Gun Free Zone

Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.

Month: February 2020

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James Carville and LBJ on the current Democrat party

Feb 8, 2020 J. Kb 0 comments

I saw a number of conservatives on Twitter praising James Carville’s interview in Vox.  So I thought I would read it.

One part really stuck out at me:

I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the “Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?”

You know how fucking patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so fucking smart.

Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.

Keep in mind that Carville is known as the “ragin’ Cajun” and is a graduate from Louisiana State University.

He’s right that the Democrat party has developed an internal narrative that it’s smarter than and looks down on regular middle Americans.

The fact is that human beings are tribal, give humans the ability to join a tribe and exclude others and they will do it.  That is the basis of every club, social organization, and fraternity in existence.

Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson said about the South in the 1960s:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

The Democrat party of 2020 is just as bigoted and hateful as the Democrat party of Jim Crow.  All they did was change the targets of their hatred.

The best way of summarizing the Democrat party leadership and the prime time media talking head class would be:

“If you can convince the lowest top tier college graduate he’s better than the best community college or mid-tier state school graduate, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Or

“If you can convince the lowest New Yorker or Californiana he’s better than the best Southerner or Midwesterner, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Or

“If you can convince the lowest white-collar employee he’s better than the best blue-collar worker, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

And it’s probably some combination thereof, depending on the audience.

Democrats rally around their ability to look down on some groups of people and mock them.  This was the very heart of the Don Lemon/Rick Wilson minstrel show from a few weeks back.  That was the motivation behind Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quote.

And so it becomes natural for a New York Times editorial board member and graduate of America’s only Public Ivy to mock LSU for not being an “actual school.”

The problem with this is that it’s hard to build a majority coalition out of hating people who don’t go to elite selective colleges and live in a city that touches saltwater because the majority of Americans don’t go to elite colleges and live in cities that touch saltwater.

Unfortunately for Carville and fortunately for us, the Democrats are too high on themselves and their hatred for “reg’lar Americans” to come down from that any time soon.

 

 

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Reemeber: Bernie Goetz was the bad guy.

Feb 7, 2020 Miguel.GFZ 4 comments

“You don’t need a gun, and if you do, you don’t need that many boolits in it.”

The very few times I had been to downtown Miami Dade, I used the Metro Rail. it is impossible to get a cheap and decent parking spot down there and they charge you up the keister for whatever vehicular real state they have to offer.  So I drive to a nearby Metro rail station, park my truck for a cheap prize and take a wagon downtown.

It does not take but one trip to observe the predatory fauna to make you decide you don’t use public transpo without carrying.  Mind you, as with all thin  human things, most users are nice people who just want to be transported and they mind their own business, but you get to see from time to time those who will take you down if you look like steak to be had.

Oh yes, the parking lots of the stations? The one I use is big, several stories and even with patrols, they do not feel like safe environments.

And Miami’s Public Transportation is not even close to be as violent as Chicago or NY or Oakland-SanFran, but hell if I go unarmed and I am sure I am not the only one… maybe that is why we don’t have that many issues.

 

 

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I am conflicted.

Feb 7, 2020 Miguel.GFZ 8 comments

This… I want this so bad.

But as Latino, the idea of spending $85 on a machete is a bit shocking, specially since you can probably find one regular machete in Calle Ocho for $10.

And the price is also 2 Palmetto State Armory AR 15 stripped Lower.  Seriously, it does not make sense. I must be Spock logical, but my brain is whispering “Yeah, be like him during Pon farr!”

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They do not think like us – tampon theft edition

Feb 7, 2020 J. Kb 9 comments

This was spotted on the internet:

https://twitter.com/oonskie/status/1222509293204844545

I’m a law and order conservative.  I believe in property rights.  I believe that theft is bad for the community and that laws against theft should be enforced.

I don’t care that the retailer is a big corporation, if their products get stolen they will pass the cost of that loss onto the rest of us who do pay for them, or they will stop selling those products, and possibly go out of business meaning consumers will have no access to any products they sell at all.

If they close, jobs will be lost and the local community will suffer.

Theft, even from a box corporation, is not a victimless crime.

None of that matters to the Progressives who replied to this threat.  Nearly every reply was in support of theft, and most of them tried to justify it.

(Yes, I know the Tweet is from England, but most of the comments are from the US.)

Just allow all theft, regardless of the consequences.

Of course for the Communist, theft is fine, having some sort of law enforcement protecting property rights is dangerous.

It doesn’t work like this.

I’ve seen that too. It’s necessary.

They don’t.

“Hero” and “criminal” are not synonyms.

The paragon of virtue.

This is what male feminists do to get laid when they are too weak to be rapists.

Here is the reality.  If there is one good thing that California Prop 47 did, it totally blew away the Leftist notion that people shoplift just what they need because they are too poor to buy it.

As reported by Fox News:

Del Seymour, founder of the non-profit Code Tenderloin, told Fox News that fencers – often from Mexico and Guatemala – set up shop in the middle of the day and night around the city’s United Nations Plaza area. He said he’s also noticed that the stealers and dealers have gotten bolder by the day. The retail heists taking place, he said, aren’t some small-time operation but instead a sophisticated network of international dealers who cross the border to buy stolen goods. What’s worse is that a majority of the handoffs happen in view of San Francisco’s City Hall.

Seymour believes San Francisco is stuck in a cycle and, until it’s able to pull itself out, the problem will continue. Drug addicts, who are often homeless, need money for a fix so they walk into a store, steal merchandise, sell it for half the value and use the money they made to buy more drugs. 

As reported by KPIX CBS San Francisco:

“We’ve heard of cases where they’re going into stores with a calculator so they can make sure that what they steal is worth less than $950,” said Robin Shakely, Sacramento County assistant chief deputy district attorney.

Every human being makes cost/benefit decisions all the time.

If the punishment for theft of $950 in goods is non-existent there is no cost.

If a person steals $950 of merchandise per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, that is $237,500.  Selling those stolen items for half price is an income based on theft of $118,750 per year, in cash, no taxes.

And that, or something close to it, is what we are seeing.  People making a living on shoplifting, taking advantage of the high costs of living in California.

I’ll agree, diapers are expensive.  It’s not some poor woman stealing one box of diapers because she needs them.  It’s shoplifters stealing hundreds of dollars worth of diapers to sell for fifty-cents on the dollar to other people who have no scruples against buying stolen goods.

And then it’s you and I that pay for this when the prices of the goods we buy go up.

Progressives are facilitating a massive criminal enterprise that destroys business and puts people at risk, because they think they are helping poor people stick it to the corporations.

I’m just curious what the people of San Francisco will do when the last store in the city shuts down and their Amazon Prime grocery delivery is stolen off their porch?

 

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A dead five year old and what that means for us is why I am the way I am about locking up your guns

Feb 6, 2020 J. Kb 17 comments

I have a buddy who reads my post,s and then does what he is not supposed to do on the internet and reads the comments as well.

Then, he lets me know his opinion.

I have to agree with him (and I know Miguel says this too), sometimes law-abiding gun owners are our own worst enemies.

For those of you who understand what I am trying to say, this post doesn’t apply to you.

For those of you who felt the need to argue with me when agreed with Brady just a little bit, the rest of this post is for you.  I’m going to spell it out very clearly.  If you get offended, well, this is my opinion and Miguel has very graciously given me room to voice it.

From AL.com

5-year-old killed in accidental shooting in Madison County

My son is five years old.  This already is heartbreaking.

The victim of a deadly accidental shooting in Madison County has been identified as a 5-year-old boy.

The fatal gunshot wound to the head was accidentally self-inflicted, according to the Madison County sheriff’s office. The child, whose name wasn’t released, was inside the family’s parked vehicle at a home on Berry Creek Drive in Harvest when the shooting happened Sunday afternoon. A parent found the child and the authorities were notified.

“It’s obvious it was just a horrible, horrible accident,” he said. “It’s just a horrible thing.”

At the scene on Sunday afternoon, emergency medical workers attempted life-saving measures, authorities said, but the child was declared dead after being taken to Madison Hospital.

I’ve checked other news outlets but no other information has been released.  No charges are expected to be filed but that is little more than thinnest silver lining on what is probably the darkest possible cloud in these parents’ life.

Given that, this is probably a case of a CCW owner who left an unsecured gun in his car and the boy in the car found it.

These accidents do happen when little kids find unsecured guns.

When it comes to politics, I don’t want the government all up in my shit.  Part of that means that I have to behave in a way the doesn’t give the government, or someone else, a reason to get up in my shit.

For gun owners, that responsibility to behave in such a way to not invite people up in our shit is collective.

So let us take this hypothetical but very realistic scenario.

Family A, they are not gun owners.  They might not be totally anti-gun but are definitely not pro-gun.

Family B.  They own a handgun for home defense, it’s hidden in a nightstand.

Kid A goes to Family B’s house to play.  Kid A finds the gun and kills himself.

Family A decides “there needs to be a law.”  That law REQUIRES everybody store their gun safely.  Bloomberg and Watts get a whiff of this shit and decide that in order to get a gun permit, the police have to verify you have safe storage with an inspection.  That’s how they do it in England, Australia, New Zealand.  I know Canada has safe storage laws, but I don’t know if the police are required to inspect the safe storage.  In the US, inspected safe storage also applies to FFLs, so there is some precedence there too.

The law gets named after dead Kid A and Hogg and his bunch march around demanding it be passed or else politicians have blood on their hands and faces.

So now in a number of states, to get your FOID, FID, Firearm Safety Certificate, or handgun permit, the police have to inspect your safe storage.  That means they have to make sure it’s big enough to hold all of your guns, so now they get to see all of your guns.  If you buy another gun, they have to right to make sure your safe storage can accommodate the new gun, so they get to see all your guns again.

Now, do you see how bad this can get very quickly?

And what will be the argument made by the anti-gun activists?

“Do you want more kids to die from gun accidents?  What sort of monster are you?”

So what do we do to prevent this?

Lock up your fucking gun so that Kid A doesn’t find it and shoot himself.

No accidental dead kids takes the bloody shirt away from the bloody shirt wavers.

And what do we get, besides less government all up in our shit?

Fewer accidental dead kids.  Seems like a win-win to me.

If that’s not enough of an argument, how about this?

When your kids were little, did you put a latch on the cabinet under the sink where you kept the drain cleaner?

Do you think that a 9mm is more or less dangerous than a spray bottle full of bleach?

Then lock up your fucking gun.

And lastly.  For those of who have made the argument “but I need my gun in a heartbeat if someone kicks in my door and I won’t have the presence of mind when just woken up to the sound of my alarm to punch in a four or six-digit combo into my handgun vault or wave a finger over the biometrics.”

Guess what?

If you are too uncoordinated and bleary-eyed to work your gun box open, you are way too uncoordinated and bleary-eyed to be running that fucking gun.

Will, you properly identify your target?  Will you be able to line up your sights and hit it?  Or will you get your gun out of your nightstand in a wink and put a bullet through your teenage kid sneaking in after curfew?

Besides, if you are anything like me and most of the people I know who use their cellphone as an alarm clock, I have to punch in a code to unlock my phone to shut off my alarm, so I’m sort of used to having to punch in a code within the first 20 seconds of waking up from a sound sleep.  I do it 6 days a week.

If you don’t have kids, and you don’t have kids that come over, and you don’t worry about your nightstand gun being stolen, fine.

But for every other law-abiding gun owner in America.  Lock up your gun so it isn’t used by some kid to accidentally hurt themselves.  If not for the kid, as a courtesy to the rest of the gun-owning community that doesn’t want mandatory safe storage laws thrust up our asses.

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Florida Gun Rights 2020 – CS/HB 1347 – Fixing Church Carry – GOOD BILL – Voted Favorably by Education.

Feb 6, 2020 Miguel.GFZ 2 comments

General Bill by Criminal Justice Subcommittee and Williamson and Trumbull (CO-SPONSORS) Andrade; Byrd; Donalds; Drake; Hill; Roach; Sabatini; Stone; Yarborough
Safety of Religious Institutions: Authorizes church, synagogue, or other religious institution to allow concealed weapons or concealed firearms licensee to carry firearm on its property for certain purposes; specifies property owner who allows church, synagogue, or other religious institution to use his or her property may prohibit church, synagogue, or other religious institution from authorizing person to carry firearm on property

Read the Text of CS/HB 1347

I just finished watching the live streaming and it was interesting. Let me begin with pubic participation: there were 5 people who were against the bill and one of them was the representative of Moms Demand who actually addressed the committee. More on her later.

There were two people in favor! They did not speak in front of the committee but declared their support for the bill. I am going to guess they were a couple with the last name Dubois and just thank you, thank you thank you for being there.  If any of the readers know them, please extend our collective gratitude to them.

Back to Mommy Demanding: She was taken to task with what we know is their weak spot: the truth. She tried to paint how dangerous it is to carry next to kids insinuating that those allowed now by law (something that she denied it existed earlier, but was chastised for) were shooting kids accidentally all over the state, but that lasted only as long as one of the Representatives asked her to mention ones single case in Florida and she made excuses that she needed to check her laptop. She was asked by Rep Fine if she believed that people should have to Pay to Pray at their houses of worship and she was confused and said she did not think that had to do with the bill. It was not a fantastic presentation, but at least she was there with 5 others.

After the public part of the session was over, the debate began: There was one opposition to the bill and very mild, And then came Rep Fine explaining how he had seen his synagogue protected by the local Sheriff with a deputy or two and initially he thought it was a nicety from the Agency but he was told they were paying for the off-duty deputies to keep an eye around, thus it was a Pay to Pray which goes against the First Amendment. No picture of the face of the Demanding Mommy was shown.

But what really knocked me on my ass was that two Democrat Representatives came out with full force in favor of the bill. Rep Bush is a minister and Rep Daniels is a pastor of her church and If I heard Rep Bush right and I know I heard Daniels say it, both have Concealed Weapon Licenses.  To make a long story short, both have dealt with funerals from gang-related activities and have their houses full of gang bangers. And as Rep Daniels said, this bill cannot be for the weekend because a church never sleeps and people live and work there all week.

The vote was taken and the bill passed if not unanimously then it was with a huge majority (there were a couple of voice votes I am not sure about).

Where is the bill headed now? No idea. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: The voting was 15 Yeas, 1 Nay and 2 missed.