Gun Free Zone

A City Fights Back Against Heavyweight Cars
Oversized pickups and SUVs are exacting a deadly toll on urban streets. Here’s how one US city plans to push back.

Imagine that you, a city resident, are contemplating swapping out your mid-sized sedan for a full-sized pickup truck. And not just any pickup truck; your eye has fallen upon a heavy-duty one, like the Chevy Silverado HD or the Ford F-250. These are machines intended for towing and hauling, but they’re increasingly popular as passenger vehicles in the US, despite their massive proportions. At 6,695 pounds, the F-250 is 23 inches taller and more than twice as heavy as a Honda Accord.

If you’re a city or state leader, you have a limited arsenal of tools available to discourage residents from operating these behemoths on local streets. A proposal from the District of Columbia would add a new one: The city is poised to require owners of vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds to pay an annual $500 vehicle registration fee], almost seven times the cost to register a modest sedan. No other US jurisdiction has created such a forceful financial disincentive against the biggest, heaviest car models.

“You can’t ban sales of these things,” says Mary Cheh, a D.C. councilmember who developed the new fee structure, “but you can make them pay their own way.”

In other words, a D.C. resident registering a heavy-duty pickup or SUV who would have paid $775 over five years in the old fee structure will now have to fork over $2,500. Notably, no exception is available for residents claiming that they need a heavy-duty truck or SUV for their work.

DC Councilwoman hates pickup trucks and intends to tax the shit out of them to dissuade ownership, even among working people who might need them.

Tell me just how out of touch DC is from regular Americans.

I didn’t think it was possible for a police department to be more cowardly and inept than the Broward County Sheriff’s Department after Parkland, but the Uvalde Police managed to pull it off.

Uvalde school district police chief, Pete Arredondo, who ordered cops NOT to engage Texas gunman is a former 911 dispatcher with an unremarkable career who was elected to city council just days before massacre

Uvalde’s school district police chief is under fire for refusing to let his officers engage the active shooter at Robb Elementary School, after the gunman barricaded himself in a classroom as kids cowered inside and called 911.

During a bombshell presser Friday, Texas Department of Public Safety head Steven McCraw slammed Chief Pete Arredondo for failing to engage 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, mistakenly believing the teen had finished his killing spree and was hiding out from cops.

‘With the benefit of hindsight, from where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period,’ McCraw said.

Holy fucking dog shit!

The Chief of Police thought that the shooter had killed all the kids in the classroom and decided that since they were already dead his officers might as well just wait for the tactical team to breach.

That’s horrible but it gets worse.

Look at the timeline of the shooting:

There were active 911 calls from inside the classroom while the police were held back.

Actual fucking proof that there were still people alive inside the classroom while the chief assumed they were all dead.

Texas police release timeline in deadly school shooting, revealing that the suspect was inside for 77 minutes. pic.twitter.com/iSD5jISigZ

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 27, 2022

Now let’s add this little piece of information:

So every Uvalde officer has had Level IV body armor, paid for by the federal government, since 2018.

Every officer had the gear they needed to breach but didn’t because fuck it, the kids are already dead, why risk their lives.

But wait, there’s more.

Uvalde school police hosted active shooter training in March

The Uvalde school police force hosted an active shooter training session on March 22, according to a department Facebook post.

“Our overall goal is to train every Uvalde area law enforcement officer so that we can prepare as best as possible for any situation that may arise,” the post reads. “We have hosted several of these courses and plan to continue to do so.”

These feckless fuck-shits just trained on what to do two months prior.

They had the training and the equipment and failed beyond all comprehension.

Heads should roll for this.

The failure of the Uvalde Police Department to go in and stop an active school shooter, much like the failure of the Broward County Sheriff to do the same in Parkland in 2018 has, is a watershed political moment.

I think the difference between the cowardly catastrophe of the BSO in Parkland and the bumble-fucking ineptitude of the Uvalde Police is what happened during COVID.

It’s no secret what the Left thinks of police.  They have been saying it for years, and ratcheting it up since Michael Brown and George Floyd.

The Right, for the most part has defended the police.  Often pointing to the Ferguson Effect and crime waves in Blue cities (e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City) and how reducing the number of police and law enforcement results in increased crime.

Then came the COVID lockdowns, the George Floyd riots, and then Uvalde.

In the period of two years we watched as police department after police department brought out SWAT teams to enforce lockdowns and  COVID restrictions.

Who on the Right doesn’t remember watching MEAL Team 6 from the Ector County Sheriff roll a fucking MRAP against Big Daddy Zane’s Bar in Odessa, Texas for not shutting down during the lockdowns.

Two years later when an active shooter is killing children in an elementary school, another rural Texas police department stands around in plate carriers with their dicks in their hands.

As it turns out, the cops are all big and bad, happy to roll out a armored personnel carrier against guys drinking beers during the Coof but won’t muster the same intestinal fortitude to save the lives if children from a madman.

Then, in the days that followed, we find out that those same offices were all big and bad… when it came to stopping parents from going into the school to rescue their children themselves while the cops stood around.

The Right has, in the past, defended arming the police and providing tactical training, using the war on drugs or the war on terrorism as justification.

What we have discovered is that we have created police departments that are happy to bring every weapon and tool at their disposal with alacrity to threaten law abiding citizens who just want to go to the gym or have a beer in public despite some octogenarian career bureaucrat saying they need to stay home but respond with an equal level of cowardness to the defence of our children from a madman with a gun.

This is absolutely unacceptable to a degree we cannot put words to.

We tacitly accepted that police will enforce laws we don’t like and are tools of state power, but we still need them for when the shit hits the fan and they run towards the danger and do their job of keeping us safe.

But no…

We got the tools of state power enforcing draconian and Unconstitutional restrictions on citizens, but when BLM burned and looted cities, and a unhinged teenager shot up an elementary school, they stood back and hindered regular people from protecting themselves or their children.

We can never go back to the way it was.

Any group that can break out the tactical gear and point rifles at people for having a drink at a bar in defiance of Fauci but not use that sane gear to protect children from being murdered have no place in society.

The police have no friends anymore.  The new Right will no longer have their backs.  Fuck ’em.

“ZOMG! The Catholic Priests abusing kids!”
OK, now do the Southern Baptist Convention.

Nashville attorneys advised top Southern Baptist Convention officials to ignore reports of abuse and requests for reform in a decadeslong sexual abuse crisis, an explosive new report this week concluded.

The firm Guenther, Jordan & Price say their advice, valued by SBC officials for nearly 60 years, was ethical and in line with what their clients asked them to provide.

Oh yes, they even have a list of abusers spanning only 15 years but is 200 pages long.

I’ll post a link when they publish the article in the free side of the site.

A little exchange in Twitter. Click to enlarge.

And I missed in the collage one tweet before the Chicago v. McDonald quote:

I believe they are slaves to their own prefabricated misconceptions about us. If you are into guns and the Second Amendment, you must be some rube, an uneducated-sister-humping redneck who can barely read and write and can be easily defeated in a simple argument. He bitched because I refused to play by his rigged rules and did not allow him to move the goalposts. And his ignorance came to shine in a supernova way with his last tweet about SCOTUS’ opinions.

A mom of two students at Robb Elementary School says she was handcuffed by officers as the shooter was still inside before she jumped a fence and ran into the school to safely retrieve her children on Tuesday.

Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of a second-grader and a third-grader, told the Wall Street Journal she drove 40 miles to the Uvalde school and was one of numerous parents begging and yelling at the officers to enter sooner to take out 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos.

After a few minutes, she said, a US Marshall placed her in handcuffs, stating that she was under arrest for intervening in an active investigation, according to the Journal.
…

Gomez recognized a few local Uvalde police officers and convinced them to tell the marshals to remove the cuffs.

Once freed, she distanced herself from the crowd, jumped the school fence, ran inside the school building and grabbed her two children. The three sprinted out of the school together, she said.

Texas school shooting: Cops handcuffed mom before she ran in to get her kids (nypost.com)

And this is mom and her kids

She could be what? 105 pounds soaking wet? Just a mom with zero experience on tactical rescues or any kind of police training? And she did what trained officers refused to do?

Every time I believe it cannot get any worse for the Uvalde PD, shit pops up proving me wrong.

Just a bit ago at the gym, I was watching CNN while on the treadmill and saw these two items one right after the other:

CNN: We must stop American people from getting weapons of war.
CNN: We must help the Ukranian people by giving them more weapons of war.