It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It has no middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and in it are lies and  the pit of man’s fears with nothing even resembling basic knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination and feelings. It is an area which we call the Liberal Zone.

A group of protesters had a sit in at the office of Florida Senator Marco Rubio to protest his “legacy of violence” and was tied to the Pulse Nightclub Shooting.

What was Senator Marco Rubio’s “legacy of violence” on this issue?  Rubio voted against the No Fly, No Buy Bill on Constitutional principles, aka Due Process.  That is violence according to the left, supporting the Constitution.  Pledging allegiance to a radical religious organization that murders gays around the world? What “legacy of violence” are you talking about… there’s nothing to see here.

Rubio’s “legacy of violence” is just another example of the Liberal re-definition of the word violence to mean “disagreeing with a Liberal or Liberal talking point.”  That’s what it was an “act of violence” to write Trump 2016 in chalk on a sidewalk on an college campus.

“The underlying theme seems to be that if words and symbols can be connected to the collective trauma experienced by a historically oppressed or marginalized group of people, they “constitute an act of violence” (an opinion shared by 53 percent of the surveyed college students).”

Of course, supporting the Constitution with a vote in the Senate is not violence.  But this idea has become so pervasive on the Left that both Democrats running against Rubio for Senate, Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson, have endorsed this sit in.

This is collective insanity.  This is a political ideology that can’t the Radical Islamic forest for the terrorist trees, and thinks that defending the Constitutionally protected civil liberties of American Citizens is WORSE than shooting 100 gay people in a nightclub.

This we cannot abide.  The people of Florida, if you value your liberties, vote for Marco Rubio.  I think that just endorsing him over two liberals is in itself an act of violence.

We need out of this political Twilight Zone.

Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law  at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.  He is a professor of torts, constitutional law, intellectual property, legal history, and admiralty law.  

I guess he must have taken some transfer credits from the Barack H. Obama school of Unconstitutional Law when attending Yale Law School, because as a professor of Constitutional law, Gerard Magliocca published this legal turd of an Op Ed.

Wouldn’t a better approach be for amenable states or municipalities to spend money on public education campaigns to discourage people from owning guns, much in the way that they do to discourage smoking? This would do nothing, of course, with respect to deranged people who want to kill many.  But there are many more easily preventable gun deaths from suicides, accidents, or domestic violence.  If lawful gun possession went down by, say 10%, many lives would probably be saved.

…

Would the First Amendment be violated by government speech that discourages the exercise of a fundamental right?  I think that the answer is no so long as that speech is general.  In other words, forcing gun store owners or abortion providers or liquor stores to lecture customers about the evils of those goods would be deeply problematic.  But if the speech is not done at the point of sale and comes through media (TV, radio, etc.) then I see no First Amendment violation in what amounts to government propaganda.

I may not be a legal scholar but allow me to answer his rhetorical question.

Yes, asshole, using the government and government funds to discourage people from exercising a Constitutional right is very fucking problematic.  The use of propaganda too discourage a civil liberty is abhorrent.  You might as well argue for the government to mandate that on the news and in every police procedural TV show, the suspect allow the police to search without a warrant and the defendant give up his right to counsel and just confess to whatever crime his is charged with.  Wouldn’t that make the government’s job easier too?

I’m going to paraphrase his first paragraph to address his last.

“Wouldn’t a better approach be for amenable states or municipalities to spend money on public education campaigns to discourage people from worshiping or speaking freely, much in the way that they do to discourage smoking? This would do nothing, of course, with respect to deranged people who want to go to church on Sundays, put up nativity scenes, fly Confederate flags, or even post on racist message boards.  But there are many more easily preventable deaths from gang and extremist violence.  If the freedom of speech and association went down by, say 10%, many lives would probably be saved.”

Sure, Magliocca’s proposal might convince millions of normal, law abiding Christians to abandon their religion, but hey, it will do nothing to stop the next Dylann Roof from getting any bad ideas.  So that’s something I guess.  (Because we all know that Islam is a religion of peace and no true Muslim has ever committed an act of religiously motivated violence)

See, I believe in the principle that I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Gerard Magliocca seems to believe that if he does not agree with what you say, he has the right to have the government coerce convince you to say something else.  And somehow that is Constitutional.  Apparently the Magliocca standard is a passive aggressive assault on your civil rights is OK.

If this is the future of Constitutional Law professors in America, we are doomed.

One of the more disgusting things I saw the Left do after the Dallas protest police shootings last week was gloat over the fact that a concealed carrier did not stop this mass shooting.  Because a regular citizen with CCW did not stop a sniper attack, to them, proves that CCW is ineffective and they responded by relishing that fact over the NRA (of course).  This goes without saying is absolutely disgusting.

Let me be clear on something.

Nobody has said that a CCW permit holder can stop EVERY shooting.  It can’t.

In this case, the shooter was a sniper hiding in a fortified position – he barricaded himself in a room.  US Army guidelines say that it takes a 3:1 ratio to assault a fortified position, three assaulters for every defender.

For snipers, there is no guidelines, but historically the method that works is overwhelming force.  I remember watching an interview in the History Channel of some WWII veteran telling about German snipers.  His convoy was pinned down by a sniper.  They figured out the sniper was in the top of a tree in a stand of trees a few hundred yards away across a field.  One brave soldier got into a M45 quad mount that was in the back of a truck and emptied the entire battery into the stand of trees, knocking them all down.  They figured they got the sniper when the shooting stopped.

In Iraq, counter sniping was done more often with close air support than other snipers.  When pinned down by a sniper in a building, the Army called in to have a JDAM dorpped on the building.

Quite famously, to try and stop the the Finnish sniper Simo Hayha, the Soviet army located the forest he was in and carpet bombed it.  Hayha survived.

The Dallas police understood how dangerous it is to take on a sniper, and send in a robot to deliver a bomb to get the shooter.

Of course the reality of the situation means nothing to Liberals.  They found a way to manipulate a tragedy into a talking point and they are going to run with it.

The overwhelming majority of CCW permit holders are not “Rambo wannabes.”  We don’t get our permits with the dream of getting into gunfights with snipers.  We simply want to be able to defend ourselves if we find ourselves in a situation in which that is the only option.  We do not want the difference between live and death to be at the mercy of a bad guy.

Of course, for me this is only a matter of principle.  So I’m going to leave the final words of this post to a woman who lived this, Suzanna Gratia Hupp, who survived the 1991 Luby’s massacre in Kileen, TX.

If you read the liberal media (but I repeat myself), you will learn that the NRA is ignoring the shooting of Philando Castile because, black lives don’t matter to the NRA because the NRA and gun culture is racist and the NRA is a bunch of hypocrites.

Of course nobody can get shot in America without it being the NRA’s fault because… conspiratorial reasons.

As it turns out, the Second Amendment Foundation – which has scored far more legal victories for gun rights in the last few years than the NRA-ILA – is pushing for a full investigation of the Castile shooting.  They  have openly stated that they do not want to see concealed carriers shot by jumpy police.

“Exercising our right to bear arms should not translate to a death sentence over something so trivial as a traffic stop for a broken tail light, and we are going to watch this case with a magnifying glass.”

This is a sentiment that seems to be going around the gun-web.  A number of online comments at various gun blogs (including my last posting) show just how many CCW permit holders feel a connection with Castile and want to put in place protections to make sure this doesn’t happen to them.

So while BLM is out protesting and causing problems, a gun rights organization is actually doing something useful.

Why?

Because the gun community takes care of its own.  An attack on any of use for exercising our right is an attack on all of us, regardless of race or other factor.

I only hope when the NRA releases its official statement, it reiterates that principle.

I want to talk about the shooting of Philando Castile.

I have no interest in talking about Alton Sterling.  I have no interesting in the shooting of Castile AND Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, or Trayvon Martin.  I do not want the shooting of Castile to become just another hashtag for #BLM to Mau-Mau with.

The essence of empathy is the ability to put yourself in another persons’ shoes.  I am white, I grew up in a middle class neighborhood, I have no criminal record.  I know enough not to resist the police.  I feel confident that I won’t be sought after by cops for strong arming a convenience store.

The shooting of Philando Castile, on the other hand, sends a bolt of fear through my heart.  I have concealed carry permits, I regularly carry concealed, I have gun that lives permanently in my glove box, and I have a wife and kid.  This could have been me.

I don’t have any unique details of this shooting, only what has been made available on the news, but from what I read, this shooting seems to be the tragic combination of bad – but not malicious – acts of both Castile and the officer.  This is critical to preventing future shootings of this type and is something I don’t want to get buried in BLM politics.

Here are the bad acts as I see them.

Castile:

Castile announced that he had a gun THE WRONG WAY.

There are some states that require a CCW permit holder announce that they have a gun to police.  Some states don’t require it, but I have been taught (and I believe) that it is best to announce anyway.  The worst case is that a cop discovers your gun for himself.

The speech that I have practiced in my head over and over is – while holding the steering wheel with both hands – “Officer, I have a concealed carry permit.  I am currently carrying.  What would you like me to do?”

Now the cop knows 1) I have a permit, 2) I have a gun, 3) he is in control of the situation.

I have been pulled over a few times in my adult life.  I have had a cop tell me to slowly get out my licence and permit.  I have had a cop ask me to get out so he could secure my gun for the stop, which he returned to me unloaded at the end.

I believe that Castile announcing that he had a gun BEFORE announcing that he had a permit (his girlfriend actually said he had the permit) was his first mistake.  Announcing he had a gun while moving was his second.

Neither mistake justified the shooting.

The cop:

The officer (in my opinion) over reacted.  If the girlfriend’s statement is correct, the officer asked for Castile’s licence and then told him not to move.  These are contradictory commands.  Castile was shot in the confusion between complying with the first and not complying with the second.  I believe that the officer heard “gun” and got (for lack of a better way of describing it) tunnel vision.  He didn’t hear or didn’t register that Castile had a permit.  He reacted by drawing and shooting.  The officer lost his composure, his ability to assess the situation accurately, and killed a man.

How much race played into this over reaction, I do not know.

However, there have been a number of examples of police over reacting in the presence of concealed carriers.  The gun community is familiar with the now infamous Canton, Ohio police officer, Daniel Harless.  Harless was caught on video, multiple times, threatening to murder concealed carry permit holders.

Then there is this traffic stop out of Florida.  Watch how the interaction goes from relatively calm to the officer yelling, cursing, and threatening to shoot an elderly white man in the back when the officer discovers the man is carrying lawfully.

Then there is the case of the shooting of Army Veteran and West Point graduate Erik Scott.  Scott was exiting a Costco and was shot by Las Vegas PD.  Scott was given contradictory commands to both “get on [his] knees” and “drop [his] weapon” and was shot several times in the ensuing confusion.

I believe that these cases have more in common with the shooting of Castile than the shooting of Castile has with Michael Brown or Tamir Rice.

Some in the media are focusing entirely on the racial aspects of the Castile shooting, going as far as to claim that the Second Amendment does not apply to black people.  Others, having overcome their temporary PTSD and bruised shoulder, blamed the NRA.  This is ridiculous, offensive, and the wrong lesson to be learned.

The fact is concealed carry is skyrocketing.  Several states have gone to permitless Constitutional Carry.  This means that police are going to be interacting with more and more lawful concealed carriers.  It is vital that the police adopt training and policies to avoid misunderstandings with carriers that turn violent.

Yes, carriers have a duty to be up-front with police.  Yes, carriers should be careful in what they say to police to convey that they are armed.  But a poorly worded sentence should not be a death sentence.  “Officer, I have a gun on me…” shouldn’t result in a police shooting.  There needs to be better protocols in place for police to handle concealed carriers with good intentions, allowing police to keep their composure in these type of situations.

Concealed carry is a right, a right that is being practiced by more and more people.  It is vital for the safety of both armed citizens and police for systems to be put in place to prevent these over reactions and tragedies of errors.  This is the real lesson to be learned from the death of Philando Castile.

Unfortunately, this lesson is going to be lost in the inevitable BLM activities and protests by the racial animus exacerbating, grievance mongering social justice crowd.

In the last week, this is what I have seen:

The former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate, was under investigation by the FBI for violating Federal law in mishandling classified information.  That mishandling possibly allowing classified information to fall into the hands of less than friendly nations.

The former President of the United States and husband of the Secretary of State was under investigation meeting with the Attorney General of the United States in an unofficial meeting on an airplane.

The  former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate floated the idea that if she won the election, the current Attorney General might be kept on an be the Attorney General of her administration.

The Attorney General punts on determining if prosecution is warranted  based upon the FBI investigation to the FBI, abdicating her legal responsibilities.

The FBI Director holds a press conference detailing all the ways the former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate violated Federal law, as well as showing evidence that she committed perjury during her testimony in a previous (Benghazi) hearing.  Despite the evidence to this felonious behavior, the FBI Director recommends against prosecution of the  former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate, while admitting that anybody else would be brought up on charges for doing the same thing.

The Justice Department headed by the Attorney General, announced that none of the assistants or support people involved in this violation of Federal law will be prosecuted either.

Following the FBI Director’s press conference, the current President of the United States attends a campaign rally for the former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate, in which he allows the former Secretary of State and current Presidential Candidate to break with tradition and decorum and give a campaign speech from behind the Seal of the President of the United States.

Now the political party of the President of the United States, the former Secretary of State, and the Attorney General, as well as the majority of journalists covering this want the rest of us to believe that what appears to be naked, open, and abject corruption, is just a lot of hoo-hah over nothing.

Let me ask this question:

At this point, is it even worth holding an election?  If those in power are going to be so corrupt so brazenly, is it necessary to go through the pro forma process of an election?  If the current President simply appointed the former Secretary of State to the position of President by executive action, in the words of the former Secretary of State ” what difference does it make?”

I know the article I’m about to quote is a few days old, but I’ve been on vacation, and have some catching up to do.

The Illuminati. The Bilderbergers.  The Freemasons.  The Trilateral Commission.  The Lizard People (Reptilians).  The Jooooooooos.

The NRA?  Gun Manufacturers?

Maybe those last two are little bit of a stretch.  Maybe not, if you listen to what some people on the political left say.

There is a common theme in the attacks directed at the NRA and firearms industry by the media and the anti-gun politicians and activists:

The NRA and gun companies doesn’t care about you.  They don’t care about your rights.  They don’t care about your life.  All they want to do is sell you guns and watch you drown in blood.  The NRA and gun makers love mass shootings and high profile murders because they can use them to manipulate you into buying even more guns for you to kill yourselves with.  The NRA and gun makers are entwined in an evil conspiracy to profit from the slaughter of innocent people.

To a reasonable person, this might seems ridiculously far-fetched and down right insulting to the decent people who work in the firearms industry.  I guess Isvari Mohan of the Boston Globe is not a reasonable person.

If it seems wrong to talk about a mass shooting as a business issue, you’re right. It’s wrong. But thanks to the National Rifle Association and the $13.5 billion-in-revenue gun industry, money is inextricably tied to the seemingly endless string of killings plaguing our country… But for the NRA, the gun industry, and the politicians they bankroll, spasms of violence like Orlando are an obscene blessing.

This is disgusting.  No one in the firearms industry revels in a mass shooting or terrorist attack.  I can testify to that with my very own eyes.

No one came into the office on June 13th, with a smile on their face, saying: “Did you see the news on Sunday?  We are going to be rolling in dough.”

Lobbying is one of the most successful businesses in this country, one the gun industry is especially good at. The NRA has so much power that even when 90 percent of Americans said they wanted universal background checks after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, according to a CNN/ORC poll, there was no federal action… The problem is extremely wealthy people, gun makers, and the NRA, can now spend as much as they want to buy candidates.

While it is true that the NRA has outspent anti-gun groups in political donations, the NRA has spent enough money to rank 75th in political contributions.  Bloomberg’s interests rank 36th, just to give you some perspective.  But CNN won’t write stories about the influence of the donations by George Soros’ interests (14th) or the SEIU (1st).  They will cover the NRA’s lobbying efforts ad nauseam.

But in the warped mind of the conspiracy theorist, 75th might as well be 1st.  There is no other money in politics than gun money and the NRA is the entity that shovels it out.

The NRA – and the five million people who get its magazines – are on a mission to prove that guns make us safer… (Quotes Kellerman Study) … In other words, guns make you less safe and they’re not that great for self-defense.”

Yes, yes, yes, I know.. owning a gun means that I am more likely that I am going shoot my my wife and kids until the home invader takes my gun away from me to kill me with it.  Then again, according to liberals, I’m also too stupid to decide was car I should drive, what beverage I can drink, how big my burger should be, what I should be able to watch on TV, and pretty much every other personal choice I can make.  So, I’m going to take this one with a grain of salt … if the liberals will let me have a grain of salt.

Until the 1960s, the Supreme Court had only dealt with a few gun control cases and held that the Second Amendment was related to militia and collective rights, not individual rights. In 2008, thanks to a long NRA campaign, the Court held in Heller that the Second Amendment does grant an individual right.

OH GOD NO!!!  THE NRA IS MAKING DECISIONS FOR SCOTUS NOW TOO!!!  “THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” ACTUALLY MEANS “ALL THE PEOPLE”!?!  OH THE HORROR!!!

Just to be clear: The gun industry does not actually care about your Second Amendment rights; they don’t even care about your life. They only care about profit.

Just to be clear: we absolutely do care about gun rights.  Despite what Ms. Mohan seems to believe, the gun industry is not a few fat cats smoking cigars and drinking scotch atop a mountain of skulls.  We are men an women who love our jobs and are passionate, dedicated firearms enthusiasts.  We have spouses and children.  We value life.  We go to work in a industry we believe in.  Yes, we want to make profit, so does ever industry.  But we don’t want to profit off enormities.  We want to profit off good products made for good people who will use and enjoy them responsibly.

Since business is the only thing that seems to speak to the NRA and the gun industry, one solution to the gun culture problem might be boycotting businesses that refuse to support responsible gun ownership. A lot of retirement stocks are invested in the gun industry – and they went up after the Orlando shooting – so people who support gun control might want to prevent their savings from being invested in companies that profit when people die.

This is movie stock market thinking.  Yes, stock value is in part determined by perceived value of the company.  But a company’s worth is in its earnings.  If antis don’t invest their 410(k)s into gun companies, we won’t magically dry up and die.  There is real earnings in people buying guns.  It’s not the investors that cause the industry to hit record highs in value, it is the record gun sales that are doing that.

The only purpose of guns is killing. And the only purpose of the gun industry is to sell them. Next time you think about buying a gun, think about that.

I should say that killing is not the only purpose of guns, but I won’t.  All target practice is killing practice, even if you don’t ever intend to kill.  I will agree with Ms. Mohan on this point, but I will take it one step further.  I want the tools to kill.  I don’t want to commit murder.  I do want the ability to defend myself with lethal force if necessary.  I do think about that when I buy guns, which is why I own them.  Whether it be the government or criminals (or both), I don’t want somebody else to have the monopoly on violence.  I want to be able to hold my own and meet force with force.

Ms. Mohan is supposed to be some sort of prodigy genius, writing columns for the Globe and giving TEDx talks.  To me, this article seems less like critical thought and more like a mix of Liberal anti business and anti gun platitudes, lightly flavored with conspiracy.

This is the kind of crap that passes for deep thought in  Left Wing circles.  Miguel touched on an article in an LGBT magazine a few days ago that made this same point from an identity politics perspective.

Make no mistake: The newest iteration of the pro-gun agenda has nothing to do with protecting LGBT lives and everything to do with blindly and irresponsibly selling guns to an untapped market. Telling LGBT people to carry guns so they don’t get “bashed” — as the Pink Pistols group has done recently — is like telling a woman to stop wearing short skirts to avoid rape. It’s out of touch and deflects blame from those who should truly be held accountable.

If members of the Pink Pistols are really concerned about ending deadly violence in the LGBT community, they could start by cutting their ties with the gay bashers at the NRA.

Again, the NRA doesn’t care about you or your life.  We’re just in it for profit.  Evil, evil, profit.  All the gun ranges and firearms instructors that were giving away free training to the LGBT community were doing that because… ?  At the same time that well intentioned Liberals were doing their damnedest to make sure that EVERYBODY knew that Islam had nothing to do with the killing of 49 people and the wounding of 50 others at a gay club.  So that the next time a man shows up with a gun shouting “Allah Akbar” at a gay hot spot, people know he’s just there to party.

Also… no, telling people to defend themselves is not victim blaming.  The gay men and women at Pulse were no asking to be shot and murdered by an Islamic terrorist.  But it is irresponsible to put yourself at the mercy of someone who has proven that they have no mercy for you.  I don’t blame the Jews of Europe for what the Nazis believed or did.  But I will not understand why so many Jews chose to board the cattle cars, hoping that if they just worked hard, they would survive the camps.  All the Liberal platitudes in the world won’t stop the next radical Islamist from attacking his target.  A well placed bullet will.

Daniel Greenfield summed up the cause of this belief quite well at his blog.

You wouldn’t blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been “liberated” to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. 

With this in mind, it is easy to understand why the Liberals in the media and advocacy groups don’t see how their actions drive gun sales and a growing gun culture.  It is not their incessant desire to ban guns or hinder honest citizens’ ability to buy them or their epic transparent bumblefucking of trying to explain away terrorism** that drives gun sales.  They do not believe that regular people not have cognitive function to say “the government isn’t going to protect me, so I should buy the tools to protect myself before that same government bans them.”  It is the NRA whispering mind controlling evil into the ear of the people like Emperor Palpatine.

**Watching the response to the Pulse shooting by Liberals in the media and Washington was a surreal experience.  It was like watching New York Fashion Week if all the models looked like Hilary Clinton and showed up naked and demanded that we acknowledge how beautiful and elegant everything is.  All but the most ardent Liberals were gagging, wondering if what they were seeing was for real, while the argent Liberals were calling them “bigots” for not ooing and ahhing.  I fully expected the news of that week to close with a monologue from Rod Serling.

Understanding the Liberal world view that we are puppets and the NRA and gun industry are our puppet masters explains why groups like Everytown and MDA, as well as so many others, believe what stands in their way is the NRA and gun makers.

We are not evil.  We are not soulless monsters that turn human misery and death into profit to feed our gluttonous appetites.  We are not stupid, consumerist sheep.  And we are certainly not a monolithic, top down group that manipulates the helpless masses for our own desire or world domination.

We are freedom loving people, who enjoy a sport, and want to own the tools we desire for our self defense.

Understand that and understand why we are not easy to defeat.