Gun Free Zone

Normally in one of these articles, I would be quoting their words, pointing out how horribly wrong the state is, how the state is cheating, lying or otherwise attempting to put their thumb on the scales of justice.

Not so today. The attorneys representing the Senate President and General Assembly Speaker do a good job of presenting their position.

The form of these briefs is pretty set, a cover page that fully identifies the case and any cases that have been absorbed into this case, identification of the lawyers who are responsible for the document, theses are not always the person who wrote the brief, the person being represented, Table of Contents, Table of Citations/Authorities, introduction and optionally a summary of the argument, the arguments. That’s followed by other stuff, a conclusion and such.

In many of these briefs, the author uses the introduction and summary to make unsupported arguments and to attempt to set the stage for later misrepresentations.

This is the place where they attempt to put the ear bugs in place. The place where they give the judge(s) a limb to grab onto when they want to rule in a particular direction.

We saw all of that in the state’s official response. This brief doesn’t go down that path. It is very clean.

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Short answer: Yes.

Maybe we should ask for Universal Background check before buying a pool.

Although now Liberty Safes has come out with a Mea Culpa and promises over a stack of bibles this crap won’t happen again, something has come up that makes me think they may be fibbing a bit.

Liberty Safe was sold to Monomoy Capital Partners in 2021, a liberal East Coast investment firm. I pulled the FEC reports on the company and found approximately $400,000 over the last 10 cycles of max donations to Democrats like:

Raphael Warnock in GA
John Fetterman in PA… pic.twitter.com/WqnlQpPnrA

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 7, 2023

I need to post a screenshot because details matter.

If you bought a Libert Safe after 2021, your monies probably went to fund not only Liberal democrats but outright support for Gun Control.

I now believe this is no longer a case of some mid-level idiot making a decision beyond his/her scope but a willful assistance by the company to the Federal Two-Tiered Justice System.

Act accordingly.

Hat Tip RobertoEcho

Starting late last week the topic #BanTheADL ran on Twitter (X).

It’s taken me a while to put into words what I have been feeling about that.

Here it is:

I have made no bones about the fact that I hate what the ADL has become.

If you study politics and bureaucracy, you will learn about two inevitable sets of laws.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, states that, “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

And

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Jonathan Greenblatt is Pournelle’s Iron Law and Robert Conquest’s second and third laws of politics in human form.

A former Obama aide, he took the ADL from an organization that was non-partisan and focused on cataloging antisemitic incidents into a Progressive Leftist shakedown organization.  The ADL consistently downplayed or ignored Leftist antisemitism while turning any Right-Wing foible and mention of George Soros into a Nazi rally.

He borrowed from the Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson school of fundraising and used the threat of accusations of antisemitism to strongarm donations from companies, who would pay for the ADL’s blessing.

Under Greenblatt, the ADL doubled its funding and forgot all about Jews.  The ADL wouldn’t say shit about Jews getting beaten up on the streets of NYC by black people but would lecture about the Jewish values of trans-rights and defending drag queen storytime.

The way that the ADL had gone aggressively after conservative Christian groups and bought into the Woke perspective on white privilege and how only whites can be racist, reinforced antisemitic conspiracy theories that the Jews are both anti-Christian and anti-White.

Greenblatt has successfully destroyed both the credibility and the legacy of the ADL.

Elon Musk was the first business leader to push back against them, and technically, nothing he said was wrong.

But…

Have you ever had a fight with your family?  You can fight among yourselves, but as soon as an outsider criticizes a family member, that’s out of line.

I feel like criticism of the ADL is exactly that.

If the ADL is to be taken down, it should be us Jews who do it, and nobody else.

The problem is that the alt-Right antisemites have jumped into this frey in the worst way.

For them, the ADL is a stand-in for “all Jews everywhere.”

You will see things like “the noticing” posted.  That, is the conspiracy theory that the Jews secretly control everything and are out to destroy White Christian America and the ADL is their watchdog to stop people from noticing what the evil Jews are up to.

Another attack is that the ADL was never a good organization and was founded in disrepute.  They say that the ADL was founded to “defend a pedophile rapist Jew.”  That is such a perversion of history, but the antisemites have turned it into lore.

In 1913, in Atlanta, Leo Frank was convicted of the murder of factory girl Mary Phagan.  The evidence of Frank’s guilt was circumstantial at best, and his conviction was dubious.  It involved both a lot of antisemitism and racism in the Deep South.  At one point, when the evidence pointed to the black night watchman, the prosecution said that the night watchman couldn’t have done it because blacks were too stupid to plan a complex crime.  The Frank trial led to a resurgence of the Klan in Georgia.

He was convicted, but his death sentence was commuted due to the dubious level of the conviction.  A mob broke into the jail and lynched Frank.  The mob then held a Klan rally.

None of the mob were arrested, prosecuted, or convicted.

This was the basis on which the ADL was founded.  But according to the White Supremacist antisemites, the trial was a paragon of American jurisprudence, the ADL lied to get a pedophile rapist let out of jail, and in the most extreme comments, Frank deserved to get lynched.

And since that is what they attribute the ADL to, it will always, to them, be an evil organization, founded in evil, by evil Jews.

And these people have been boosting #BanTheADL.

Consequently, only a small percentage of the people on Twitter pushing this are people who seem to have a legitimate grievance that the ADL is no longer a credible civil rights organization and they should stop being able to influence social media companies, and the larger percentage is antisemites who want to lash out at the Jews and want to destroy any organization that might help Jews.

It’s like if your family is having a fight and all of a sudden a mob comes in to kill the side of your family you’re arguing with.

I want Greenblatt fired, I want the ADL overhauled, and I want a strong, non-partisan organization that will help to protect the Jews.

They just want to destroy us, all of us, and they will start with the ADL.

Those are two different goals.  Those people who are also attacking the ADL are not my allies, they are my enemies.

The problem is that Musk doesn’t seem to get that.  I don’t think he’s an antisemite, he’s just being oblivious to how the antisemites have latched onto his legitimate grievance for their own purpose.

The whole fucking thing is a terrible shit-show and the Jews with pay mightily for it.

Each of us here at the GFZ has a niche that we get into.

Miguel is our security camera guy.  AWA is our digital security guy.  I am our physical security guy.

I have been following the Liberty Safe kerfuffle and wanted to give my opinion.

To do this accurately, I’m going to break this down into two separate issues: security and policy.

First, security.

I have a couple of Fort Knox safes.  When I bought them, I registered them with Fort Knox.  In my paperwork packet is information about how Fort Knox keeps the combination for my S&G mechanical dial lock.  If I ever forget my combination, I can provide my serial number, proof of purchase, and other information on a notarized form, or on law enforcement letterhead and they will provide the combination to a licensed locksmith to come and open my safe.

In the event that I die, my inheritors can provide paperwork, including proof that they inherited my safe, and Fort Knox will dispatch a locksmith to open the safe and give them the combination.

Across the board, it seems that every US gun safe manufacturer has a similar system and policy.

When my dad died suddenly, we had to go through all sorts of rigamarole to get access to his bank accounts, credit cards, safety deposit boxes, internet passwords, etc.

A safe is no different.  I’ve seen some people say online, “Drill the safe.”  That’s stupid.

My safes are very expensive.  A safe has value in and of itself, beyond its contents.  Once a safe is drilled, it’s dead.  It’s been irreparably damaged.  My lawful inheritors should be able to open my safe without having to destroy it and its value.

As much digging as I have done online, I have not come across a single incident that involved a criminal opening a safe by getting the combination from the manufacturer.

It’s a ridiculous premise if you think about it.  A mechanical lock has a combination.  Digital locks apparently have a master override code.  I would assume that the master code is specific to the lock and not universal to all the locks of a particular make and model.  If your garage door opener has a unique code, so can your safe.

A thief would have to know the location of your safe and get its serial number from inside the safe, and then in an act of identity theft that includes a public notary, request your combination.

As for the storage of that information by the manufacturer, that falls under corporate security, with layers and layers of protection to keep customer records safe.

Your $2,500 Liberty safe from Cabela’s, sitting in your basement in your suburban home, is not going to get targeted to that degree.  You have to worry about the local hoodlums with crowbars who want your stuff to sell for drugs.

If your safe is opened with the combination, I can guarantee it’s because you wrote it down somewhere and they found it, or your bitch ex-wife told someone the combination (that was the only verifiable anecdote of a guy who had his safe burglarized with the combination).

The people online who are going nuts over the idea that their safe has a backdoor master code are being paranoid.

Let me draw you this parallel.

When I got my Mustang, it came with one key fob.  My fob got damaged and didn’t work anymore.  I had to have it towed to the Ford dealership.  There, I had to provide my license, registration, proof of insurance, and proof of ownership (car loan documents) so the dealer could contact Ford corporate and with the VIN, order a new key fob that would work with my car.

Imagine if I took my car to Ford and they said, “We don’t keep that information.  Those key fobs were the only ones in existence for your car.  Your car is effectively totaled, you’ll never get it started again.”

That’s fucking stupid.

And try as I might, I have yet to find an incident of a criminal ordering a new fob for a particular VIN to steal a car.  All of the fob thefts I have read about are from people who have lost control of their fob and had it cloned.

Security failures like this are almost never the result of a top-level breach (somebody hacking Ford and getting all the fob codes or hacking Liberty and getting all the master codes), but a low-level breach (writing your password down so you don’t forget it or leaving your key for your other car at home while you go on vacation).

At the end of the day, I have to remind people: You’re not that special, Ocean’s 11 is not going to carry out a multi-level caper involving corporate espionage to make off with your guns.

From a physcial security standpoint, this is not a serious concern for me.

If it is a concern for you, my two recommended options are: buy a used safe with cash so the company record doesn’t have your information, buy a new safe and pay a locksmith to replace the lock so the lock is different than the one in the company record.  Then make sure you don’t die without some executor knowing the combination or your inheritors will have to drill your safe.

Second, policy.

This is where Liberty fucked up.

Liberty should have had a policy that says if law enforcement wants the code to a safe, then they have to get a judge to sign a warrant that compels Liberty to provide the code.

Providing the code to law enforcement because they have a warrant to search the homeowner’s home is bad policy.

Unfortunately, Liberty will pay for that.

What I hope to see come out of this is a broad reaction from all US gun safe manufacturers to clarify their policy on the conditions in which they would provide combinations to law enforcement, and that should require a warrant for the combination from the manufacturer.

I hope Liberty recovers, they make good products.  It’s important for law-abiding citizens to own gun safes and to lock up their guns to prevent unauthorized access, and having a gun safe company go under Bud Lite style won’t help any of us in the long run.

If there is a silver lining, I look forward to possibly picking up a few used Liberties at pennies on the dollar from the same class of people that poured out all of their Bud Light.

Seen on Facebook Marketplace:

Oh, I abso-fucking-lutely would.

Wife: “Why the fuck did you buy a dump truck bigger than our house.”

Me: “First of all, it’s a haul truck, not a dump truck. Second, this will hold 67 cubic yards. I’ll only have to make one trip to Home Depot for mulch.”

Also, do you have any idea how fucked up it is that a used 100-ton diesel haul truck is worth less than a used 3/4-ton diesel pickup?

https://twitter.com/ViralNewsNYC/status/1698379241866285509?s=19

When you see a crazy homeless man attack someone, you just ignore that shit, because if you intervene, the city will destroy you.

It didn’t matter that everyone on the subway said Daniel Penny was a hero, the city is more interested in protecting its criminal vagrants than its citizens.

New Yorkers learned that lesson well, and nobody stopped an elderly woman from being beaten with a cane for almost three minutes.