sake of control.

To his credit, Jake Tapper defended himself on Twitter.

Watch the longer video clip of this from Bretibart.

Clearly, the Dem Rep from California hates gun owners.  She wants gun control because she wants to control the people on the other side of the aisle she doesn’t like.  I have the feeling Blow, because of his politics, feels the same way.

But you can’t get people to vote for you by saying “I don’t like you and I want to take your guns away.”  Bill Maher, to his credit, said that.

So they have to frame their gun control push by saying it will prevent crime, but when asked how they fail.

So now the argument is it’s wrong to even ask how the policy will work.

It’s not about stopping crime.  It’s about stopping law-abiding gun culture.

They keep proving that more and more.

Hat Tip Bother Chuck

When states legalize pot for all adults, long-standing medical marijuana programs take a big hit, in some cases losing more than half their registered patients in just a few years, according to a data analysis by The Associated Press.

Much of the decline comes from consumers who, ill or not, had medical cards in their states because it was the only way to buy marijuana legally before broad legalization. But for people who truly rely on marijuana to control ailments such as nausea or cancer pain, the arrival of so-called recreational cannabis can mean fewer and more expensive options

Medical Pot Takes Hit When Weed Legal for All

So, first you admit that a lot of people with Medical Pot Cards were not sick but just needed a government-medically-issued excuse to munch heavily on Doritos. Next you are surprised that people would go for the cheaper Free Market untaxed  pot from the corner dealer with little overhead rather than the more costly store-with-expenses-and-taxes ganja.

It goes to show that it was not decriminalization what they were after but another way to collect more taxes for the government till. I see in a few years the government cracking hard on non-commercial traffic and growth of pot with the BAMTF (Bureau of Alcohol, Marijuana, Tobacco and Firearms) leading the charge.

top of the fence this time. It allowed me to get closer this time, I’d say about 10 feet away before the twitching began.

Check the length of the tail. That is a 4 foot fence.

Last year, New York City decided to install needle drop boxes for the drug addicts to safely dispose of their drug paraphanilia.

What ended up happening is that drug addicts were convinced that the city had decriminalized shooting up heroin in parks, because why would the city give them convenient disposal services if it wasn’t legal to use?

Faced with huge numbers of addicts shooting up and shitting in NYC parks, the NYPD bravely chose to ignore the problem.

So, fast forward to today. What policy could New York implement that would be worst than that?

Sex Work Would Be Broadly Legal in New York Under New Bill Introduced Monday

That ought to do it.  I can’t think of a better way to drastically increase quality of life crimes than let hookers roam free.

A group of lawmakers first called for legislation in February, but on Monday they finally came forward with a 13-page bill that would bring dramatic changes to the sex trade in the state.

The bill, written with advocacy group DecrimNY, would make it legal to both buy and sell sex under certain circumstances and modifies laws around facilities that are used as places of prostitution.

Better start buying up those shitty hotels as investment properties, the flophouse market is going to BOOM.

“For us, this is a bodily autonomy issue — our bodies, our choice — but more than that, it’s an economic issue. And it’s personal,” Jessica Raven, one of Decrim NY’s organizers, wrote in a Daily News op-ed Monday.

Two of the bill’s sponsors, state senators Jessica Ramos and Julia Salazar, have said that 9 out of 10 people arrested in sex-work-related massage parlor raids are immigrants, with most being undocumented Asians.

So this will only encourage gangs to traffic in more Asian women for prostitution.

LGBTQ youth, who often run away from home seeking acceptance, trade sex at 7 to 8 times the rate of other youth in New York City, Ramos and Salazar say.

So emotionally damaged gay and trans teens can now hook without the fear of getting arrested.

Again, this seems like it will encourage more teens to enter prostitution than solve the issues that cause them to go into prostitution in the first place.

Of course, this will increase LGBT teen and trafficked Asian women to more abuse though pimps and people who will take advantage of them.

I’m seeing only negatives here.

More flophouses, more pimps, more street walking, more sleaze-bag johns, more crime in general.  Really, this was a bang up job by the New York legislature to pour gas onto a smoldering fire.

I guess after Amazon pulled HQ2 out, they needed something to make up those 25,000 jobs.  I never would have thought that creating an industry of illegal immigrant and gay teen prostitutes was the way they were going to do that.

And I really do not give a shit.

This stupid idea that an organization’s mistakes means to have it disappear is asinine. I wonder how many of those who actually believe that line of bullshit own Ruger and Smith and Wesson firearms.

It took two or three years, ending with the Cincinnati Revolt to remove the old school NRA leadership. We are now in month what? Three?  Four? I hope it gets solved fast and Wayne finally leaves, but I am realistic enough that it won’t (can’t) happen in a snap of the finger, specially with lawsuit back and forth.

Stop playing Bloomberg’s game and I will stop insulting you. It is that simple.

I saw this Tweet from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1136329869783117824

I get it.  It is the thesis of the Left that America is intrinsically a White Supremacist nation, and therefore it must go easy on violent White Supremacists and go extra hard on Muslim extremists.

The evidence for that is that violent White Supremacists are not “domestic terrorists” while Muslims are, and clearly, that is bigotry.

The clip in AOC’s Tweet is very selectively edited (a big shock) and a much less edited video is available below:

Congresswoman and Islamic Terrorist supporter, Rashida Tlaib, also got into this line of questioning.

Despite all her crying, both AOC and Tlaib don’t seem to know the law.

FBI Assistant Director of Counterterrorism Michael McGarrity, tired his best to explain the law.  It is 18 U.S. Code § 2339 under 18 U.S. Code chapter 113 – Terrorism.  Code § 2339 prohibits providing aid, training, support, or financial assistance to an international terrorist group. That is defined by 18 U.S. Code § 2331.

Simply put, “domestic terrorism” is a nice buzzword but it is not a criminal statute or something a person could be convicted of.

They can be charged with aiding an international terrorist organization.

The San Bernardino shooters and Pulse shooter both pledged allegiance to ISIS and the global Jihad movement, which made them supporters of an international terrorist organization.

Dylann Roof did not.  And while AOC can postulate that White Supremacism is a global problem, it is not as organized as ISIS.  Shit posters on 8Chan are not engaged in a multi-national money laundering operation to fund terrorism using means as diverse as selling oil from captured Iraqi wells to the ransom of cargo ships off the African coast.

Domestic terrorism is merely a classification the FBI uses in working an investigation.

AOC and Tlaib didn’t seem to get that the issue isn’t with the FBI it is with the legislature.  In addition, the Legislature is held back by the Constitution.

The reason groups like the Ku Klux Klan is allowed to exists and can’t just be taken down by declaring them a “domestic terrorist organization” is the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Right of Assembly allows groups like the Klan to exist.  The challenge for law enforcement has been to sift through the Klan (and other groups like it) for the fraction of members that can be proven to have committed the crimes in the name of the Klan.  Simply charging the entire clan as a group is unconstitutional.  I’m also talking about the Klan in modern times (post 1950’s), not the Klan during Reconstruction.

The same prohibitions prevent mass arrests of Muslims at the “Terror Mosque” in New Jersey that has had a number of members radicalized.

That right does not belong to non-US citizens outside the borders of the United States.

Rather than try to understand this and try to figure out how to make new law to deal with the variety of threats this nation faces, AOC and Tlaib would rather just try and prove their thesis that America is a racist nation.

Also, reading between the lines, it seems like they want to FBI to go easier on Islamic extremists.