Category Archives: Right to keep and bear arms

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Solomon Jones and his very bad timing

Solomon Jones is a columnist for The Phila-delphia Inquirer, and, according to his biography blurb at the bottom of his column, “is the author of ‘Ten Lives Ten Demands: Life and Death Stories and a Black ActivistĘźs Blueprint for Racial Justice.’ Listen to him weekdays from 7 to 10 a.m. on WURD 900 AM.” Amusingly enough, the amazon.com blurb for his book calls it a “manifesto,” with these demands to “rectify racial injustice.” Copyrighted in 2021, I do wonder if, given the current Democratic candidates for Mayor of Philadelphia, whether he still adheres to his demand to “Defund the police and move funds to trained social workers, mental health professionals, and conflict resolution specialists.” Even Helen Gym Flaherty no longer says that, though I would not be surprised if she didn’t move in that direction if she wins.

Unfortunately for Mr Jones, his latest column is a masterpiece of lousy timing. Continue reading →

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The credentialed media don’t understand their home state! Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader is out of touch with Kentuckians

We have previously reported how the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy newspaper, follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and refrains from publishing the photos of black suspects and convicted criminals, and does not refer to race in its criminal reports, though somehow, photos of accused criminals who are white manage to make it into the newspaper.

So, imagine my surprise when reporters Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd wrote this line:

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

Naturally, I took the screen shot of the sentence, before it vanishes into the ether.

Authorities identify former Old National Bank employee as Louisville shooter

by Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 4:10 PM EDT | Updated: 9:52 PM EDT

Louisville Metro Police have identified a 25-year-old man as the shooter who killed five people and injured several others before he was fatally shot by police at a downtown bank Monday morning.

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

The new details emerged during a Monday afternoon press conference attended by city officials and Gov. Andy Beshear, who said he’d lost a close friend in the shooting.

According to police, officers were dispatched to Old National Bank Monday morning for reports of an active shooter. When they arrived, the shooting was ongoing, but the shooter was reported dead soon after.

Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel named him Monday afternoon during a press conference. She said Sturgeon was formerly an employee with Old National Bank and assumed he was a Louisville resident.

According to the police chief, Sturgeon was killed by police gunfire. He was reported to have used a “rifle,” although police did not specifically state what type.

There’s a little more at the original, but nothing that hasn’t been all over the news. The story mentions that the killer was a “former” employee of the bank, but does not state what several other sources have, that he was discharged by the bank.

Naturally, the Herald-Leader’s primary columnist wants gun control:

After Louisville shooting, it’s time to get out our bullhorns. We’re sick of gun deaths. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 12:28 PM EDT

Have we had enough yet?

Exactly two weeks after a deranged shooter killed six people in Nashville, three of them precious, innocent children, a deranged shooter killed four people in Louisville (the shooter also died), and sent eight more to the hospital.

Also see: William Teach, “Gun Grabbers Push Gun Grabbing Immediately After Leftist Nutjob Kills People“

There have been 131 mass shootings — defined as more than four people dead or injured — THIS YEAR alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Almost 10,000 people have died from guns since Jan. 1.

Today made 132. The archive updated its numbers as police gave their final reports.

A tsunami of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians will now roll down, hoping to drown us in distraction from the fact that they could stop this if they wanted to.

If we made them.

After several more paragraphs blaming “the guns,” Mrs Blackford comes up with a statement she has made before, and one she knows is a lie:

But once again, gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people, who are sick of seeing people, children, die for nothing but a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers.

“Gerrymandered”? In 2020, Republicans dramatically increased their number of seats in the Kentucky General Assembly, from 61-39 in the state House of Representatives to 75-25, and in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8. But those gains happened under the district lines passed following the 2010 Census, when Democrats controlled the state House, and a Democrat was Governor. Republicans did not take over control of teh state House until after the 2016 elections; they did previously control the state Senate, including prior to the reapportionment.

Republicans did increase their seats in the 2022 election, up to 80-20 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate. Interestingly enough, the Democrats never even fielded candidates in 44 of the House districts, so there was no way they could even think about regaining control. In my own district, no serious Democrat ran in the primary, and a perennial kook candidate won the nomination, a candidate so bad that the state Democratic Party disavowed him.

Is there gerrymandering? In 2020, President Trump received 1,326,646 votes from Kentuckians, 62.09% of the total, while Joe Biden got only 772,474, or 36.15%. President Teump carried 118 out of the Commonwealth’s 120 counties, losing only Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington). In the same election, Senator Mitch McConnell won 1,233,315 votes, 57.76%, while his well-funded Democrat opponent, Amy McGrath Henderson received only 816,257, 38.23%. Mrs Henderson carried only three counties, Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin, which included the state capitol of Frankfort.

In 2022, Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, won 913,326 votes, 61.80%, to Democrat Charles Booker’s 564,311 votes, 38.19%.

Those were statewide elections, which means there was no gerrymandering possible. Mrs Blackford might argue gerrymandering at the margins of the 2022 General Assembly races, but a difference of two or three would hardly matter against the GOP’s overwhelming majorities.

Mrs Blackford called the Commonwealth’s gun laws “a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers,” but that completely ignores history. When what became the Second Amendment was written, it was by the generation which had just won a revolution against Great Britain. In 1775, the military Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, had ordered gun control himself, ordering the confiscation of firearms and ammunition from the wretched colonials. It was to seize reported storehouses of gunpowder and ammunition that General Gage sent the redcoats to Lexington and Concord, resulting in the shot heard ’round the world, and the first battles in our revolution. Does Mrs Blackford seriously believe that the revolutionaries who began that war fighting against gun control by the British would not have meant for individuals to have the right to keep and bear arms.

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, many Americans lived on or very near the frontier. Does Mrs Blackford believe that the “founding fathers” would have thought the government could ban individuals from owning firearms when they had to hunt for game to put meat on the table, and be able to defend themselves from the Indian tribes? Does Mrs Blackford believe that when her home state of Kentucky was settled by white families, that the “founding fathers” would have believed it acceptable for the government to have the authority to ban individual ownership of firearms when the settlers needed to hunt for food and defend themselves from the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians who already lived here?

There were no telephones in the late 18th century, and homesteads could be pretty far apart. There were no police departments on the frontier. The first organized, publicly-funded professional full-time police forces in the United States were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854. If a bad guy was raiding a homestead, would the “founding fathers” have thought that the government could ban the private ownership of firearms by individuals, leaving them unable to defend themselves?

Mrs Blackford’s biography says that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” Twenty years, huh? That means entirely in the 21st century, on computers and word processors, exercising her freedom of speech and of the press via giant printing presses and an internet which allows distribution of her words widely across the Herald-Leader’s service area, which is central and eastern Kentucky, and even around the world if someone chooses to search. These are certainly things of which the “founding fathers’ had no concept! If we were to accept the columnist’s ideas that the “founding fathers” certainly never meant for the Second Amendment to cover what it covers today, then wouldn’t we also have to say that the First Amendment does not cover more than a megaphone or a hand-set newspaper printed entirely by manual labor?

We have previously documented the newspaper’s endorsement history, and how the voters of the sixth congressional district and the commonwealth as a whole almost always vote the opposite from how what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal want.

When I moved away from the Bluegrass State at the end of 1984, the Herald-Leader was a broadsheet publication, and if not the size of Louisville’s Courier-Journal or The Philadelphia Inquirer, still a reasonable newspaper for central and eastern Kentucky. I used to deliver the old morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, and when I returned to the Bluegrass State in 2017, I could see just how far downhill the newspaper had gone. Just a few pages, no longer a broadsheet, and visibly on its last legs. That, too, is freedom of speech and of the press, as, presented with the other news alternatives of television and radio and the internet, the people of the newspaper’s service area have chosen against it.

Perhaps that is why Mrs Blackford personally, and the newspaper’s editors in general, have lost touch with what used to be their service area. They now reflect only the opinions of the state’s second-largest city, and while it’s a significant voting block, it isn’t the majority of even the sixth congressional district. Mrs Blackford may blame it all on gerrymandering, but it’s the newspaper and her which are out of touch with Kentuckians, not the state legislature.
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The left keep making excuses for other leftists who kill.

Democrats in the United States have been very much in favor of enforcing the law when it came to the protests which occurred on January 6, 2021. The federal Department of Justice has charged nearly a thousand people with crimes over a rowdy demonstration, and The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland — who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a Supreme Court seat — is looking at charges for perhaps another thousand people. What my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal has been very much supportive of charging the Capitol kerfufflers as seriously as possible, even though the actual guilty pleas have been for a single, relatively minor misdemeanor count, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G), Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; the penalty for which is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or up to six months in prison, or both.

But it seems as though the Herald-Leader is actually quite supportive of breaking the law when it comes to something the editors support:

Civil disobedience is now required to fight gun violence and protect our most vulnerable | Opinion

by Fenton Johnson[1] | Thursday, April 6, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT | updated: Friday, April 7, 2023 | 9:35 AM EDT

The moment I read that the Nashville school shooter was a woman whom the police indicated was being “treated for a mental disorder,” I wrote an email to a friend in Kentucky, like Tennessee a state where a Republican supermajority legislature is waging war on trans children and their parents. “I find myself wondering,” I wrote, “if the ‘mental disorder’ with which the killer was being treated was some kind of gender nonconformity issue, conscious or otherwise. So much mental illness resides there, and may have been triggered, to use the word of the day, by the Tennessee legislature’s actions against LGBT people.”

Really? It was reported almost immediately that Audrey Hale, the murderer — no need to used the qualifier “alleged,” since she was shot dead virtually in the act — was ‘transgendered,’ a woman claiming that she was really a man and calling herself “Aiden.” As we previously reported, with some confusion about Miss Hale’s status in the immediate aftermath, the professional media used some contorted language to avoid gendered pronouns or honorifics, to keep from getting them wrong.

Not that it mattered: “Gender identity advocates accused mainstream news outlets who scrambled to cover the story of ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ Hale by not referring to her as a man or as a transman.”

How did I know this before reading or hearing the news that Audrey Hale was in fact trans? Because I grew up in rural Kentucky in the 1950s, where I attended the most conservative of Roman Catholic grade schools. Shaming and corporal punishment were commonplace and sex was never spoken of because the priestly hierarchy understood that silence was its most powerful tool in protecting its power to abuse children and women.

LOL! I attended a public school in a small town in Kentucky, in the 1960s and very early 1970s, and sex was never spoken of by the teachers and administrators — it was spoken about plenty of times by the students! — because those subjects were simply not supposed to be part of the educational curriculum, and if they had been part, parents would have been very upset. Sex education was a subject for parents, not the public schools.

I who loved learning dreaded not the classroom, where I could sneak a look into the science and literature textbooks that we were often forbidden to read. Instead I dreaded the playground and my walks to and from school, where class bullies beat me up for walking like a woman. They would teach me to be a man like them — they would teach me violence. But I got lucky — I got a scholarship; I got out; I ran away, to San Francisco, to a place where I could heal my wounds, learn peace, and find the courage to come out as a gay man.

The playground and those walks home taught me that the loudest bullies had the most to protect. The meanest bullies were such cowards that they resorted to violence to mask their insecurities. They rushed to buy assault weapons.

Really? The “bullies” of the 1950s “rushed to buy assault weapons”?

Fifty years later, ex-Marine Senator J.D. Vance tweets that “giving into these ideas is dangerous,” as if gender identity is an “idea,” as if his toxic heterosexuality has not slaughtered countless women, children, and men across centuries of war, in the battlefields and in the streets and lanes. Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett implies that the solution is to lock our children up at home and go to the mats — an approach that has some merit, in that it allows loving and compassionate parents to protect their children from the likes of him and his ideologies.

When a homosexual male starts blabbering about “toxic heterosexuality,” you know that he’s pretty much losing it. 🙂

Audrey Hale’s powder keg of anger and self-loathing was prepared in the halls of the school where she acted out her despair on the terms established and promoted by the gun lovers. The leaders who in their public stances told her she was “dangerous” invited her to act out their accusation. That she did so on their terms and using their weapons of choice is a matter of cause and effect.

Oh, look! Fenton Johnson just ‘deadnamed‘ and ‘misgendered‘ Miss Johnson!

Americans live on sidewalks, migrants seeking asylum are murdered at our doors and in our streets, banks go under, our transportation infrastructure is in rotten shape, our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens. Our legislators’ response to these crises is to spend days debating drag performances while defending easy access to assault weapons. Beyond that, they say, they can do nothing.

The hour is here for peaceful civil disobedience, such as that practiced by Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson and over a thousand Nashville students, who are taking their case directly to the legislative halls in exercise of their constitutional rights, and whom the Republican supermajority is attempting to silence. As U.S. history teaches us, those who act from courage and compassion must be prepared to face the cowards with their guns. Better our aged bodies than those of our children.

Connor Sturgeon’s LinkedIn profile, screen captured before it could be deleted. Click to enlarge.

“Civil disobedience,” huh? Civil disobedience is defined as “active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government or other lawful authority.” Is Mr Johnson, and the Herald-Leader which chose to publish him, calling for breaking the law? The newspaper, at least, hasn’t been so charitable when it comes to the January 6 protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but march in the Capitol Building. Is Mr Johnson willing to go to jail, and be incarcerated amongst those “toxic(ly) heterosexual” other criminals?

Well, Connor Sturgeon, 25, just killed several people at Old National Bank, his employer, in Louisville, going to his eternal reward in the process. Will Mr Johnson “find myself wondering, if he had a ‘mental disorder’, or was perhaps homosexual or transgender, since the General Assembly recently overrode the Governor’s veto and passed Senate Bill 150, which prohibits hormone of surgical ‘transitioning’ of minors — they can do whatever fool thing they want once they turn 18 — and prohibits public school systems from requiring teachers and other employees from being required to go along with a ‘transgender’ student’s preferred name or pronouns? Mr Sturgeon did specify his ‘pronouns,’ “He/him” in his LinkedIn profile, though they only show up if you are logged in to LinkedIn, which I screen captured before it was deleted. Mr Johnson complained that “our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens,” but young Mr Sturgeon claimed that he had a Master of Science degree from the University of Alabama’s Manderson Graduate School of Business, and he had what would appear, from his job title, Syndications Associate and Portfolio Banker, to be a decently-paying job at Old National Bank.

Miss Hale and Mr Sturgeon were insane by any practical definition: both wanted to end it all, and both decided that suicide-by-cop and taking innocent people with them was a great, great way to make a splash as they departed our mortal vale. Anger over a legislative act does not somehow justify what Miss Hale, and perhaps Mr Johnson, did.

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Once again, the #woke credentialed media don’t want to cover the story * Updated! *

As we reported on Saturday, some of the credentialed journalists, journolists as we see them, really don’t like it when other journalists do something really radical like report the facts. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Yesterday, a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was shot and killed, shot ten times, making it an obvious hit, not far from Samuel Fels High School. Here’s the story from Fox 29 News:

Police: 15-year-old chased down Philadelphia street, shot to death in broad daylight

Published March 13, 2023 1:27PM | Updated 10:17PM

PHILADELPHIA – A 15-year-old is dead after police say he was chased down a Philadelphia street by a group of gunmen and shot at least 10 times. Continue reading →

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When supposedly responsible people make irresponsible promises

Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, image from her campaign website. Click to enlarge.

That The Philadelphia Inquirer would not like a law-and-order Democrat like Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect … Continue reading is not much of a surprise. In an article published on February 15th on the four women running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, she was listed last — which does happen when listed in alphabetical order — though the Inky did give her more words, 244, than Helen Gym Flaherty, 233, the #woke progressive who will probably be favored by the newspaper’s Editorial Board.

What Mrs McDuff posts as her campaign promises actually sounds reasonable, right up until it hits up against political reality:

Most shootings in Philadelphia are perpetrated with illegal firearms. Though the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prevents Philadelphia from passing its own gun laws, it is within our legal authority to prosecute individuals possessing guns illegally. The Rhynhart Administration will aggressively pursue those trafficking illegal guns into our city, working in conjunction with law enforcement partners.

Recently, Philadelphia Police have been arresting more people for carrying illegal guns, but prosecutions have not kept pace. As Mayor, Rhynhart will convene a task force with the District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia Police, and the courts to review illegal firearm cases and ensure all three arms of the criminal justice system work cooperatively to eliminate illegal firearms from our streets.

The District Attorney is not a subordinate official to the Mayor, but is independently elected on his own, and the current DA, Larry Krasner, does not want to prosecute people for carrying “illegal guns,” and has said so openly:

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns, and, if it entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops, has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.” He notes that “people of color are disproportionately stopped in Philadelphia and arrested for illegal gun possession in Philadelphia and statewide.” African Americans, who represent 44 percent of Philadelphia’s population, account for about 80 percent of people arrested for illegal gun possession in the city.

The city’s George Soros-sponsored defense attorney now serving as chief prosecutor apparently cannot conceive of the notion that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested for illegal firearms possession because perhaps, just perhaps, a higher percentage of black Philadelphians than whites are carrying guns illegally. Given that the vast majority of shooting and homicide victims in the city are black, you’d think he could figure that out on his own.

“Focusing so many resources on removing guns from the street while a constant supply of new guns is available is unlikely to stop gun violence, but it does erode trust and the perceived legitimacy of the system,” Krasner writes. “This in turn decreases the likelihood that people will cooperate and participate in the criminal legal system and associated processes, reducing clearance, conviction, and witness appearance rates.”

Krasner highlights an oddity of Pennsylvania law that compounds the racially disproportionate impact of arrests for illegal gun possession. For Pennsylvanians generally, carrying a concealed weapon without a license is a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in jail and/or a maximum fine of $10,000. For Philadelphia residents, the same offense justifies an additional misdemeanor charge. As a local law firm explains, the combination of those two charges is “almost always graded as a felony,” which means “it may carry significant jail time even for defendants who do not have a prior criminal record.”

That Mr Krasner and his office could, if they so chose, not pursue the additional misdemeanor charge went unspoken, but given that city officials have long sought to be able to pass stricter gun control measures for Philadelphia, the whole thing becomes laughable: the District Attorney wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

Yet Mrs McDuff just airily brushes that concern aside.

Sadly, it gets worse, which was my inspiration for this article. In this tweet, Mrs McDuff says, directly, “As your Mayor, I will reduce this homicide rate, I will cut it in half within my first term, from over 500 to under 250, where it was seven years ago.”[2]Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.

At this point, I would note that even under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the number of homicides was not cut from the 391 in the year before he took office to “under 250,” 246 to be precise, in his first term, but his sixth year in office, and that Administration had far less of a reduction to get under 250.

Mrs McDuff has promised to do something unprecedented. If she wins, will she decline to run for a second term if she fails to meet that first term promise?

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↑1 Even though married to a man named David McDuff, Mrs McDuff has not shown him the respect of taking his name. As stated in our Stylebook, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect to husbands, and always refer to married women by their married names.
↑2 Direct quote from her spoken words, rather than the reduced version in the heading of the tweet.
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Lies catch up to you

We have twice previously noted the story of a dog being killed in the City of Brotherly Love, far, far, far more coverage than The Philadelphia Inquirer gives to actual murder victims. I suppose that this story couldn’t have been ignored, considering the information, but this is the third story on the shooting of the dog.

The pit bull fatally shot by Philly’s top FBI agent severely injured another dog earlier this year, neighbors say

“Many of us in the building know that this dog was not completely innocent,” said one neighbor, describing the violent incident three weeks before the dog’s death Monday.

by Jeremy Roebuck | Friday, February 24, 2023

Less than a month before Jacqueline Maguire, the FBI’s top agent in Philadelphia, shot and killed a pit bull as it reportedly attacked her smaller dog on a Center City street this week, that pit bull seriously injured another dog, requiring three surgeries and $9,000 in vet bills, according to residents of the building where the earlier incident took place.

The Jan. 27 fracas — between the 7-year-old pit bull named Mia and a Siberian husky mix puppy that lived in the same apartment complex — prompted management to ban the pit bull from a community dog park and require it to be muzzled in all common areas, three neighbors at the Lincoln Square apartments at Broad Street and Washington Avenue said.

Those residents — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with neighbors — said they were prompted to share the story with The Inquirer after seeing news of the pit bull’s fatal shooting Monday and in response to a TV interview in which the dog’s owner, Maria Esser, said she’d never had an incident with the dog before.

“It’s been a little frustrating,” said one resident who witnessed the earlier dog fight. “Many of us in the building know that this dog [Mia] was not completely innocent.”

There’s more at the original, and yes, in view of the Inquirer’s earlier coverage, the information in this article was necessary. But Miss Esser telling people that there’d never been trouble with her dog previously, when other residents had seen differently, $9,000 in veterinarian bills, and a photo in the article showing the bandages on the injured Siberian husky mix, would appear to cast doubt on Miss Esser’s claims.

I wonder what the animal rights activists are saying now?

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It’s just so easy for the white liberals in safe neighborhoods to support ‘progressive’ politicians After all, most of the crime happens in other places

My good friend Harrison Finberg — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but we can be good friends on Twitter these days — noted this tweet from Philly First Ward, the Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward. We have previously noted the mayoral candidacy of Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. one of the furthest left of the ever-growing list of hopefuls, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer described as a “longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing”. Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do, other than those bromides, in office if elected.

While she says that she will fight “gun violence,” what she doesn’t want to do is fight the criminals who use guns. I guess that’s not much of a surprise, since ‘progressives’ seem to think that guns simply levitate and shoot people all by themselves.

Helen Gym makes it official and launches a run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address gun violence

The now-former Council member and leader of the city’s progressive movement launched her run at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Center City.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Former City Councilmember Helen Gym announced Wednesday that she will run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address the city’s alarmingly high rate of gun violence, saying, “Everything is at stake right now.”

In remarks to a room of about 350 supporters gathered at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Gym centered her message on public safety, vowing to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office and prioritize improving homicide clearance rates.

I am amused that Mrs Flaherty chose a homosexual ‘Community Center’ as the place in which she announced her long-anticipated candidacy, but that’s probably something of which The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward approves.

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Further down:

Gym has opposed tax cuts for businesses and corporations, and has been critical of the Police Department, championing legislation to ban the use of tear gas on protesters and rejecting calls to bring back stop-and-frisk. In 2020, she voted against a planned increase to the Police Department’s budget — along with a majority of Council.

And here’s what Mrs Flaherty tweeted in 2019.

I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels, We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.

Can any policy have failed as badly as District Attorney Larry Krasner’s ‘decarceration’ program has failed the city since then? Murders get the most attention, and yes, they’re down a bit, but shootings, and every non-self-defense shooting is an attempted murder, are up.

So, who are The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward? The First Ward is a gentrifying area, between Wharton and Mifflin Streets north and south, bounded on the west by South Broad Street and running east to the Delaware River. To the left is their group photo from their website, and with only four exceptions, they’re all as white as ceiling paint.

The area? Even a dump fixer-upper like this one is listed for sale for $475,000, though the fixed up row house at 1007 Mifflin Street is listed for $465,000.

It’s pretty typical in today’s urban areas, where the well-to-do whites who aren’t worried about street crime, who aren’t seeing the dead bodies or hearing the gunfire in their neighborhoods can blithely support ‘restorative justice‘ and ‘decarceration‘, because the bad guys who aren’t locked up aren’t in their neighborhoods.

Then again . . . .

Armed Delf-Defense in Dallas

by Robert Stacy McCain | Saturday, February 18, 2023

This happened in December, but the police took a while to complete their investigation and make arrests, so we’re just now getting a detailed account of what happened:

There are a lot of new details about how a recent attempted carjacking of a luxury car went down in an upscale area of Dallas.

Police arrested the three suspects they were looking for, and court documents detail a good lead police had.

One suspect showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound minutes after the attempted carjacking and shootout last December.

Police say he was shot by a friend of the Maserati owner they were trying to carjack.

Skipping the details of the crime, down to Mr McCain’s conclusion:

This attempted carjacking happened, as they say, “in an upscale area” on the north side of Dallas, which shows that there is no such thing as a “safe” neighborhood in 21st-century America. Who knows what might have happened had it not been for the fact that the Maserati owner’s friend was armed? Permit me to recommend two books by my friend Robert Waters, The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm and Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms.

It is unfortunate that civilization has collapsed to the point that no one is safe unless they’re carrying a pistol, but we must live in the world as it is, rather than that fantasy world where “safe” neighborhoods still exist.

The good, noble, progressive Democrats of Philadelphia’s First Ward might, just might, find the effects of the politicians and policies for which they have voted visiting their own gentrifying streets.

The feelgood story about the three ‘unsuccessful’ carjackers came from Dallas, and there’s always a better chance that Texans will be armed. The good progressive Democrats of the First Ward? The city’s Democratic politicians — and Democrats outregister Republicans in Philly about 7 to 1 — don’t want the public to carry firearms, so it might be less likely that an attempted carjacking on Wharton Street would be met with a prospective victim who was armed. Might as well give up their wheels, and hope the ‘jackers don’t go ahead and shoot you anyway.

References

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↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
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To the left, liberal politics are far more important than Freedom of Religion Jennifer Palmeiri said the quiet part out loud: to the left, religious faith is determined by politics, rather than the other way around.

As we noted on Friday, an FBI “Analyst” submitted a proposal to monitor traditional Catholics who prefer the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass, “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” or RTEs, he called them, because “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists,” or RMVEs might be interested in using Latin Mass Catholics to spread their goals.

Someone leaked a hand-redacted, redacted by magic marker, copy of the “FBI internal use only” document, and the Bureau decided, rather quickly, that they ought to withdraw the document entirely.

FBI retracts leaked document orchestrating investigation of Catholics

By Tyler Arnold and Joe Bukuras | Thursday, February 9, 2023 | 3:15 PM EST

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau’s Richmond division launched an investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics and their possible ties to “the far-right white nationalist movement.”

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because “it does not meet our exacting standards.”

Really? The document is ‘sourced’ citing far-left political sources, including Salon, The Atlantic, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. If there are less biased sources, they were redacted from the document. It’s so bad that it makes me wonder: if it was a great departure from the Bureau’s “exacting standards,” why wouldn’t the document author have realized it, and the Bureau have flagged it before it was leaked? Or is the document not really that great a departure from those “exacting standards,” which calls into question just how “exacting” those standards really are. Continue reading →

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We wicked Catholics and our Assault Rosaries!

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met her, but people can become good friends over Twitter these days — Christine Flowers says, in her Twitter biography, that she has an “open carry permit for (her) assault rosary.” That was a mocking reference to an article by Daniel Panneton in The Atlantic, originally entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol“, about which I have previously written.

The Atlantic got plenty of pushback about it, and twice changed the article headline and subheading — the title “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary: The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement” isn’t shown in the screen captures tweeted by Taylor Marshall — imaged to the left, but the internet is forever.

And now we find out that some in the federal government, specifically the FBI, see Catholics, at least some Catholics, as evil subversives. From National Review:

FBI Internal Memo Warns against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’

by Brittany Bernstein | Wednesday, February 8, 2023 | 5:14 PM EST

The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday.

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com. Continue reading →