The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, or at least its website main page, was just full of stories about firearms. Soccer beat writer and website home page editor Jonathan Tannenwald wrote “Alejandro Bedoya leads Union protest against gun violence: ‘This ain’t American exceptionalism’: ‘It ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time,’ the Union’s captain said after his team wore T-shirts at Saturday’s game with the message ‘END GUN VIOLENCE.’” Breaking news editor and President of the News Guild Diane Mastrull wrote “2 women leaving a church funeral service were hit by stray bullets in Philly fatal shooting,” noting, almost as an aside, that there were three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday. She did, however, scrub the story of any reference to race, even though the Philadelphia Police reported the race of the victims in each report. In that, she was following what is quite obviously the newspaper’s editorial policy under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ and executive editor Gabriel Escobar’s orders.

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared that the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper as a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.” Those days are long gone!

But the Inquirer did publish a few stories which might not quite fit Miss Hughes’ and Mr Escobar’s editorial slant. Continue reading →

The Democrats and the left — please, pardon the redundancy — are never willing to inflate a crime into a crisis, and are using the school shooting in Texas to try to infringe on the rights of Americans who have done nothing wrong. There was District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, who would rather prosecute police officers and exonerate criminals chiming in with “What organization does more to enable murder by gun & mass shootings of Americans than the @NRA? Every elected official who panders to the NRA is failing. Period.”

Of course, under Mr Krasner, a defense attorney who hates cops, but who was elected District Attorney thanks to George Soros pumping money into ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ candidates, while the Philadelphia Police Department were making record numbers of arrests for illegal possession of firearms, the DA’s office was winning, or even attempting to win, a far lower percentage of such cases.

Pennsylvania does not have outrageously tough gun control laws, but Mr Krasner isn’t attempting to enforce the ones they do have. We do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us if Mr Krasner had kept previously charged violent criminals in jail when he had the chance.

Now comes Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), calling for the state legislature to enact tougher gun control laws:

Students and leaders rally in Philly for stronger gun laws: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: do your jobs,” said Gov. Tom Wolf.

by Oona Goodin-Smith | Friday, May 27, 2022

Gov. Tom Wolf rallied Friday with fellow lawmakers, clergy, students, and gun violence prevention activists in Philadelphia, calling for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pass more stringent gun laws in the wake of the Texas school shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

William Teach: House Democrats To Investigate….Gun Makers In Wake Of Texas Shooting

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: Do your jobs,” Wolf, a Democrat, said to applause and a sea of orange CeaseFirePA T-shirts.

Wolf said the Republican-controlled state legislature for years has stymied the passage of “commonsense legislation” in the commonwealth. He urged lawmakers to: require reporting for lost and stolen guns within 72 hours, close loopholes and require background checks on all gun sales, require safe storage of firearms, and create “red flag laws” to protect those who may be a danger to themselves or others.

The renewed demand for action came days after the Uvalde massacre — the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and the 27th school shooting in the country this year — and two weeks after 10 Black people were shot to death in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in a killing reportedly motivated by a racist conspiracy theory.

Twenty-seventh school shooting this year?

• May 17: Walt Disney Magnet School, Chicago: an 8 year old student discharged a gun, injuring a 7 year old. The Washington Post counted this as 1,420 students experiencing gun violence at school.
• April 26: Aspen Ridge Elementary School, West Ishpeming, MI: Student shot himself in bathroom during school hours. Post counts this as 700 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
• April 11: Pine Bluff High School, in Pine Bluff, AR: Student fired shots in parking lot, no one injured. 820 students present.

Using The Washington Post’s interactive graphic of school shootings, it quickly became clear: the 26 other school shootings were gang violence involving kids who brought guns to school themselves, killing five in five separate incidents, along with security officers shooting outsiders harassing parents in two separate incidents. This is the kind of propaganda that the credentialed media use to artificially pump up numbers.

In Philadelphia, where gun violence is often unrelenting, shootings have surged in the past years with killings reaching record levels in 2021.

Well, yes, shootings have spiked in the City of Brotherly Love, but that’s because the District Attorney keeps turning loose criminals on ‘minor’ offenses, enabling them to be out on the streets to commit major ones. It is because the city and, let’s be honest here, the ‘disadvantaged communities’ tolerate and enable gang violence. So-called “red flag” laws will do nothing, because the public aren’t even providing evidence against actual shooters, and can’t be expected to report potential ones. The Buffalo shooter had posted plenty of messages on social media giving clues that he was a whacko, and New York state has a red flag law, but he was never reported or investigated. Red flag laws seem to be of more use for one enemy to get another enemy hassled by the police than stopping mass shootings.

Require “safe storage” of firearms? Philadelphians have been seeking permits and buying firearms at record paces due to the increased homicide rate; the last thing they want to do is have their weapons locked in a safe or inhibited by a trigger lock when seconds count while someone is breaking into their homes.

Governor Wolf and the ralliers shouted that they wanted the General Assembly to “Do your jobs!” but their jobs include protecting the constitutional rights of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. What the ralliers want is for the legislators to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. There is a certain irony involved when people exercise their constitutional rights to advocate that other people’s constitutional rights should be abridged.

In the end, the entire thing is enabled by utter stupidity: criminals are criminals because they violate the laws! They don’t care about gun control laws, because they don’t care about any laws that stand in the way of their desires. If someone is willing to violate the laws about shooting people, about trying to kill others, why would anyone expect him to care about a law trying to restrict his ability to do so?

The only people that gun control laws would affect are those who haven’t been breaking the law, those who do not intend to kill anyone, save perhaps in self-defense.