Friday, March 02, 2018

Guns, Democrats, and Common Sense

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

At first, when David Hogg, the alleged shooting victim from the high school in Florida turned anti-gun activist, began attacking the NRA, I thought the kid was simply an uninformed buffoon.  Now, with his latest offering regarding AR-15s, I've decided he's a complete moron . . . at least when it comes to guns.  Then again, aren't most (if not all) anti-gun Democrats and their allies complete idiots when it comes to their gun ignorance?

You know, like Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.), who called for a ban on "machine gun magazines" during a press conference Tuesday.

What in the hell is a machine gun magazine?

I am going to guess that she got bump stocks and high-capacity magazines all jumbled in her head, and since she has no clue what she's talking about, she rifled them together into an idiotic quote.

According to Katie Pavlich, getting back to David Hogg The Ignorant, his latest target in his crusade is specifically the AR-15.

On MSNBC, Hogg commented, "Who wants to go down the barrel of an AR-15, even with a glock? And I know that's what these police officers are supposed to do, but they're people too."

Hogg, like his classmates, know nothing about guns.  A quick trigger finger to them may have sounded like an automatic - even though they've likely never heard the sound of automatic gunfire (except maybe in movies and video games) before in their lives.  As I wrote a couple weeks ago about one of Hogg's classmates, "The cries of emotion are based, unfortunately, on false information. For example, the kid who claimed you don't need an AR-15 for hunting probably thinks the rifle is fully-automatic (pull the trigger, and a spray of bullets comes out), and that's just not true. Fully automatic rifles, which are closer to the definition of what an 'assault rifle' is, are already illegal. As for not needing it for hunting, the only difference between an AR-15 and a common hunting rifle are cosmetic accessories that make it look more military. The AR-15 essentially performs in the exact same manner as any other hunting rifle."

Well, the statement is accurate as far as semi-automatics go.  I will have to admit bolt-actions, lever-actions, and pump-actions will not be as fast.

Do kids like David Hogg even know the difference between a semi-automatic and firearms that require an action prior to firing the next round?

Hogg tried to say a Glock on a cop's hip couldn't keep up with an AR-15.

Reality is, they are both semi-automatics (one shot per trigger squeeze, no additional action required to drop the next round in the chamber, it happens "automatically").

Pavlich explains, in her article, that "In 2015 Garland Police Officer Gregory Stevens, armed with a Glock, took out two ISIS terrorists in Texas when they attempted to murder attendees of a 'draw Muhammed' cartoon contest. The terrorists were armed with AK-47 rifles. Like the AR-15, an AK-47 is a semi-automatic rifle."

The gunmen Stevens faced, considered terrorists by the FBI, were armed with assault rifles and body armor. Stevens stopped them with a handgun.

Despite the close-range firefight, Stevens left unscathed.

Last summer, Capitol Hill Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey engaged a man armed with an SKS 7.62-millimeter caliber semi-automatic rifle. Both of the officers were injured, but continued to pursue the man until he was neutralized. They were armed with handguns.

The inaction of the deputy on campus in Florida was not because of the gun's size in Nikolas Cruz's hands.  The deputy who did not engage made that decision out of fear of the gunfight, not the size of the gun.  I get it.  It's a scary thing.  I've been in a similar situation before where you are looking the guy who wants to kill you in the eyes, and what saves your life is that you are a better shot.  It's very scary, very heart-thumping, and something you never forget for the rest of your life.  That said, I had a .45 ACP 1911 in my hands, and the other guys had AK47s.  I'm alive, they are not.

Hogg's claim that a semi-automatic pistol cannot win a firefight with an AR-15 is hogg-wash.

In fact, I would even bet that someone who is trained and a good enough shot could have even taken out Cruz with a single-action revolver. . . a .22 at that.  Cruz was a coward, and acting erratically.  A level head and a well placed shot would have ended it all.

The crusade to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens, for the Democrats, is not a winning argument for them, by the way.  Most people believe that stricter gun laws will either have no effect or lead to increased violent crime.  Rasmussen finds that 54% think massive government failures are mostly to blame for the Parkland, Florida shootings, while only 33% blame a lack of gun control. Interestingly, the finding is even more pronounced among those who have school-age children: 61% think government is mostly to blame, while only 23% point the finger mostly at guns.

As always, throughout American History, when leftists threaten to take away our guns, the public says, "Hell, NO!"

Pavlich's article also made me aware of a video where CNN’s Gary Tuchman is firing an AR-15 at a range, and he obviously has no idea what he is doing.  He has the rifle too low to get his eyes lined up in the sights, he's anticipating the recoil and as a result his gun’s muzzle is bouncing all over the place, and I am convinced that if there is a target in front of him, not a single round has penetrated it.  Check it out on Twitchy.

President Trump went so far as to say that a firearm in the firefight might not even have been necessary for him to be willing to engage Cruz. “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Trump said.

Late-night talk show hosts ran with it.  Comedians Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah joked it up quite a bit over Trump's comments.

Except, Trump has already proven in his life that what he said, he would do.

The Epoch Times reports:
...the president’s claim matches his behavior during a violent mugging described in a Nov. 20, 1991, Daily News article. 
The original article, “Mugger’s Trumped: Donald stops attack,” written by Daily News staff writer James Rosen, is now only available from Philly.com archives, but images of it are circulating on the web. 
“I’m not looking to play this thing up,” Trump said in the Nov. 20, 1991, report. “I’m surprised you found out about it.” 
In the incident, Trump ordered his driver to pull over after he saw “a big guy with a big bat” bashing another person. 
“Someone in the car looked over and said, ‘Gee, look at that, it’s a mugging,’” Trump said. “I said to my driver to stop the car because it was brutal-looking.” 
Witnesses told the Daily News that Trump got out of his black stretch limousine on Monday during the assault in Manhattan. Marla Maples, who was married to Trump in the 90s, was seen grabbing his arm.
The story goes on to explain how Trump, unarmed with anything but his wits and compassion, confronted the individual, and ended the beating.

People like Mr. Hogg want you to believe that America's gun culture is the problem.  That, because we allow gun ownership in this country, we are spiraling out of control with deaths by firearms.  Surely, with so many guns in the hands of citizens the homicide rate for America must be among the top in the world . . . and surely, socialist havens with strict gun control laws must be much safer.

Three years ago, in a video titled Number One With A Bullet, Bill Whittle reveals otherwise.



I believe there are a number of causes, regarding what gun violence we do have . . . that is, if you believe the media that it is rising and getting out of control.

Among the reasons we are seeing an uptick in gun violence, and violence in general, especially when it comes to our younger generation, is that in our culture we have turned our back on God.

Benjamin Franklin provided an insight to the importance of being a godly society when he wrote, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.  As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."

Meanwhile, the "masters" have been literally putting in place laws to worsen the situation, not make it better.

Breitbart reports, "The Broward County school district’s adoption of a school discipline policy that was praised by the Obama administration for seeking to reduce the reported number of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests may have played a role in the fact that Nikolas Cruz remained under the radar until his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida, on February 14."

Okay, I can hear the leftists now . . . crying because I am claiming that the shooting may be Obama's fault.  The thing is, the facts shout louder than their cries.
“The facts pattern that has emerged strongly suggests it played a role,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Max Eden tells Breitbart News. “It’s not actually accurate to say that what Broward County did was the result of the Obama policy. It might be more accurate to say that what Broward County did was in some way the inspiration for Obama’s policy.” 
The Obama-era Departments of Education and Justice – under education secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder –issued school guidelines in 2014 that claimed students of color are “disproportionately impacted” by suspensions and expulsions, a situation they said leads to a “school-to-prison pipeline” that discriminates against minority and low-income students. 
“Broward County was the first to have the goal of lowering suspensions, lowering expulsions, lowering arrests,” explains Eden. “And, so, they decided to reduce police involvement by not bringing in cops to arrest kids for a whole range of serious offenses, and then, as you would expect, the arrests go down when you stop arresting. That was taken to be a sign of success, based on that metric alone.” 
According to the Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague” guidance, any school district whose disciplinary measures showed “disparate impact” – meaning a disproportionately greater number of minority students are affected – is open to investigation by the Departments of Justice and Education, regardless of whether the behavior leading to the discipline is unacceptable.
Are you digesting this?  What they are saying is their brilliant way to reduce the problem of too many trouble-makers is to not report the trouble-makers.

What kind of backwards, cockamamie thinking, is that?

But, it gets even more interesting:
Eden explained at National Review in November how the Obama-era school discipline policy “extended Black Lives Matter’s ideology down into America’s classrooms”:

Social-justice activists assumed that just as racial disparities in the criminal-justice system must be evidence that cops are (at least implicitly) racist, so too racial disparities in school suspensions must be evidence that teachers are (at least implicitly) racist. Therefore, teachers — like cops — have to be restrained. 
Several years before the Obama school discipline policy appeared, however, the Broward County school board hired as superintendent Robert Runcie – who had worked for Duncan in Chicago – and also joined with the NAACP, law enforcement, and government agencies to adopt the district’s Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline, dubbed PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support, and Education). 
As M. Catharine Evans reports at American Thinker, in academic year 2011-2012, just prior to the school board’s decision to hire Runcie, the Broward County public school district had 1,062 school-related arrests – the highest number in Florida. 
Evans continues:

The Obama administration’s Department of Education was also involved in implementing PROMISE. Obama, who routinely dangled carrots in the form of matching federal grants to local districts for their participation in Common Core and Race to the Top, doled out millions to Broward. 
With the promise of federal monies, it’s no surprise that Superintendent Runcie (annual salary: $335,000) was happy to oblige his friends in D.C. Within a year of Runcie’s arrival, student arrest rates were down 66 percent, and Broward County Schools were about to hit the federal jackpot. 
One of the premises of the PROMISE program cited in the agreement and supported by data from the Obama Department of Education Office for Civil Rights reads:

WHEREAS, across the country, students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students are disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests for the same behavior as their peers. 
“In 2015, the Obama administration brought them to a White House Summit on rethinking school discipline and to highlight their success and tell school districts throughout the country, ‘Look at what Broward is doing as an example,’” Eden says.
Broward County Sheriff Union president Jeff Bell told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that he places some blame for the horrific shooting on the school board and the adoption of its PROMISE program:

For years they know that the schools have been soft targets, and they claim that they want to have better police presence inside the schools, and they want tougher security, but, yet, they do not want to cough up the money to pay for that better security and fortify their schools and have better designs. They don’t want that. And, then when they are fortunate to have a school resource officer deputy on scene, and armed police presence, a lot of the liberal-thinking principals on campus there, they don’t want the police officers making arrests on campus, and they don’t want the drugs to be found on campus, and they don’t want the warrants to be served on campus because it looks like there’s bad stats at the school. 
So, I place a lot of blame on the school board with that and some of the programs that they’ve initiated with the state attorney and the sheriff’s office in years past. For example, the PROMISE program … the problem is when that program started, we took all discretion away from the law enforcement officers to effect an arrest if we choose to.
“If we’re trying to answer the question, ‘How did Nikolas Cruz remain under the radar?’ it certainly seems as though part of that answer is the fact that the radar was shifted and that students like him were supposed to be put under the radar in the first place,” Eden suggests. “The point of the PROMISE program was to not let them know about it.”

We've become godless and senseless . . . and we wonder why the crazies are shooting people.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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