Tag Archives: #SecondAmendment

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What would so-called ‘red flag’ laws actually do? Far more harm than good is what they would do!

How does one actually implement the so-called “red flag” laws? It’s clear that neither Salvadore Ramos nor Payton Gendron were reported to law enforcement prior to buying his weapons, despite having left significant warnings via social media.

Nikolas Cruz had many ‘encounters’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, but they always let him off with a warning. He assaulted a student in school, but the soft-hearted and soft-headed school board, eager to disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, declined to report that to law enforcement.

William Teach discusses foot-in-the-door gun control proposals.

If private citizens were unwilling to see Messrs Ramos and Gendron as serious enough threats to take some action, if the idiots in Broward County were unwilling to actually enforce laws already on the books, with what does that leave us? Nina Jankowicz and her Ministry of Truth scouring Twitter and Facebook, reading every message, trying to ferret out bad people? Perhaps some sort of government surveillance of email, looking for nut cases?

No, what we’ll have are people using the system to cause problems for their enemies, cheating wives or their boyfriends trying to get at husbands, beta males trying to take the alphas down a peg, gang members trying to get opposing gang members disarmed and into the ‘system,’ cheating husbands or their girlfriends trying to get cheated on wives checked on by the police, or just liberals trying a new form of ‘SWATting‘ against sensible people. How about #woke teachers or school administrators upset when they find out some of their students are hunters? We’ve already seen efforts to get physicians and their staffs to ask patients, especially children, if there are any guns in their homes! With the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home.

I was asked that question one time, and I responded that not only was it none of their business, but that I found the question intrusive and offensive.

Robert Stacy McCain talks about The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

In the end, they’re typical leftist ideas to get more and more government supervision of our lives, Minority Report thinking that we can somehow police impure thoughts of people who may not have committed any crime.

You think that’s alarmist concern? Look at the way the government tried to track people — ‘contact tracing,’ they called it[1]In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient … Continue reading — who tested positive for COVID-19, and tried to punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.

The left say that this is a minor thing, just something to keep us safer, especially after the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. But these ‘minor things’ are just more attempts to get their foot in the door, just another ‘minor step’ to achieve their eventual goal of disarming the public.

References

References
↑1 In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient testing support and/or limited public health resources, the following evaluation and monitoring hierarchy (Box 4) and the case investigation and contact tracing prioritization recommendations can be used to help guide prioritization. The hierarchy is based on the assumption that if close contacts listed in Priority 1 become infected, they could potentially expose many people, those at higher risk for severe disease, or critical infrastructure workers. If close contacts in Priority 2 become infected, they may be at higher risk for severe disease, so prompt notification, monitoring, and linkage to needed medical and support services is important.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics How The Washington Post manipulates statistics to mislead readers

Screen capture of Washington Post headline, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The headline was dramatic: More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Read that, and you’d think that half the schools in America were being machine gunned down, which is, let’s be honest about it, exactly what the editors of The Washington Post want you to believe.

But what, exactly, does “experienced gun violence at school” mean? From their methodology:

To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school’s enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day.

So, if a firearm was discharged on school grounds during school hours, but no one was struck, 93% of the school’s enrollment “experienced gun violence at school.

  • One of the incidents shown by the Post was on November 15, 2021, when an armed 13-year-old boy in Poughkeepsie High School, in Poughkeepsie, New York, fired “several rounds in front of the school, striking multiple vehicles”, but neither killing nor injuring anyone. The Post counted that as 570 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
  • On November 19, 2021, at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado, “Teenagers exchanged gunfire in the parking lot, wounding three students.” The Post counted that as 1,940 students “experiencing gun violence at school,” even though this was a gun battle between gangs, and not an attempt to shoot up the school.
  • November 29, 2021, at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona, a 15-year-old boy shot the 16-year-old who had just sold him the gun in a school bathroom. While it was hardly an attempt to shoot up the school, the Post counts this a 2,400 students having “experienced gun violence at school.”
  • December 1, 2021 at Sam Rayburn High School, in Pasadena, Texas, a 21-year-old man fired a shot into the air while robbing a student on campus, with no one injured or killed. The Post counts this as 2,530 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • February 28, 2022, at Jonesboro High School, in Clayton County, Georgia, a student discharged a weapon in school, hitting nobody. The Post counts this as 1,282 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.

There are many, many more similar examples, of accidents, stray bullets, gang battles and one-on-one fights, things that make up the vast majority of the incidents compiled into the statistics, but which the editors hope you don’t read, which the editors hope the readers will conflate to thousands of Columbines or Marjory Stoneman Douglases.

Given that so many readers do not read closely enough, do not delve more deeply into the stories, the editors can reasonably hope that their propaganda is persuasive. Not lies, per se, but statistics compiled in such a way to have the effect of lies.

Here’s the money line:

The Post has found that at least 185 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 369 have been injured.

Remember: that’s 185 killed, and 369 injured, since 1999. Both of those numbers are lower than the number killed and injured in Philadelphia so far this year.

Screen capture of The Washington Post’s website main page, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by a misfit high school dropout who was bullied while he was in school due to a “childhood speech impediment” was certainly a terrible thing, but in practicing journalism[1]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 … Continue reading rather than journalism, by publishing wholly sensationalized but nevertheless misleading statistics, the editors of the Post are pretty much lying outright in their attempt to push Congress into infringing upon our Second Amendment rights.

The Post had ten, ten! separate articles listed on their website main page on Wednesday morning, most geared toward a push toward unconstitutional gun control, because that’s what the editors do.

The Post, perhaps inadvertently, undermined its own gun control reasoning:

In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post’s analysis.

The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn’t like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.[2]Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?

Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that — often because of an adult’s negligence — dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.

In other words, most of the weapons used were legally purchased by other people, people with no criminal intent, and then taken by those who did have criminal intent in mind. The only way that ‘gun control’ stops that is if private ownership of firearms by the law abiding is banned . . . which is, of course, what the editors want anyway.

Supporters of dictatorial government always want a disarmed citizenry. Their fellow travelers in the credentialed media are only too glad to help.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?
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Shockingly enough, Philly is seeing a huge surge in license-to-carry applications That's kind of what happens when law enforcement doesn't actually enforce the law

As of 11:59 PM EDT on the Ides of March, Philadelphia had seen 103 homicides, one more than on the same day in murder record-shattering 2021. That’s actually an improvement; the city was nine murders ahead of last year as recently as March 7th. All of which makes this article from Philadelphia magazine a surprise to absolutely no one:

License-to-Carry Applications Have Skyrocketed In Philly — Even More Than You’d Think

“When I saw how high the numbers were, I had to call our stats department to make sure they were right,” a Philadelphia Police Department representative told us.

by Victor Fiorillo | Wednesday, March 16, 2022 | 8:00 AM EDT

It didn’t surprise me a bit to learn that license-to-carry applications in Philadelphia have risen over the past year. First, you have the constant reports of shootings, carjackings and other violent crimes in the city. Second, the Philadelphia Police Department made it dramatically easier to apply for a license to carry, starting in January 2021. But I wasn’t exactly ready for just how big this increase has been. And neither was the Philadelphia Police Department, it seems.

“When I saw how high the numbers were, I had to call our stats department to make sure they were right,” police department spokesperson Jasmine Reilly told me after I requested the data.

From 2017 through 2020, the number of license-to-carry applications in Philadelphia held about steady, ranging between 11,049 and 11,814 applications each year. But in 2021, 70,789 people applied for licenses to carry guns.

In other words, license-to-carry applications more than sextupled last year. And in January of this year, the number of applications continued its upward trajectory. (The Pennsylvania State Police publish an annual report showing the number of licenses issued in the counties surrounding Philadelphia as well as in the rest of the state, but a spokesperson for PSP says that data isn’t yet available for 2021.)

There’s a lot more at the original.

The rate of increase of applications for concealed carry permits might have surprised some, but that they have increased dramatically can’t stun anyone. Since Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat — and the last Republican Mayor of Philadelphia left office when Harry Truman was still President — took office in January of 2016, killings in the city have risen from 277 to 315 to 353 to 356 to 499 to last years 562; the number of annual homicides has more than doubled since Mr Kenney took office. The George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner, also a Democrat, took office in 2018, and the homicide rate jumped 59.21% in his four years.

In March alone, while ‘only’ 19 people have been murdered, 73 people have been shot in the city; the gang-bangers are really kind of lousy shots. But while the wounded but not killed can take some solace that they are still alive, that’s only so much comfort.

The cited article goes through some of the steps required to obtain a concealed carry permit, and then we get to this:

Of course, just because you’re denied doesn’t mean you’re not carrying, and carrying without a license is generally a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in prison. But that charge can be upgraded to a felony depending on the circumstances.

“I have a pistol on me at all times,” one local resident who says he was denied a carry license told me. “You’ve got to be crazy not to, the way things are going.”

The leadership of the city continually complain that the state legislature isn’t doing enough in the way of passing gun control legislation, or allowing the city to pass its own, stricter ordinances, but that really doesn’t matter: District Attorney Krasner doesn’t really enforce the gun control legislation that is on the books:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[1]100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.

This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

It was then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-New York) who showed everyone the way. Under his Administration, and (mostly under that of his successor, Michael Bloomberg, New York went after the small-time criminals, using the theory that if you prosecuted and punished the ‘entry-level’ bad guys, maybe they’d get scared enough seeing the inside of the penitentiary early that they’d straighten out. Murder, after all, isn’t normally an entry-level crime. Even if it doesn’t set them on a better path, criminals in jail aren’t out on the streets, committing other crimes.

Since Mr Krasner, the social justice and racial justice warrior that he is, does not like putting away criminals, is it any wonder that the citizens of Philadelphia think that they are on their own, that they have to protect themselves, because the city will not?

Pennsylvania law says you can be denied a license to carry if you’re judged to be an “individual whose character and reputation is such that the individual would be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety.” There’s a lot of subjectivity in there, and an appeals process does exist for those who are denied.

The gun-carrying resident I spoke with didn’t bother appealing. He has a history of minor drug violations, a DUI, and various summary and misdemeanor offenses and says he’s more concerned about his personal safety than whether the police say he’s allowed to carry a gun.

“It’s not like they are going to protect me,” he argues.

Of course, the gang-bangers out there shooting people don’t bother with getting concealed carry permits. It’s shocking, I know, but it seems that criminals don’t obey the law!

There’s a lot more at the original, and unlike the Philadelphia Inquirer articles I frequently cite, this one isn’t behind a paywall; it’s worth a read.

References

References
↑1 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
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Killadelphia It's not just that the raw number of homicides is increasing; the rate of killings has increased as well

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so when last I saw it, the police had indicated that there had been 513 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 2nd. This morning, that number had jumped to 521 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 6th.

That’s eight homicides in three days!

Forget the “long, hot summer” when it comes to murder in Philly. As of the end of Labor Day, September 6th, the 249th day of the year, Philly had seen 363 homicides. 363 ÷ 249 = 1.4578 homicides per day × 365 days in the year = 532.1084 homicides projected for the year.

Well, that was then, and this is now. 521 homicides ÷ 339th day of the year = 1.5369 killings per day, × 365 = 560.9587 projected murders.

But it gets worse. Labor Day is the ‘traditional end of summer’, even if it’s not autumn astronomically. Since the end of Labor Day, there have been 158 killings, in just 90 days. That works out to 1.7556 murders per day. If that rate is maintained through the end of the year, that’s another 45.6444 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, for a projected 567 dead bodies littering the city’s mean streets.

Yeah, I’m something of a number’s geek on this subject, but I’m also a writer, and there have been so many murders in Philadelphia that I’ve been struggling to come up with different words to use, to avoid redundancy in my prose. Perhaps that explains why The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing on their website main page, at least as of 10:15 AM EST, not a single thing, on the eight killings over the past three days.

In reality, the editors of the Inquirer don’t want to hear about homicide in the city, not in any nitty-gritty way. I submitted the article Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer, to the newspaper as a prospective OpEd piece on Friday, December 3rd, and though I did not really expect them to print it, I did hope that maybe, just maybe, upon reading it, the editors would realize just how biased they’ve been on the reporting of the carnage in the city’s streets.[1]At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.

The American Free News Network did print it.

Of course, the Inquirer is concerned about homicide, in macro terms:

In that last one, the Editorial Board noted just how concerned they are that #BlackLivesMatter, because pregnant black women are five times more likely than white women to terminate their pregnancies. Nothing quite says black lives matter than wanting to see them being snuffed out before birth!

But none of it makes sense. In their own stories, the Inquirer noted that Latif Williams, the (alleged) killer of Samuel Collington, was a juvenile, with a criminal record, and could not be legally carrying a gun . . . but he was. They reported that Donavan Crawford, charged with the murder of Sykea Patton, was “charged overnight with murder and multiple counts of illegally carrying a gun.” Somehow, some way, the highly educated and experience editors and reporters for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper never noticed that the people committing crimes with guns are almost never holders of firearms permits, almost never carrying firearms legally, and, shocking, I know, aren’t that interested in obeying the law in the first place.

This is the problem that the left simply cannot see, because they are unwilling to see it. It is not a matter of guns, but the people using the guns. Since the people using guns to kill others are disproportionately black, to admit that it’s the people who are the problem is to recognize that homicide in our major cities is primarily a black problem, and that the #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading just cannot do.

But if you cannot admit what the problem is, you can never hope to solve the problem. And the left would rather ignore the truth than deal with the truth.

References

References
↑1 At least as of 10:15 AM this morning, I have neither been contacted nor received a rejection email from the Inquirer.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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A Drexel law professor claims that Rittenhouse verdict enables shooting “racial justice protesters”

David S Cohen is a professor Thomas R. Kline school of law at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, and perhaps that explains things; he’s getting too much of his information from the wildly slanted Philadelphia Inquirer. In addressing the verdicts in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, he wrote, in Rolling Stone:

    The Rittenhouse Verdict and a Supreme Court Case Could Spell an ‘Open Season’ on Protesters

    After the ruling, it’s clear that anyone who protests against racial injustice risks being killed without consequence

    by David S. Cohen[1]At least to judge by Mr Cohen’s Twitter entries, he’s a very hard-left liberal. | Friday, November 20, 2021 | 5:45 PM EST

    Today, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges after killing two people and wounding another while he was conducting his own armed vigilante patrol of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in response to Black Lives Matter protests. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about whether people have a constitutional right to concealed-carry permits.

    Why am I talking about these two things together? Because in combination, these two cases could mean that it is soon going to be open season on racial-justice protesters around the country.

    The Rittenhouse verdict is obviously very concerning for racial-justice protesters. Rittenhouse said he went to Kenosha the night of Aug. 25, 2020, to protect property. He did so by openly brandishing a semi-automatic rifle through the streets of the city in the midst of unrest over the shooting of Jacob Blake. While patrolling the streets, there was gunfire that resulted in some of the Black Lives Matter protesters thinking Rittenhouse was attacking them. They charged Rittenhouse, and he opened fire, killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz.

In this, Mr Cohen admitted that the shootings of Messrs Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were not because they were “racial justice protesters,” but because they “charged” Mr Rittenhouse. Mr Cohen omits, of course, the fact that they did more than “charge” toward Mr Rittenhouse, but they assaulted him as well. Mr Rosenbaum yells, “F*** you!” and dove for Mr Rittenhouse’s weapon. Mr Huber, after Mr Rosenbaum falls wounded and dying, charges at Mr Rittenhouse, and, after Mr Rittenhouse falls to the ground after being struck by an unidentified person in a white shirt, Mr Huber starts to beat Mr Rittenhouse with a skateboard. Mr Huber grabs the barrel of Mr Rittenhouse’s weapon, and Mr Rittenhouse then pulls the trigger, killing Mr Huber. Mr Grosskreutz then charges at Mr Rittenhouse, and, according to his own testimony, pointed his handgun at Mr Rittenhouse, who then shoots Mr Grosskreutz in the arm.

Mr Cohen equates all of that with simply being a “racial justice protester.”

Unless, that is, what the Left is really against is law enforcement, per se. — Robert Stacy McCain.

In the infamous screen grab from CNN, with the chyron “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests”, we can see that the “racial justice protests” are not just marchers carrying signs, but some are criminals committing arson. If all the “racial justice protesters” had been peaceful, had just been carrying signs and chanting, there wouldn’t have been any perceived need for people to defend their property. Remember: Mr Rittenhouse’s actions were on the third day of the protests, not the first.

Mr Rittenhouse was not tried for shooting someone throwing a Molotov cocktail, or someone marching and carrying a sign, or someone yelling or chanting slogans or screaming into the night; he was tried, and acquitted, for shooting three people in self-defense. Does Mr Cohen believe that people should lose their right to defend themselves just because there is a “racial justice protest” somewhere in the neighborhood? Does Mr Cohen believe that arson is a legitimate part of “racial justice protests”?

Well, being in the Philadelphia area, maybe he does, given that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, fired Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski for entitling an article “Buildings Matter Too”, in reference to the arson being committed in the City of Brotherly Love during the “racial justice protests” following the death of drug-addled convicted felon George Floyd during his arrest in Minneapolis. Many of the buildings damaged or destroyed in the Philadelphia “racial justice protests” were in the more heavily black areas of the city.

In one regard, Mr Cohen was using the Rittenhouse case verdict as his lead in for his real message: he is very concerned about the Supreme Court case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, in which the petitioners were denied permits to carry firearms in New York outside of one’s home. New York allows only restricted reasons as sufficient for such permits, and simply living in a high crime area is not considered a sufficient reason.

Mr Cohen makes the specious argument that, if the Court rules in favor of people’s Second Amendment rights rather than state restrictions, everyone will be armed and peaceful protesters at “racial justice protests” will be in grave danger:

    What this means in conjunction with the Rittenhouse verdict is very scary for all, but especially for racial-justice protesters everywhere. With a proliferation of concealed-carry permits and a sense among the far right after today’s verdict that they have the freedom to patrol racial-justice protests and act as vigilantes, the court system’s message couldn’t be clearer — anyone who protests against racial injustice risks taking their lives into their own hands.

Of course, the Rittenhouse case was not about that at all. Mr Rittenhouse was legally armed, under the laws of the state of Wisconsin, without the Court having decided on the New York case, and Mr Rittenhouse did not simply open fire on “racial justice protesters.” He defended himself against assailants, after having first retreated and been chased. Rather, it was Mr Grosskreutz who was armed illegally, carrying a concealed weapon after his permit for such had expired. It was the “racial justice protester” who was illegally armed, not Mr Rittenhouse.

Mr Cohen does not seem to like people being legally armed, and claims that they will kill people, and target “racial justice protesters.” However, as of the end of Thursday, November 18th, in Philadelphia, where Mr Cohen works, 491 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards, the vast majority — if not all — of them by people who did not have concealed carry permits, the vast majority of them possessing firearms illegally. 491 ÷ 322, the number of days elapsed so far in 2021, = 1.5248 homicides per day, not in any “racial justice protests,” but in criminal acts, in intentional murders. 1.5248 x 365 days in the year = 556.552 projected homicides for the city for the year.

And it gets worse. Despite the long, hot summer having reached its traditional end after the Labor day holiday, there have been 128 homicides in Philadelphia since the end of Labor Day, September 6th, 128 homicides in 73 days, 1.7534 per day, meaning that the pace of killings has gotten even worse, and you can bet your bottom euro that very few, if any, of those homicides were committed by someone who possessed a firearm legally. We have already noted the very personal Inquirer OpEd piece by Temple University Hospital trauma nurse Ruqiyya Greer, pointing out that the vast majority of homicide victims in the City of Brotherly Love are black, while on Friday, Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong noted the same thing, and how four black female juvenile students attacked Asian female students on a SEPTA train in a racially motivated incident.

Of course, the “racial justice protesters” in Kenosha were mostly white, simply because Kenosha County population is roughly 87.2% white, and 75.4% are non-Hispanic white. The assailants who attacked and were shot by Mr Rittenhouse were all white, though “Jump Kick Man,” if the identification of him as Maurice Freeland is correct, is black. The problem for Mr Cohen’s argument is simple: it has been the “racial justice protesters” who have been the violent ones, the criminal ones, in the vast majority of the cases. Unless Mr Cohen believes that arson and attacking bystanders or opponents, as the mostly white Antifa protesters did for much of the summer of 2020, are legitimate parts of “racial justice protests,” then his arguments completely fall apart. And if he does believe that such actions are legitimately part of such protests, then there’s just no help for him.

References

References
↑1 At least to judge by Mr Cohen’s Twitter entries, he’s a very hard-left liberal.
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Irony is so ironic Wesleyan University professor uses First Amendment, and the internet, to argue that Second Amendment should be regulated by 1791 technology

Under what conditions did newspapers labor following the American Revolution? From Wikipedia:

Many of the papers, however, which were kept alive or brought to life during the war could not adapt themselves to the new conditions of peace. Perhaps only a dozen of the survivors held their own in the new time, notably the Boston Gazette, which declined rapidly in the following decade, The Connecticut Courant of Hartford, The Providence Gazette, and The Pennsylvania Packet of Philadelphia, to which may be added such representative papers as the Massachusetts Spy, Boston’s Independent Chronicle, the New York Journal and Packet, the Newport Mercury, the Maryland Gazette of Annapolis, the Pennsylvania Gazette and The Pennsylvania Journal, both of Philadelphia. Practically all were of four small pages, each of three or four columns, issued weekly. In 1783, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first American daily. The next year, the Pennsylvania Packet was published three times a week, and the New York Journal twice a week, as were several of the papers begun in that year. There was a notable extension to new fields. In Vermont, where the first paper, established in 1781, had soon died, another arose in 1783; in Maine, two were started in 1785. In 1786, the first one west of the Alleghenies appeared at Pittsburgh, and following the westward tide of immigration the Kentucky Gazette was begun at Lexington in 1787.

Conditions were hardly more favorable to newspapers than during the recent conflict. The sources of news were much the same; the means of communication and the postal system were little improved. Newspapers were not carried in the mails but by favor of the postmen, and the money of one state was of dubious value in another. Consequently, circulations were small, rarely reaching a thousand; subscribers were slow in paying; and advertisements were not plentiful. Newspapers remained subject to provincial laws of libel, in accordance with the old common law, and were, as in Massachusetts for a short time in 1785, subject to special state taxes on paper or on advertisements. But public sentiment was growing strongly against all legal restrictions, and in general the papers practiced freedom, not to say license, of utterance.

As we have previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer, established in 1829, is the third oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, exceeded only by the New York Post, established 1801, and the Hartford Courant, first edition in 1764.

Newspapers and books were rare in the late 18th century, with the news often slanted, and a lot of inaccuracies published, especially as the sources of news were more distant.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

What became our First Amendment, which stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” was passed by the First Congress on September 25, 1789, and submitted to the states for ratification. It, along with the other nine amendments now referred to as the Bill of Rights, became part of the Constitution on December 15, 1791.

Now comes Jennifer Tucker, an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University, in an OpEd published by CNN:

Now that guns can kill hundreds in minutes, Supreme Court should rethink the rights question

Opinion by Jennifer Tucker | Updated 7:31 AM ET | Wednesday, October 20, 2021

This fall, the US Supreme Court will decide New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Kevin Bruen, a case that may result in vastly expanded rights to carry firearms in public. In doing so, the Court will need to grapple with a key question that, until now, has been left unanswered in the Second Amendment debate: Are there any limits to the type of firearm that can be carried outside of the home?

Dr Tucker has erred from the first paragraph: that is not the question before the Supreme Court. Rather, under the Sullivan Act of 1911, New York state has required permits to carry firearms outside of the home, and has given localities discretion on the issuance of such permits, and New York does not issue permits for self-defense unless the applicant can demonstrate a non-speculative need for such; a neighborhood simply being unsafe is not sufficient. The case before the bar is one which holds that such discretion is not constitutional.

In the pivotal 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller — which recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right to own a gun at home for self-defense — the Court admitted the existence of different categories of weapons, while conceding that “dangerous or unusual weapons” could be regulated. But it did not define what constitutes a “dangerous or unusual” weapon, nor recognize that there are different degrees of danger within the category of firearms.

Dr Tucker continues to document the increased lethality of firearms since the flintlocks of 1791, holding that the Court must take that into account and limit our Second Amendment rights accordingly. You can follow the link to read her arguments yourself.

But, to me, there’s an obvious irony. Dr Tucker is using the virtually instantaneous world-wide transmission of her views in an effort to persuade people, while the ‘press’ the First Amendment protects was only that of poorly printed and locally sold and distributed newspapers. If she believes that the Supreme Court should recognize and take into account changes in firearms technology and thus limit our right to keep and bear arms, would not her arguments also apply to the freedom of speech and of the press? There were no microphones and amplifiers for public speech in 1791, nor photography, nor the ability to publish the photos which did not then exist. There was neither radio nor telegraph to transmit information over long distances, no television, no CNN, and no internet. Using her own arguments, the government ought to be able to regulate and restrict all media save the four-page newspapers available in 1791.

One could argue that there’s a qualitative difference, that freedom of speech and of the press cannot kill anyone, while firearms can. That, frankly, is nonsense: al Qaeda, Da’ish, and all sorts of other groups which bear us only ill will have used the internet, have used social media, have used modern communications to set in motion acts which have directly killed people. Modern communication has served to radicalize people into Islamist ideas, to turn people who may have been leading vaguely unsatisfying lives into monsters who only wish to kill others.

It isn’t even just the Islamists. People have been using the internet and modern communications to vilify Israel, to persuade (purportedly) intelligent Americans to anti-Semitism through constant attempts to turn Americans against Israel. People have been using the internet and modern communications to inspire racial hatred, to try to frustrate law enforcement, to make martyred saints out of thugs and convicted felons — and I refer not only to George Floyd, but Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and others — and to encourage anti-social and risky behavior, including the ‘hook up’ culture and the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases.

Sure, I’m conservative, and have my biases in that direction, but the left make the same complaints, about the internet being used to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections and COVID-19 and vaccine mandates . . . and they have actively been trying to censor such things. The left have been trying to ‘cancel’ people like comedian Dave Chappelle and Harry Potter author J K Rowling for not being fully on board with ‘transgenderism.’ Virtually every credentialed media source in American, in referring to Richard Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the US Department of Health and Human Services who claims to be female and goes by the name ‘Rachel’, and his recent promotion to Admiral in the United States Public Health Service, and anyone who challenged the cockamamie notion that he is female, or used the masculine pronouns to refer to him, would be subject to whatever scorn and ‘cancelations’ the left could muster.

Using Dr Tucker’s logic, the United States could regulate such communication, by the left and the right, virtually out of existence, and she is using that First Amendment protected media of broadcast and internet transmission to spread her ideas. The good and highly educated professor doesn’t even seem to have recognized the irony of her position.
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Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want you to exercise a right she chooses not to use Today's left support freedom of choice on exactly one thing

Salon senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte moved to South Philadelphia sometime in early 2019, but unless she never listens to the local news — always a possibility, given that she never writes on it — she has to have noticed the tremendous homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love.[1]One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love? As of the end of Wednesday, June 23rd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported 262 homicides. 262 murders in 174 days so far is 1.506 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to, if that average is maintained, 550 for the year.[2]With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming. Philadelphia’s record is 500, during the crack cocaine drug gang wars of 1990, with last year coming in in second place with 499.

At the end of June 23rd last year, there had been ‘only’ 190 homicides in the city, so this year’s number is 37.37% higher than 2020.

How Democratic is Philadelphia? Joe Biden carried Philadelphia County 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%)

Unless something changes pretty drastically, 2021 isn’t just going to set the record, but blow it out of the water. And remember: the long, hot summer has just begun.

So, what is leading to all of this mayhem? According to Miss Marcotte, it ain’t the bad guys, but those inanimate guns!

oe Biden is right about the rise in crime: Blame guns — not police or protesters — for the violence

Conservatives are using crime as cover for ugly race-baiting, but their own lax gun policies are the real culprit

By Amanda Marcotte | June 23, 2021 | 1:11PM (EDT)

Violent crime is on the rise and it’s making Republicans happier than a fire sale on wraparound sunglasses.

Conservatives will find any excuse to indulge in their favorite sport: racist fear-mongering. The current uptick in violent crime fulfills their desire to use police to terrorize and stigmatize people of color while spinning it as merely in the interest of “public safety.” (Which is especially rich coming from the same people who left hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of COVID-19 rather than accept emergency pandemic measures.) And boy, they’re throwing themselves into the scare tactics with a relish usually reserved for sharing grammatically confusing memes on Facebook.

As the AP reported earlier this month, Republican politicians across the country are using rising crime rates as an excuse to pass laws aimed at suppressing Black Lives Matter protests and at protecting police budgets from re-evaluation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on June 11 blaming crime on “radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces,” which is, at best, a wild exaggeration of what have largely been efforts to redirect funds to crime prevention. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, falsely accused Democrats of supporting “the dangerous idea of defunding the police.”

Now, we noted, just yesterday morning, that very white, very liberal Portland, Oregon, had cut its police budget enough that the department was 150 officers under strength, and according to Portland Police Department numbers, the city is on pace for 92 murders this year, shattering 1987’s record of 70. With a city population of 662,549, that would give the city a murder rate of 13.89 per 100,000 population. How liberal is Portland? Joe Biden carried Multnomah County 367,249 (79.21%) to 82,995 (17.90%).

Just two days prior to that, we noted that Austin, Texas, where Miss Marcotte lived before her boyfriend and she moved to Brooklyn, had slashed its police budget by 1/3. Austin is the most liberal city in Texas; Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%).

Our deadliest city, St Louis? As of June 22nd, there had been 88 murders in the Gateway City, and 82 of the victims, 93.18%, were black. Of the 36 known killers of those 88 dead black people, all were black. Joe Biden carried the city by 110,089 (80.85%) to 21,474 (15.77%).

So, unless those inanimate guns are just leaping into the air by themselves and shooting people, those guns are seemingly leaping into the hands of Democrats.

Miss Marcotte claims that, since the rise in the homicide rate is seemingly everywhere, with no distinct differences between places like Austin, where the police have lost a third of their funding, and other big cities, where the funding drops have been significantly less, the increase in the homicide rate cannot be attributed to defunding. But then she goes on:

The sociological reasons for the rise are still ambiguous, though there is little doubt that the pandemic contributed by adding economic and social stress, while also depriving young people of jobs and school opportunities that keep them out of trouble. Pfaff also suggests there may be a reason to believe that rising tensions between police and communities contribute, if only because people are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement they see, for good reason, as oppressive. If that relationship “deteriorates significantly,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis-Missouri, told Salon’s Igor Derysh in February, “that simply widens the space for street justice to take hold.”

Well, yes, that’s true enough, but it undermines her other points. She claimed that crime, overall, had dropped, and the violent crime rate had spiked only modestly. As I have previously noted, there are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals.

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

So when I read that other crime has decreased, I just don’t believe it. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime; it’s a crime committed primarily by people who have committed other crimes. When you read about a murder who was caught — and the police actually catching killers is getting progressively worse — you almost always read that the killer was legally barred from owning a firearm, or that he was carrying it illegally. Noting Miss Marcotte’s own statement that people are less willing to cooperate with the police, it stands to reason that crimes of reporting would be reported less.

After a few paragraphs in which the author ties the existence of illegally purchased or possessed guns to the existence of legally owned firearms, she gives us her solution:

The surest way to reduce murder rates is to get guns out of people’s hands.

Miss Marcotte’s biggest issue has always been abortion, but it’s certainly not the only right she cherishes. She frequently and loudly exercises the rights she believes she should have. She exercises her freedom of speech and of the press in her tweets, her articles in Salon, and other places. She exercises her right to use contraception. She has exercised her right of peaceable assembly to join the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Philadelphia. An avowed atheist, she exercises her right not to go to church. She will defend those rights to, well, to the death is the common phrase, but I can’t say that she’d go that far.

But the right she has and chooses not to exercise — and, to me, it is actually choosing to exercise the right in the negative[3]Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press. — is her right to keep and bear arms. Because it is a right she chooses not to keep and bear arms, she doesn’t think that anyone else should have that right. Her solution to the illegal use of firearms is to take guns away from people who have not used their weapons illegally.

Miss Marcotte is but a small, if vocal, part of the left in America. Very much proclaiming her own views, she, like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, doesn’t like hearing other people expressing their own. The left just plain don’t like anyone exercising their constitutional rights in a way of which they don’t approve.

Me? I support Miss Marcotte’s right to choose to buy, or not buy, a firearm. I support her right to write, or not write, whatever she chooses. I support her right not to go to church, and I even support her right not to read what I happen to write. Our freedoms are both positive and negative; we may choose to do or not do something as we please.

The left used to support that, but that was a long, long time ago.

 

References

References
↑1 One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love?
↑2 With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming.
↑3 Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press.
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A sad tale illustrates why gun control laws do not work

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has, fortunately for the individual rights of the citizens thereof, a state legislature controlled by Republicans, and current state law prohibits cities in the Keystone State from enacting their own, stricter gun control ordinances.

Naturally, in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, the Democrats who have controlled the city government or the last 69½ years, see the homicide numbers, and think that the answer is: more gun control! The Philadelphia Inquirer keeps up its calls:

But it was a sad story in Thursday’s Inquirer which revealed the futility of it all, without ever mentioning the subject:

Philly father sentenced to 6 to 12 years in prison after his teen son fatally shot his twin brother

Aleem Gillard encouraged his sons to play with a gun in his apartment and one son, Fayaadh, accidentally killed his brother, Suhail, authorities said.

By Julie Shaw | June 3, 2021

A Philadelphia man was sentenced Thursday to six to 12 years in state prison after one of his twin sons accidentally shot the other after he encouraged them to play with his gun in an Overbrook apartment two years ago.

Aleem Gillard, 43, pleaded guilty in February to charges of involuntary manslaughter and possession of a firearm. As a felon, he was not permitted to have a gun.

On Dec. 1, 2019, Gillard’s 18-year-old sons and 16-year-old daughter were in his apartment when his sons were playing with his gun, and one son, Fayaadh, fatally shot his brother, Suhail, in the chest.

Chesley Lightsey, supervisor of the DA’s homicide unit, told Common Pleas Court Judge Lillian Ransom during a virtual sentencing hearing Thursday that the father encouraged his sons to play with the gun. After the shooting, authorities said, Gillard told his surviving son and daughter to lie to police, telling them the teen was shot while going to a corner store. He also had his daughter hide the gun, she said.

The money paragraph was further down:

Aleem Gillard had four prior convictions for illegal gun possession, Lightsey said. In the most recent case, court records show, he pleaded guilty in February 2015 to felony firearm-possession charges stemming from a 2013 arrest and was sentenced to 2½ to five months in jail and 10 years’ probation.

So, Mr Gillard had four prior convictions for illegal gun possession, was not, as a convicted felon, allowed to own a firearm, and was on probation at the time his son was shot, yet he still had a gun! In 2013, Mr Gillard was shot himself, paralyzed, and is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, yet he still had a gun.

If all of that could not keep Mr Gillard from obtaining yet another firearm, just what other gun control laws would have prevented it? What laws would the bad guys of the City of Brotherly Love, who have already put 221 people in their graves, obey in a city that has people like Mr Gillard, already a jailbird, already a convicted felon, already paralyzed for life, choosing to keep a gun despite all of that?

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Maybe gun ownership isn’t the problem?

As always, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, and I found that the City of Brotherly Love had seen 77 homicides through the end of February, compared to ‘just’ 60 on February 28th last year. 2020 was in second place, all time, for Philadelphia, with 499 homicides, and it looks like the good people of Philly have taken beating the record of 500, set in 1992, as a personal challenge.

Then I came across this interesting map. You can click on it to double its size.

It seems that Philadelphia, with its population of 1,579,000 has a murder rate of 31.60 per 100,000 population, all in a state in which 37.1% of the people own firearms. Meanwhile, in Lexington, Kentucky, a city of 320,601 people, there were 34 homicides all of last year. That makes Lexington’s homicide rate 10.60 per 100,000 population, yet 42.4% of the people in the Commonwealth of Kentucky own firearms.

If the problem is too many guns, why is Philly thrice as dangerous as Lexington?

If you look at that map, you’ll see that some of the real murder capitals in our country — Chicago, Baltimore, St Louis and anyplace in New Jersey — are in states which have lower rates of firearms ownership.

How can that be?

The left seem to think that restricting the rights of people who have not committed any crimes will somehow reduce the violent crime rate, but the numbers don’t appear to bear that out. And while it could be argued that the map does not account for people who have firearms illegally, that completely undercuts any arguments that restricting legal gun ownership will reduce crime.

The only thing that will do is make crime victims more helpless.