Tag Archives: #SecondAmendment

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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 →

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Why, it’s almost as though gun control laws don’t work!

It was just one sentence, buried far down in the story:

“I believe the weapon that was recovered at the Alhambra location is not legal to have here in the State of California,” LA County Sheriff Robert Luna said Sunday.

The New York Post reported that the alleged Monterey Park gunman, Huu Can Tran, 72, was essentially nuts:

The gunman who slaughtered 10 people at a California dance club before killing himself had been a regular patron at venue — and believed that the instructors said “evil things about him.”

Huu Can Tran, 72, opened fire at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park late Saturday with a semiautomatic pistol, killing 10 people and wounding at least 10 others before storming the rival Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio, where two bystanders disarmed him.

He later killed himself inside a cargo van during a stand-off with police in Torrance, about 30 miles from Monterey Park, officials said.

The motive for his rampage after a Lunar New Year celebration remains unclear but several disturbing details have emerged about the gunman, who had once been a regular patron at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where he gave informal lessons, CNN reported.

There’s more at the original, and the Post is not behind a paywall.

It has been reported that Mr Tran was looking for his ex-wife at the two dance halls; she had been invited, but he had not. It was, as it is so often, a domestic dispute.

Mr Tran used a Cobray M11 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a weapon not highly regarded by firearms experts, but one for which a thirty-round magazine has been available. The Los Angeles County Sheriff said that the weapon was not legal to be possessed or owned in California, but Mr Tran apparently had one anyway. Why, it’s almost as though nuts and criminals don’t obey gun control laws.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer just trashed its own gun control arguments

We have previously noted the change from the 502 homicides originally reported for 2020, down to 499. Now, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted someone that many expected to be on the list of 499, but who wasn’t there. This one seems legitimate:

A 22-year-old was killed just over the city line in Upper Darby. That might have helped his family’s quest for answers.

A mere 100 yards might have made all the difference in an attempt to find a measure of justice.

by Helen Ubiñas | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Amir Parks was a 22-year-old new father who was shot and killed near Cobbs Creek Park in August 2020. He was loved, friends and family told me. He was missed. He mattered.

But when it came to Parks’ death, answers were mostly hard to come by for those who knew him best. And there was this mystery: Why wasn’t Parks mentioned on the official list of Philadelphia’s 499 homicide victims in 2020?

Maybe the police had misidentified him or even misspelled his name, I thought, hardly an uncommon error in a city that averages more than a homicide a day.

After double and triple checking the list with the police, an answer. His loved ones were right; he had died around the woods along Cobbs Creek, in the 6500 block of North Church Lane not far from Marshall Road.

But that was about the length of a football field beyond the Philadelphia city line in Upper Darby Township, a section many misidentify as being part of Cobbs Creek.

What no one realized then was how crucial those 100 yards would be in his family’s quest for justice.

In 2020, when Philadelphia was just shy of 500 homicides, Upper Darby had 10.

As we have previously reported, the homicide rate, even adjusted for population, is several times higher in Philadelphia as in the rest of Pennsylvania. Those 499 homicides in 2020? They constituted 49.48% of all murders in the Keystone State, while the city has just 12.33% of the Commonwealth’s population.

It got worse last year, as the city’s 562 homicides were 54.72% of Pennsylvania’s total.

Of all the homicides in Philly in 2020, only 210 were solved, or about 42%‚ typical in a city where a majority of murders are unsolved.

By comparison, nine of the 10 homicides in Upper Darby that year have been solved, including last month when police arrested a 20-year-old man for killing Parks.

Now, I doubt that Mr Parks was included in the 502 number; the call was handled by the Upper Darby Police.

There followed several human interest story paragraphs concerning how nice a guy young Mr Parks was, and noting that, for the majority of homicides in Philadelphia itself, no one is arrested.

According to police, Parks was killed while illegally trying to sell guns to a potential buyer — a trade that (his cousin Shamiese) Parks–Gunagan said she believes her cousin took up in a desperate attempt to support his family.

And there it is: young Mr Parks was not the great guy in Miss Ubiñas story. Actually, it’s a bit of a surprise that the story was published at all, in that the Inquirer doesn’t usually tell us about the bad guys who get killed in the process of being bad guys.

I will admit to some doubts that a 22-year-old, in just “a desperate attempt to support his family,” would turn to gun-running. Such is not usually an entry-level crime. To be a gun-runner, you have to have money in advance, to buy the weapons you plan to sell at a profit. He could, I suppose, have just been a mule for the real gun-runner, but that would mean he’d have had to have known a pretty bad guy, and was trusted by that bad guy enough to make the sale.

Parks left a note on his phone shortly before he was killed: “Just in case something happens this is the person in the car.”

So, yeah, young Mr Parks knew that he was doing something bad, and that bad things could happen in the process. Miss Ubiñas’ first internal link was to Mr Park’s obituary in the Philadelphia Obituary Project, which tells us what a great and loving guy he was. But, if the Upper Darby Police are correct, he was still killed while he was committing a crime.

And it was more than just a simple, one-off crime. If Mr Parks was running guns, even as just somebody else’s mule, he was doing something which he had to know — and his obituary tells us that he was supposedly a smart guy — would enable other people to commit other crimes.

This is more than just a story about the killing of Mr Parks. It also points out the silliness of the arguments by Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), that the problem is that the state legislature in Harrisburg will not allow Philadelphia to pass its own, stricter gun control laws. Marshall Road in Upper Darby turns into Spruce Street in Philadelphia after you have crossed the bridge over Cobbs Creek as you pass the boundary between the two, but the Philadelphia Police are not sitting there, checking every border-crosser for contraband. If Philly had stricter gun control laws, the next thing about which the city, and the editors of the Inquirer, would whine is that those laws needed to be applied to Upper Darby and Haverford and Plymouth Meeting and Bensalem, because, as Mr Parks’ killing shows, the bad guys know how to drive to the next town.

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What is he thinking right now? I’d bet he isn’t thinking, “Hey, I sure got around those gun control laws, didn’t I?”

Stephon Henderson. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Meet Stephon Henderson. Mr Henderson, 59, allegedly shot and killed Talina Henderson, 47, his wife, at a residence in the 2800 block of Bay Colony Lane. Mrs Henderson was shot “multiple times,” which tells us that this was no accident. This was Lexington’s record-breaking 41st murder of the year; the previous record of 37 was set in 2021.

According to the Lexington Herald-Leader and Fayette County Detention Center records, Mr Henderson was charged with murder (domestic violence), violation of an emergency protection order/domestic violence order, and possession of a handgun by a previously convicted felon.

Now, you would think that any person with an IQ above room temperature who was the subject of a domestic violence protection order would be smart enough to not have a handgun. You would think that any such person who is a previously convicted felon would be smart enough to realize that possession of a handgun, a violation of KRS §527.020 (2)(a), is a Class C felony, punishable by a minimum of five and maximum of ten years in the state penitentiary under KRS §532.060, even if he never uses it, and the existence of a protection order could easily result in the police searching his home.

Bay Colony Lane, near Masterson Station Park in Lexington is hardly a bad area. It’s something of a cookie-cutter development, of decent single-family homes with actual front and back yards. While Zillow shows no homes currently for sale on Bay Colony Lane itself, 2657 Wigginton Point, a couple of streets away in the same development, is a three bedroom, three bath, 2,056 ft², built in 2020, very similar home listed for $327,900. There is a lot of new development in that area off of Leestown Road. The neighborhood is neat, clean, racially integrated, and not run-down at all.  Simply put, there was no particular self-defense need for Mr Henderson to be packing.

This tells me of just how ridiculous it is for the left to tell us we need more gun control laws. Mr Henderson — assuming that he is guilty of the charges — was obviously able to obtain a handgun, despite being legally barred from buying one. More, he knew that it was illegal for him to own one, yet he chose to do so anyway. Then, after doing something — the newspaper does not tell us what it was — to cause his wife to seek an emergency protection order, he still kept the gun, even knowing that the police could come at any time and search his residence for a weapon, and knowing that simple possession of the weapon was enough to send him back to the big house for five to ten years. All of those reasons not to have a firearm, and he chose to have one anyway.

He was subject to a restraining order, but he was near his wife anyway. I guess that piece of paper didn’t do very much to defend her.

Mr Henderson is 59 years old, and the possible sentences for murder in the Bluegrass State include death, life in prison without the possibility of parole, 25 years to life, or a 20-to-50-year sentence. If convicted of murder, there is no way Mr Henderson would be out of jail until he’s 79 years old, and possibly not until he’s stone-cold graveyard dead. He threw the rest of his miserable life away.

And for what? Sometimes I fantasize about what other people can be thinking. As he sits in his cell, is he thinking, “Damn, I sure showed her!“, or is it more probable that he’s thinking, “Boy, did I f(ornicate) up this time”? I’d bet one thing though; I’d bet he isn’t thinking, “Hey, I sure got around those gun control laws, didn’t I?”

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Some common sense from the county sheriffs

On November 8th, I will be voting for one Democrat, Estill County Sheriff Chris Flynn. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, and I personally know him to be honest. And, in his auto repair business — which he inherited from his father, and was once again being run by his father once Sheriff Flynn took office following the 2018 election — there are a couple of signs posted showing support for the Second Amendment.

Sheriff Flynn is serious, and has said, publicly, that if given an order to confiscate law abiding citizens’ guns, he would resign before obeying such an order. It seems that he is not alone; from The New York Times:

Another Challenge to New York’s Gun Law: Sheriffs Who Won’t Enforce It

Some say the measure, which was passed after a Supreme Court opinion, ignores common sense, the Second Amendment and the way people live outside big cities.

By Jesse McKinley and Cole Louison | Sunday, October 9, 2022

LYONS, N.Y. — Robert Milby, Wayne County’s new sheriff, has been in law enforcement most of his adult life, earning praise and promotions for conscientious service. But recently, Sheriff Milby has attracted attention for a different approach to the law: ignoring it.

Sheriff Milby is among at least a half-dozen sheriffs in upstate New York who have said they have no intention of aggressively enforcing gun regulations that state lawmakers passed last summer, forbidding concealed weapons in so-called sensitive areas — a long list of public spaces including, but not limited to, government buildings and religious centers, health facilities and homeless shelters, schools and subways, stadiums and state parks, and, of course, Times Square.

Also see: William Teach, Bummer: New York State Sheriffs Refuse To Enforce Highly Restrictive NY Gun Law

“It’s basically everywhere,” said Sheriff Milby, in a recent interview in his office in Wayne County, east of Rochester. “If anyone thinks we’re going to go out and take a proactive stance against this, that’s not going to happen.”

On Thursday, a U.S. District Court judge blocked large portions of the law, dealing a major blow to lawmakers in Albany who had sought to blaze a trail for other states after the Supreme Court in June struck down a century-old New York law that had strictly limited the carrying of weapons in public. Between the court challenge and the hostility of many law enforcement officers, New York’s ambitious effort could be teetering.

The article subtitle really gives the demarcation point, the difference between city and country life. When I lived in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, the county was under the same gun regulation laws as Philadelphia, yet somehow, some way, Carbon County went years between homicides, and the Commonwealth, outside of the City of Brotherly Love, doesn’t have the murder rate as Philly.

In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

Here’s how the actual numbers work out: there were 510 homicides among 11,398,903 Pennsylvanians not living in Philadelphia, for a homicide rate of 4.474 per 100,000 population, while there were 499 murders among 1,603,797 Philadelphians, which works out to a homicide rate of 31.114 per 100,000. If the gun laws are the problem, why aren’t the homicide rates for Philly and the rest of the Commonwealth fairly similar?

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders.

So, why are the county sheriffs in upstate New York not giving priority enforcement to the ridiculous gun control laws?  Other than in the five counties making up New York City, sheriffs in the Empire State are elected officials, and they are, therefore, concerned with the opinions of the voters, and most voters in less urbanized counties understand that gun control really doesn’t reduce crime; it simply makes it more difficult for law-abiding citizens from defending themselves.

“We will take the complaint, but it will go to the bottom of my stack,” said Mike Filicetti, the Niagara County sheriff, who appends a Ronald Reagan quote to his emails. “There will be no arrests made without my authorization and it’s a very, very low priority for me.”

The law took effect on Sept. 1, and, at least anecdotally, has been used only sparingly since. Jeff Smith, the sheriff in mostly rural Montgomery County, west of Albany, said his office has had no calls for enforcement of the new law, noting that “almost every household” in his jurisdiction had some sort of gun.

Sheriff Smith, a Republican, said he understands the motives of lawmakers to quell violence and mass shootings, but that the gun law inadvertently targeted lawful gun owners.

“The pendulum swung way too far,” he said.

The left are, of course, aghast. A Twitter user styling herself Silent Spring wasn’t silent at all in giving her opinion: she wants all of those sheriffs fired.

But all law enforcement officials have some discretion, and New York City has been especially aggressive in ordering its employees not to enforce federal immigration laws. The left seem remarkably unconcerned about law enforcement not enforcing the laws the left don’t like.

The dispute evinces a larger rift between Democratic lawmakers in Albany — heavily represented by downstate liberals — and more conservative law enforcement and elected officials upstate. The schism was intensified by the pandemic, with some sheriffs defying Covid occupancy rules for Thanksgiving dinners in 2020, while other Republican county officials refused to abide by mask mandates in schools.

Hey, we defied Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) COVID-19 restrictions for Thanksgiving in 2020, and while our gathering for Thanksgiving dinner did not exceed ten people, they were from more than two separate households. The authoritarian state governors, of course, couldn’t send the gendarmerie to every home to check for compliance, but were depending on officious little pricks and Karens to enforce their illegal orders.

It would not make a difference even if widespread gun control laws actually made a difference in the crime rate; they’d still be mostly unconstitutional. But gun control laws really don’t make a difference, because the actual criminals don’t obey those laws.

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Mayor Jim Kenney just can’t think things through

On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) signed an executive order banning the possession of firearms and other deadly weapons at city parks and recreation centers, something that even The Philadelphia Inquirer recognized as likely to draw a legal challenge.

It didn’t take long: on Monday, October 3rd, the executive order was tossed by a judge:

Judge bars Philadelphia from enforcing Mayor Jim Kenney’s ban on guns at rec centers and playgrounds

The lawsuit cited a Pennsylvania state law that prohibits the any city or county from passing gun-control measures stricter than state gun laws.

by Robert Moran | Monday, October 3, 2022

A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge on Monday blocked the city from enforcing an executive order Mayor Jim Kenney signed last week banning guns at recreation centers and playgrounds following the fatal shooting of a Parks and Recreation employee last month.

The Gun Owners of America, on behalf of several state residents, filed a lawsuit last Tuesday, the day Kenney signed his order. After hearing arguments Friday, Judge Joshua H. Roberts issued his ruling siding with the plaintiffs and ordering Philadelphia to be “permanently enjoined” from enforcing Kenney’s ban.

The lawsuit cited Pennsylvania state law that prohibits any city or county from passing gun-control measures. The preemption law, which the city has repeatedly sought to overturn, bans local government from passing gun-control measures that are stricter than state gun laws.

Andrew B. Austin, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in an emailed statement: “For my part, I am gratified that the Court of Common Pleas was able to so quickly resolve this suit, but that was in large part because the law is so explicit: The City is not allowed to regulate possession of firearms in any manner.”

There’s more at the original, and the pre-emption law is pretty clear and explicit.

The right to keep and bear arms is pretty explicit in our Constitution, and I support that without reservation. In this, I am going to ignore the constitutional and legal issues, but ask the obvious question: just what would Mr Kenney’s executive order have done were it allowed to go into effect?

A ban on the possession of firearms at city parks would probably be mostly obeyed by legal gun owners in the city. If someone has gone to the effort of obtaining a license to carry a firearm, he is pretty much a law-abiding citizen.

But the impetus for the Mayor’s order, the killing of Mill Creek Recreation Center worker Tiffany Fletcher by a stray bullet allegedly fired by 14-year-old Makie Jones, was not something that the executive order would have prevented had it been in place at the time. Young Mr Jones was using a “ghost gun,” a privately-manufactured weapon put together with spare parts and having no serial number, which had an extended magazine. Mr Jones supposedly saw some of his enemies, and a gun battle ensued:

The killing came after a shootout around 1 p.m. Friday between Jones and at least three other people near the rec center on the 4700 block of Brown Street, Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said Monday. Vanore said it was not clear what sparked the gunfire, but that investigators later recovered 12 fired cartridge casings at the scene — eight on one side of the street, and four on the other.

Does the Mayor seriously believe that a 14-year-old who was willing to obtain and carry a ghost gun with an extended magazine, and engage in a gun battle with his enemies would care about an executive order banning the carrying of firearms in a city park? Anyone with any sense at all — a definition which certainly excludes Mr Kenney — would know that someone like the alleged killer wouldn’t care at all about such a restriction, not that one would suspect young Mr Jones of having read the Inquirer to even know of its existence.

One question to which I have never received an answer is just how Mr Kenney thought his executive order could be enforced? Was he hoping that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw would have Philadelphia Police officers stationed at the rec centers, stopping and frisking everyone there for a weapon? I saw nothing like that in the media, though, to be fair, I could have missed it.

Back to the main article cited:

Kevin Lessard, a spokesperson for Kenney, said in an emailed statement: “We are reviewing today’s decision and are disappointed by the outcome, which as it stands prevents city employees from making the reasonable request that anyone with a firearm or deadly weapon leave a recreation facility. Since 2019, nearly 300 reported incidents of gun violence have occurred at city recreation facilities, in addition to dozens of other incidents of violence with a deadly weapon.”

OK, then: the mayor was apparently counting not on the police, but on unarmed city employees, employees like the late Tiffany Fletcher, to ask people spotted carrying firearms to leave. Has the Mayor forgotten assaults by three ‘unruly’ teenaged girls on July 21st, which led to vandalism, led the city to drain the pool and close it for the rest of the season. City Parks and Recreation said that the pool was closed due to concerns for the safety of staff and visitors, and that this pool, in the crime-ridden Kensington section, has had many problems, including multiple break-ins after hours. The Parks Department did not say that the staff had all just up and quit, or refused to work at that pool again, but the city has had a serious shortage of lifeguards for the pools, and opened only 50 of the 65 pools in the city. If the city had to close the McVeigh Recreation Center because three uncivilized, but apparently unarmed, brats were disruptive, and vandalized the place, just how can he expect unarmed staff to confront and ask to leave someone they believe is carrying a firearm?

This is a huge problem when it comes to the left: they just can’t seem to think things through! Anyone with any common sense ought to have realized that an enforcement incident, the way Mr Lessard described it, is too fraught with danger in a city like Killadelphia; it’s a way to get an unarmed staffer killed.

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Killington The truth shall set you free . . . if you are free to tell the truth

After being graduated from high school in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I was more than ready to leave the small town and head for Lexington, and the University of Kentucky. It wasn’t like I could afford Hahvahd, anyway. I lived in the Bluegrass State’s second-largest city from 1971 through the end of 1984, before moving to the Old Dominion for better job prospects. Yeah, I tend to concentrate on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia when it comes to crime, but it seems that while Killadelphia sounds more closely like Philadelphia than Killington sounds like Lexington, they’re becoming a bit too much alike.

I was ready to write about Lexington’s 32nd homicide of the year, when I opened the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website and found that the story about the 32nd murder was already out-of-date:

Man fatally shot on Devonport Drive, Lexington police say. It’s the second homicide this week

by Christopher Leach | Friday, September 2, 2022 | 7:14 AM EDT | updated: 8:05 AM EDT

Lexington police are investigating the second reported homicide of the week after a man was fatally shot early Friday.

The shooting happened in the 2000 block of Devonport Drive, near the intersection of Alexandria Drive and Versailles Road, around 12:55 a.m. Lt. Joe Anderson with the Lexington Police Department said responding officers found a man with a gunshot wound when they arrived at the scene.

The man was sent to the hospital, where he later died, according to Anderson. His identity will be announced by the Fayette County coroner after next of kin is notified. . . . .

This is the 33rd killing of 2022, nearing the annual homicide record of 37 set last year. This is also the second homicide this week after Dietrich Murray, 29, was shot and killed on Wednesday.

There’s a little more at the original.

In 2019, Lexington set its all-time homicide record of 30. Then, in 2020, Lexington broke that with 34 murders, and, in 2021, set it again at 37 dead bodies littering the city’s streets.

The city is on the slow side when it comes to putting information up on its websites. The city’s homicide investigations page hasn’t, as of this writing at 8:34 AM EDT on Friday, September 2nd, even included the 32nd killing, which occurred before noon, two days ago. But it does include the homicide investigations from 2021 on the same page, and the 33rd killing last year occurred on November 20th, 79 days later in the year.

Unlike Philadelphia, which averages almost 1½ homicides per day, much smaller Lexington, 321,793 versus 1,576,251 residents, averages only 0.1346938775510204 per day, or one every 7.42 days. That means that statistical projections are a bit more iffy; with one homicide every week, just a couple of weeks in which no one bothers to kill someone else can really throw off projections. Something as simple as a rainy weekend can keep the bad guys indoors more, and out on the bad street corners less.

Nevertheless, the current numbers work out to a projected 49.16 murders for the year.

So, what’s changed? As we noted on Thursday, Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) was blaming Philly’s huge homicide record on Republicans, on everyone but himself. Just as in Philly, Lexington has been operating on the same firearms control laws for years, so it isn’t a change in Kentucky’s constitutional carry gun control laws. A lot of big city politicians tried to blame the 2020 surge in killings on COVID-19, or the reaction to the unfortunate death-during-arrest of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, but that was two years ago! COVID-19 restrictions mostly eased by the end of 2020, and certainly by mid 2021, so it’s difficult to blame them. In Philly, the homicide rate surged from 1.4578 per day at the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend, to 1.7155 for the period from September 7 through December 31, 2021, when the vast majority of COVID-19 restrictions had been lifted and the public schools had been opened, albeit with mask mandates.

Something else has happened, something cultural that legitimizes bad guys carrying guns and blowing away people for trivial reasons. Yes, Kentucky’s firearms laws are less strict than Pennsylvania’s but Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate of 11.498 per 100,000 population was far lower than Philly’s 35.654.[1]The math: 37 homicides in 2021 ÷ 3.21793 = Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate; 562 homicides in 2021 ÷ 15.76251 = Philly’s homicide rate, expressed in homicides per 100,000 population.

Lexington’s homicide investigations page does not specify the race or ethnicity of murder victims, and the murder victims are specifically excluded from the city’s non-fatal shootings investigations page. But of the 87 non-fatal shootings listed as of August 27, 2022, 16, 18.39%, of the victims are listed as white, 5, 5.75%, are listed as Hispanic, which can be of any race, and 66, 75.86%, are listed as black.

Lexington’s population are not 75.86% black.

At some point, we have to look at the numbers, because numbers don’t lie. Pointing out these numbers, as I have previously, will be denounced as raaaaacist, but, unlike a lot of bloggers, I am retired, and have no job from which I can worry about being ‘canceled’. I can tell the unvarnished truth, the way so many others cannot.

And the truth is important: you cannot solve a problem if you are unwilling to identify the problem correctly, and it is wholly politically incorrect to identify the problem correctly these days.

Well, here’s another truth: everybody does know the problem, but as is obvious in Philly, most would rather ignore the fact that the homicide problem in our cities is primarily a black problem. So many would rather simply accept a ‘disproportionate’ number of murders among black city dwellers than admit that the problem exists within our black communities.

 

There is, however, another problem which jumps out at me, and it’s a problem that today’s left really don’t want to admit. The left believe that one change necessary to combat global warming climate change is greater population density, more people living closer to their jobs, not having as long commutes, and a greater ability for more people to take subways, trains and buses to work than their evil personal cars. But if there’s one real physical difference between Philadelphia and Lexington, it’s that the poorer areas in Lexington are not the rowhouse type of neighborhoods that dominate much of Philly. Even in the poorer neighborhoods in Lexington, housing is far more likely to be physically separate dwellings, far more likely to have a bit of yard between houses. This is not to say that there are no rowhouses in Lexington; there are, though interestingly enough many of them are in the gentrified areas north of the University of Kentucky campus, on South and North Limestone Street, along parts of Upper Street. And if you are really, really angry at someone, if you live further apart, it will take you longer to go home and get your gun — assuming that you aren’t carrying it — than in Philly, and those few extra seconds may be the ones which give you the time to realize, hey, if I blow that rat bastard away, I might just spend the rest of my life in Eddyville.

Row houses on Broadway in Jim Thorpe, during 2012 St Patrick’s Day Parade. Click to enlarge.

Could that be part of the reason that heavily rural Carbon County, population 64,749, where I lived in Pennsylvania, under the same gun control laws as Philly, went many years straight with zero homicides, even though it’s an area with a lot of hunters and most people own firearms? As nearly as I could find — the data are scattered, not consolidated, and it’s possible I missed something — there was one murder in Lehighton in 2004 and another in 2006, and those were the only murders in Carbon County from 2001 through 2019. Other than going up Broadway in Jim Thorpe, there are very few rowhouses. When the murder rate in Philadelphia was 22.197 per 100,000 population, in 2019 — boy, how low that seems compared to now! — and zero in Carbon County, with both under the same firearms laws, perhaps, just perhaps, it might be considered that the firearms laws aren’t really the problem.

Those two murders? One was a strangulation and beating of a mother by her son, and the other a stabbing following an argument.

But, at some point, we have to look at race and population density, both things the left are horrified to contemplate as being contributing factors, when it comes to crime in general, and murder specifically.

References

References
↑1 The math: 37 homicides in 2021 ÷ 3.21793 = Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate; 562 homicides in 2021 ÷ 15.76251 = Philly’s homicide rate, expressed in homicides per 100,000 population.
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Does Mark Bailey think that getting raped is really not all that bad?

Twitter is a social medium in which you can find all sorts of unexpected things, and the screen capture of a tweet from Mark Bailey pretty much fits the definition of ‘unexpected.’ I do screen captures just in case the author decides that oops, perhaps he shouldn’t have tweeted that. and deletes it. But with [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me around, the internet is forever!

There were all sorts of responses, the vast majority of which were expressing incredulity that anyone, anyone! would tweet something which could be read as saying that a woman about to be assaulted or raped would be better off just surrendering and taking whatever happened to her, and I will confess to having added a couple of them myself.

But then I asked myself, what was Mr Bailey really trying to say, so I asked him

You know what? I’ll bite and ask intellectually: what do you believe a woman should do if she is about to be assaulted, sexually or otherwise? Do you believe that it is somehow better that she just accept being beaten or raped (rather) than shoot, and possibly kill, the assailant?

Mr Baily hadn’t responded immediately, which is perfectl;y fine: he might not even be on Twitter at after 10:00 PM on a Thursday night. But I did find this from him as I went to his Twitter bio:

Now this is the first response to my posts that seems to understand my meaning. In New York City, you are persecuted if you take the law into your own hands and defend yourself. Walking around with a gun, opens the door to questions about why are you walking around with a gun?

Well, one thing is clear: New York City, and New York State, do not want people to be able to defend themselves against armed criminal assault, as they tried, fortunately unsuccessfully, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, to defend the laws which mostly deny law-abiding citizens the right to carry concealed weapons. It should be noted that the Manhattan District Attorney, another George Soros funded ‘progressive’ stooge named Alvin Bragg, initially sought to try bodega owned José Alba, 61, for fatally stabbing Austin Simmons, 35, who attacked him after Mr Alba refused to accept short payment from Mr Simmons’ girlfriend for something. Eventually, the District Attorney’s office decided to dismiss the charge:

In the prosecution’s motion to dismiss, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sigall said the district attorney’s office would not present the case to a grand jury. “Following an investigation, the People have determined that we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not justified in his use of deadly physical force,” Sigall said in the court filing.

Translation: Mr Bragg wanted to lock up Mr Alba, but knew that no grand jury would indict him, and no petit jury would convict him; Mr Bragg knew that he was looking like a fool, and was trying to cut his losses.

Mr Alba didn’t defend himself by using a firearm, but it certainly brings up Mr Bailey’s second statement: if a New Yorker was carrying a firearm without a permit, and used that firearm to defend himself against an assault, sexual or otherwise, Mr Bragg and his minions might well try to charge him for using potentially deadly force to defend himself.

It was Thursday morning that The New York Times finally noticed the City of Brotherly Love, and published ‘Everybody Is Armed’: As Shootings Soar, Philadelphia Is Awash in Guns: More than 1,400 people have been shot this year in Philadelphia, hundreds of them fatally — a higher toll than in much larger New York or Los Angeles, the day after Mr Bailey’s unfortunate tweet. We have previously noted that Philadelphians are seeking concealed carry permits in record-setting numbers precisely because the bad guys have been on a rampage, killing people in the city at a record breaking pace.

Mr Bailey tweeted:

This all started out as a debate on having guns in public places, and you paranoid people have turned it into a referendum on rape. The premise of the argument originally was whether pulling a gun and trying to kill your rapist, is it worth losing your life if something goes wrong

and:

When all of a sudden, a gun is pulled, anything can happen to either party. The person who shoots could kill the so called rapist, or the rapist could somehow overpower her & use that same gun to kill her.Or she could be arrested & held for trial where she admits killing someone.

In one way, Mr Bailey is correct: if you have to pull out a firearm to defend yourself, it could still go very wrong for you. But Mr Bailey, in trying to make his point, has moved into silliness: while defending yourself against what he called “the so called rapist”, a phrase which certainly sets himself up for more criticism, could go badly for a potential victim, not being able to defend against an assault means getting assaulted. Perhaps he didn’t mean to make it sound that way, but many people, myself included, are reading this as him suggesting that getting assaulted or raped is just not so bad as to be worth risking whatever it is you are risking by defending yourself.

I will notify Mr Bailey, via Twitter, of this article, giving him a reasonable chance to respond.

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Gun Control Laws and Our First and Second Amendment Rights Beware: if you are a faithful Roman Catholic, some states would deny your right to keep and bear arms

Robert Crimo III, via Twitter.


In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, several Republicans in the Senate got all wobbly-kneed and agreed to a Democratic ‘gun control’ bill. Among other things, it provides financial incentives for states without a so-called ‘red flag’ law to pass one.

Well, the solidly Democratic state of Illinois had a red flag law, and guess what? It didn’t stop alleged Highland Park shooter Robert Crimo III[1]Some people hold that publishing photos and the names of accused serial killers somehow encourages other potential serial killers. Personally, I cannot see how such an obviously incel-looking man … Continue reading from obtaining a firearm:

Highland Park suspect’s father sponsored gun permit application, police say

By Reis Thebault and Timothy Bella | Wednesday, July 6, 2022 | 10:18 AM EDT

The Illinois State Police confirmed on Tuesday that the father of the Highland Park parade shooting suspect sponsored his son’s application for a gun permit months after relatives reported that Robert E. Crimo III had threatened to “kill everyone,” and that authorities had “insufficient basis” to deny the application.

The revelation that Crimo, 21, had at least two previous encounters with law enforcement has raised new questions about how he was able to legally purchase his guns and whether more could have been done to prevent the massacre that killed seven people and injured more than 30.

In September 2019, a family member told Highland Park police that Crimo had threatened to “kill everyone,” said Christopher Covelli, a spokesman for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Officers visited Crimo’s home and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword, but made no arrest, Covelli said on Tuesday, because they lacked probable cause. However, they notified Illinois State Police, he said.

Months later, in December, Crimo applied for a firearm owner’s identification card, the document required to possess a gun in Illinois. Because Crimo was under 21 at the time, state law required him to have the consent of a parent or guardian before he could own a firearm or ammunition. According to state police, which issues the cards, Crimo’s father sponsored the permit application.

Also see: William Teach: Having Relatives Report Highland Park Shooter Threatened To Kill Everyone Is Apparently Not A Reason To Deny A Gun Permit

There’s more at the original, but it sounds like Robert Crimo, Jr, is being set up to be responsible, in some way, for his son’s (alleged) killings.

The Washington Post article continues to tell us that the state police had received a “clear and present danger” report on the younger Mr Crimo, but because there was no current request for a Firearms Owner’s Identification Card, there was no action the agency could take. Then, when he did apply for a FOID, the agency could not disapprove it because he had a sponsor.

“The subject was under 21 and the application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” Illinois State Police said in a statement. “Therefore, at the time of FOID application review in January of 2020, there was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger and deny the FOID application.”

So, what does this mean? It means that instates which are incentivized to establish ‘red flag’ laws, the pressure will be to make them more stringent, to suspend people’s Second Amendment rights for longer, possibly much longer.

I think back to the case of Nikolas Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter. Young Mr Cruz had many interactions with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, all for mostly petty crimes, but the deputies kept giving him free passes, kept letting him off with admonishments to be a good boy. After Mr Cruz committed an in-school assault, the Broward County schools, which had greatly reduced references to law enforcement, because they wanted to stop the “school to prison pipeline,” following a January, 2017, in-school assault. Had Mr Cruz been charged with that assault, he could not have legally purchased the weapons he used in the attack.

A FOID card is required under Illinois law to possess guns. The cards issued by the Illinois State Police require “any qualified applicant” to meet at least 15 requirements listed on the agency’s website.

At a news conference announcing the initial criminal charges against Crimo, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said Illinois’s red-flag law, which allows loved ones to ask a court to temporarily remove guns from those deemed violent or threatening, is “very powerful.” Yet the law is rarely used.

“We must vastly increase awareness and education about this red-flag law,” Rinehart said.

In the days following the shooting, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has vowed to strengthen state laws in an effort to prevent another tragedy like the one in Highland Park.

Translation: Illinois ‘red flag’ law did not work, so that Democrat-ruled state is going to make it stronger, restricting the rights of law-abiding Americans even further, because the state failed to act under the laws it had in place.

Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) said, “(I)n the state of New York, we’re now requiring social media networks to monitor and report hateful conduct on their platforms.” As Hannah Bleau noted on Breitbart:

It is a rather controversial move, given the varying interpretations of what constitutes “hate speech” in a world where far-left radicals consider “misgendering” someone an intrinsically “hateful” act.

In other words, because my site, The First Street Journal, states in the Stylebook,

Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

I would be denied a firearms permit in the state of New York because my sincerely-held belief that girls can’t be boys and boys can’t be girls. I have no criminal record, and have never even been accused of assaulting anyone. But because my beliefs closely adhere to Roman Catholic teachings on ‘transgenderism,’ the state of New York — where I do not live, but many Catholics do — would deny my Second Amendment rights over First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. Had I kept my beliefs entirely to myself, not exercised another of my First Amendment rights, freedom of speech and of the press, I guess I could get that permit.

There has been plenty of evidence that if law enforcement had acted on the laws already passed, some of these mass shootings could have been prevented, or at least made more difficult for the perpetrators; we could have prevented some of these cretins from obtaining firearms legally, but it seems that nothing can prevent a determined person from obtaining a firearm illegally. Instead, when existing laws have failed, due to bureaucratic mistakes and individual bungling, the response of the states is to further restrict the rights of people who have done nothing wrong. And now New York is attempting to remove people’s rights to keep and bear arms due to people’s religious and political beliefs.

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↑1 Some people hold that publishing photos and the names of accused serial killers somehow encourages other potential serial killers. Personally, I cannot see how such an obviously incel-looking man male — surely no sighted heterosexual woman would ever consider actually copulating with him! — like Robert Crimo could ever inspire anyone to act like he did.