Jacinda ardern firearm confiscation assault weapons
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
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Jacinda Ardern says 8000 Kiwis who watched the mosque shooter’s live stream sought out “mental health support.” Now she wants the social media giants to police speech (even more than they already do) in order to “prevent the posting of terrorist content online, to ensure its efficient and fast removal and to prevent the use of live-streaming as a tool for broadcasting terrorist attacks.”

(T)he terrorist’s other weapon was live-streaming the attack on social media to spread his hateful vision and inspire fear. He wanted his chilling beliefs and actions to attract attention, and he chose social media as his tool.

We need to address this, too, to ensure that a terrorist attack like this never happens anywhere else. That is why I am leading, with President Emmanuel Macron of France, a gathering in Paris on Wednesday not just for politicians and heads of state but also the leaders of technology companies. We may have our differences, but none of us wants to see digital platforms used for terrorism.

Our aim may not be simple, but it is clearly focused: to end terrorist and violent extremist content online. This can succeed only if we collaborate.

– New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern in How to Stop the Next Christchurch Massacre

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111 COMMENTS

    • Yes. This is what Fascism looks like. We may have fooled ourselves into believing that, after fighting and winning a world war, it was dead as a political ideology and political movement. I think the kind of control that Fascism embodies is so seductive to politicians that it will always be around. Now its come out of shadows—again.

      • It’s more of a socialist/communist type of thing. You see it Britain today as well with their anti-leftist think punishment and knife laws. The did the gun thing back in the 90s.

      • Fascism is just one flavor of authoritarianism. But in general, there have always been people with the will and drive to rule over others. There still are. And there probably always will be.

    • New Zealand is the Globalist Elite Refuge of Last Resort.

      They, as a whole, have pumped $BILLIONS into the NZ economy and into buying Govt Slaves (Govt Officials) in the last decade to make it ‘safe’ for them to evacuate to the various underground complexes they have built for themselves there.

      Now that they own the Govt, they desperately need to disarm the population.

      • Quick, hurry, there is still time to buy your very own New Zealand politician! Closing down sale. I tend to judge people on what they do, not what they say. Jacinda has been very vocal in a lot of areas, but her only actions to date have been to hug Muslims (weird but, to each their own) denounce and declare illegal the guns that most assiduous gun owners have in their gun safes, and fly to France for a talk fest on mass media.

        By contrast, when an official report comes in that demands immediate action, nothing happens. F’rinstance, the committee on child poverty said welfare benefits need to be raised by 47% after a decade of cuts by the previous government. Action: Nada.

        Teachers, doctors and nurses are all going on strike for more pay and better conditions. Police won’t be far behind. Public services are at a near standstill. Welcome to the Third World. All those rich refugees will find there’s nothing left to flee to.

      • Well, you’d think if they were buying all of these politicians they could have at least bought better looking ones. She is butt ugly! No wonder she is such a psycho.

  1. 😢R.I.P. New Zealand 🗽 Personal Freedoms 🔔.
    🆔📴🚫🚓🚔🚓🚔🚧👮👮👮Replaced with “Authoritarianism !” 👮🚧🚓🚔🚔🚔🚔🚨🚫

  2. to prevent the use of live-streaming as a tool for broadcasting terrorist attacks.”

    And this is going to happen how? Magic wand? There is no way they are going to be able to tell before it it happens, what the stream is going to be. Leftists always whip out their phone and start live streaming all the cop brutality, etc etc. You either have the streaming service or you don’t. Figure it out.

  3. Just wait…..in our kids and grandkids time the rest of the world will Live in a police states and their subjects will Laugh at how “wild west” the US is. How we’re allowed to hurt other people’s feelings and that we dare place our own interests first… and yet those around the world who are not sheep, who value hard work and individuality and have the will to make their Lot better, be free and excel will continue to make their way here as the Last bastion of freedom… …as Long as we remain resolute and continue to abide by the constitution.

  4. Sounds like it’s time for economic sanctions against and a total blockade of New Zealand. In fact, order the US Navy to not protect any vessel flying the flag of a country that doesn’t have at least American levels of personal freedom protections.

  5. Anyone who knows me knows that I am about as absolutist as anyone can be with respect to our fundamental, unalienable rights.

    That said, I do not believe that a criminal attacker has a right to disseminate live video of his/her criminal attack to maim, mutilate, and/or murder people. Related to that position, I do not believe that any distribution platform has any obligation to facilitate disseminating video of a criminal’s vicious attack. Why? Because disseminating that video is part of the “reward” that the criminal is seeking to which he/she is most definitely NOT entitled. Plus, the victims have a right to privacy and the attacker obviously did NOT receive permission to disseminate video of them, especially of such an intensely private and deeply personal matter (their very lives).

    I DO believe that society should be able to discuss a criminal attack after the fact and government should NOT censor said discussion. Should said discussion after the fact be able to include recorded video of the attack? I am undecided. On the one hand, seeing the actual recorded video of an attack is a powerful force which motivates decent people to act to reduce attacks. On the other hand, seeing the actual recorded video of an attack is likely also a powerful force which motivates evil people to perpetrate more violence on people. And we still have the matter of the victim’s privacy that I mentioned above — which argues against dissemination of videos of attacks.

    • You’ve outlined the trade-offs well, exactly as Primarily Reactive Minister, there, has not. The problem, as always, is how, exactly to do it, with what consequences, for real.

      /The Long Version
      How to keep whack-jobs from their frission of self-importance, without stifling stuff that must get out? How to make machinery for stifling the B Gs w/o creating a “may issue” gate for people who just wanna protect their own authoritah? How to deploy precrime, even if it works, without it becoming another fig leaf over stifling inconvenient facts?

      No streaming until it’s been vetted! OK, so how do we ever see the armored vehicles crashing into burning Branch Dravidian buildings? Those people were dubbed “terrorists.” Video of knock-out game ambushes? Or going at it the other way, do we really want what we can see decided by The Zuck (more than it is already.)

      How do you get rid of accidental injuries n crimes using guns without also getting rid of the .5 to 2.5 million D G Us a year? That would be the trade-off the anti-people buried for years when their own gov-funded agitprop attempt came out the wrong way. Who’s gonna be in charge of honestly vetting what we’re allowed to see?

      As much as I think live-streaming is an offense againse good sense, good manners, and good taste, we’re kind of stuck with the abuses the pesky humans will indulge in, of live streaming, of guns, and of every other ability and autonomy “we” allow.

      Of course, if I’m the one irrevocable Primary Ministrator of live-stream scrutiny n who gets what arms, that’s a different chamber-pot of “good to be the king.”

    • If it is difficult to stop now, it will be impossible in the future.

      There is good that can come out of even a horrendous video like that; it can show us what happened and how.

  6. “We may have our differences, but none of us wants to see digital platforms used for terrorism.”

    Well, that horse has been out of the barn for at least 20 years, by now…

    • Actual terrorist organizations encrypt and spoof to stop people from seeing what they are doing. They use burner phones to stop GPS and financial tracking. They like cash but don’t mind using crypto sometimes.

      Years ago terrorists used major English speaking websites to post their videos of attacks. Those sites started to take them down and not allow violent content. That didn’t stop the videos from being produced and released on the internet, they simply were posted on other sites.

      After Trump said he was pulling out of Syria the militants thought he was being serious. They decided to allow the Americans to leave in peace. Then Trump said he wasn’t actually going to pull out of anywhere. This enraged the fighters there. They sent a suicide bomber to an area with a bunch of American troops. The bomber killed himself and about 6 troops in the blast. People spread a video of the attack around to show how Trump’s lies/actions got his men directly killed and they said it will happen again if he doesn’t leave their land.

      Just because a video wasn’t posted on Youtube doesn’t make the attack or the video imaginary nor will it stop people from doing it again. It does hide reality from Americans and other people using that site, which allows their government and corporations to manipulate them easier.

  7. She should change her name to Stalinda

    1984 has descended over NZ. Sad, but not unexpected. The Lions of the Empire were killed off in WW1 & WW2, only the sheep and wolves remain.

  8. I see that the NZ prime minister got herself a story in the Washington Post (aka Pravda on the Potomac) wondering why the U.S. won’t conform to the rest of the world’s expectations with regard to restrictive gun control – after all, Australia’s, the UK’s and New Zealand’s parliaments had no problems slapping immediate and authoritarian gun control on their populaces after shooting incidents. These folks just can’t fathom that the U.S. is different and has a 2nd Amendment…

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/05/15/why-wont-us-change-its-gun-laws-new-zealands-jacinda-ardern-says-i-do-not-understand/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-world%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.856f5b675e4d

    • What they can’t fathom is that the US is government is based on a document and principles that hold the rights of the people to be greater than the power of the state. Unfortunately far to many people in our own government are having the same difficulty and it’s almost too late for the usual corrective action to be effective.

    • We do not want to change our gun laws (other than to return to a Constitutionally Protected Status) because some of us are not idiots on this issue. Some of us comprehend that guns do not do violence, never have and never will. Because they are objects, incapable of thought or deed.

      Generically, “I can’t understand why America _______________” must always be explained issue by issue. On some, conservatives are incredibly wrong headed and out of their fucking minds. On others, the liberals are all that with a cherry on top.

      We do this shit issue by issue. Because our politics are broken by the vast chasm the two political parties have evolved to demand the existence of, and for which their True Believers work very hard to maintain.

  9. And to think… New Zealand was one of the few countries free thinking conservatives thought to escape to if America ever fell to the far left. Guess not!!

    • Ginsberg was right.
      NZ is the ideal place for her to go to escape from Trumpism.

      WRT this news item, the PM does not want anybody to see the terrorist’s manifesto and make the observation that she is actively working to achieve the terrorist’s political goals…one might even call her an accomplice after the fact.

  10. “…We need to address this, too, to ensure that a terrorist attack like this never happens anywhere else. ”

    Right…… Because the shooter never would have done what he did if he didn’t have access to the livestreaming tools.

    • That really isn’t the point.
      What she said is a veiled lie, an excuse to censor because the whole purpose is to suppress the fact that government weasels aren’t really capable of preventing violence. Allowing everyone to witness that truth ruins the credibility behind the authority. We can’t have that – or so she thinks.
      Sick people.

  11. They want AI to censor the entire internet. The corporations and governments will decide what is allowed. Small internet sites won’t be allowed if they don’t accept the unified AI systems.

    Everyone that breaks the rules/laws will be recorded and reported to countries like New Zealand where it is illegal to have or spread censored content.

    You thought corporate news was very bad… Now the internet is becoming their best tool to use against the people as long as they can control it better.

    If you try to use encryption and hide your ID, you will be put on a watch list as suspect. You can’t have anonymity, your ID must be available to the government like they do it in China. To comment on a Chinese website I needed to use my government ID so the state can arrest me if I said anything that’s not allowed.

    This system is already running to an extent in China. They are also tying it into pubic surveillance cameras for social credit scoring and spying.

    • I would not be so smug when mentioning China. The U.S. right now as we speak has more cameras and the corresponding facial recognition technology today than China will get in the next 10 years and in just but two U.S. Cities Big Brother technology is legal and watching and tracking you by recording the average person at least 300 times every day. Black boxes in new car’s track your every move. Credit Card purchases record what you are buying. Logging on to this web site tells Big Brother you probably have guns and lots of them. Subscribing to a gun magazine or newspaper or buying a box of ammo at Walmart tells the government you have a weapon and what caliber of weapon you have so if its outlawed they already know about you. Government eaves dropping on private conversations had not ended. Today they get that info from friendly foreign countries that are listening to your phone conversations and they in turn give it to the U.S. Government who can claim that they did not spy on you, a foreign government did. I could go on but you get the picture. You have about as much “real freedom” as a man that is noosed and waiting for the trap door to be sprung. Like it or not your idea of a modern day revolution is a 16th century fantasy and totally laughable. No one is free in the 21st Century World, no one.

      • Yup.

        Because of the Republicans, America now has a spy network setup and is running it in the shadows. They even use it against their political opponents. They also have secret “courts” and torture facilities.

        Now the Democrats want to use the system the Republicans created to finally create a new order of communism/slavery within America. Since the U.S. is the superpower of the world, this system will make it’s way to all societies one way or the other. They already have a network with other major nations.

        It’s just a matter of time before they flip the switch and bring the system online in the way they planned. Right now it’s all in the background serving other purposes. Once the police state is strong enough they will use it to crush liberty with their iron fist.

        It’s just another human behavioral cycle playing out in front of everyone. But of course, this time it’s “different,” this time it will be better.

        • @User1
          This film, 2001 Space Odyssey and the entire Terminator series and others like these should be mandatory watching for all the automation loving Millennials and their self driving cars, “Smart Guns,” and other automaton obsessions. The New Left (including AOC) and St. Al Gore, Patron Saint of the Internet, should also pay attention. Even Elon Musk is wary of advanced AI. The obvious conclusion any smart AI can only reach is that WE are THE problem.

        • The plan is out there and openly talked about at get public meetings. They have been making movies and books about it for many years.

    • You are already on a watch list if you use encryption. Our security overlords said it out loud, in public, around when the mondo compute center was going in, in the SW.

      If they detect encrypted traftic, they grab n store it (directly, not mandating that carriers do it for them, so they need a warrant, request, authorization thing to get at it.)

      Out loud they said they grab n keep in anticipation of when they can crack standard encryption. My back of the envelope calc says they can crack into select msg targets, some of the time, w/ some social hacking assists.

  12. Sooooooo, Jacinda and Emmanual are teaming up in Paris, and they are going to ensure that terrorists never attack anyone, anywhere, ever again. They plan to accomplish this minor task by eliminating free speech in their respective countries. I admit the evil-doers will find it impossible to carry out their nefarious plots if they are constantly rolling around on the floor, shrieking in helpless laughter.

    • If terrorists kill bunch of people, but nobody can see or hear it, did that terrorist attack really happen?

  13. She’s an idiot. Most creeps will tell you what they are going to do before they do it and if you restrict speech, it makes it a lot more difficult to stop the creep.

  14. My guess is that about 7,900 of those 8,000 people from the land of the long white cloud who sought mental health assistance did so for the increased government benefits given out to nutcases, i.e., dole bludgers (welfare leeches).

  15. It is imperative for a society to struggle with the problem of how to both deny terrorist and murderous scum the reward of the publicity they seek, while also protecting the free speech of the people. It is not supposed to be easy, it has no absolute solution.

    New Zealand’s leadership has made massive errors on the gun issue, enormous royal screw-up that will only do harm to good people and nothing to bad ones. Still, they are not wrong to try to block bad guy’s ability to exploit, to recruit, to advertise, to be rewarded in broad media exposure.

    But based on track record on guns, I do expect them to take this other part of the problem well off the rails with an excessive and heavy hand.

    But that again is the problem. A civilized society MUST struggle with the balance. The next step in which is the common people pushing back where their rights are harmed. I hope they do so.

    • Maybe the corporations should stop glorifying mass murderers, gangsters and serial killers? They love a big story to tell their viewers and the viewers like to watch those stories. They do have shows like Cops, Live PD and The First 48.

      Americans “love” criminals, they find them entertaining, the very bad ones are very hard to ignore. This is not new for America. Back in the day, Americans loved to tell stories of train and bank robbers, hype stories about murderous gun slingers. Criminals tried to be first page news to become the notorious one. At one point criminals wanted to be on the top of the FBI’s wanted list.

      Americans make Hollywood movies and thrilling TV documentaries about criminals and their violence. The worse the criminal the more attention they get and it lasts longer. I think America makes the most content about Hitler (so it appears).

      When there is no real crimes to base American TV around they make up stories that will entertain Americans. They have crime shows on public TV that role plays rape, pedophilia, murder and kidnapping. They even have fake shows like Jerry Springer that become very popular.

      You can’t legislate morality. Making laws won’t change how the people think. Society doesn’t improve because some politician wrote on a piece of paper. You have to raise your kids better and change the culture.

  16. Not really all that surprising. The modern left (not to be co-mingled with old school democrats) are basically just another take on the totalitarians of the last century.

    Rights are the purview of the state, not the citizen, in their very messed up world. Those people need to be dealt with at all costs, cause if we don’t, they’ll be rounding us up and ‘dealing’ with us.

    That is what Totalitarians do.

    • I have only known Democrats to be totalitarians. I don’t know about old school Democrats being about liberty ever. Because of that, I have never been or planned to be a Democrat.

      I think people are confused about what a leftist is and what tyranny is. I know Europeans think fascists are far right. It appears Americans think Democrats were not like they are now. What I seen from Democrats is what I have always seen from Democrats, it’s just not sophisticatedly veiled anymore. They’re openly loud and proud now because they know most of America leans left now and the youth are on their side. They think slow and steady is no longer necessary…

  17. “New Zealand PM Went After Gun Rights…Her Next Target is Free Speech”

    She was on PBS last night with chistiana amonpour, and if you’d seen it, you’d swear she had a god complex, the way she talked made me want to throw up…

  18. The New Zealand Prime Minister can and should deny the right to hate speech. If Adolf Hitler had been unable to promote his racial hate speech its unlikely he would have ever been elected because he would have ended up in jail. Civilized Countries around the world are clamping down on hate speech because they are aware of the honorific legacy of the past for allowing it to go on to promote the rise of a racist dictator.

    No Constitutional right is unlimited, if it were not you could own atomic bombs and poison gas and you could promote the mass murder of minorities and the building of gas chambers which is constantly promoted on Far Right Hate Sites in the U.S. and other countries showing people wearing Brown Shirted uniforms. Its shocking to say the least and that is exactly why sites like Face Book are booting them off permanently. Its a wonder they waited so long to act responsibly as they let that kind of repulsive thing go on for way to long a time.

    Civilized Countries protect the rights of minorities in regards to freedom of religion, the right to vote, the right to live in any town or neighborhood and the right to attend public schools without being required to participate in a “state sanctioned religion” that the Far Right is so found of promoting especially with in the U.S.

    Freedom of Religion, the outlawing of Racial and Religious discrimination and the the belief in the inscription on the Statute of Liberty are what all decent U.S. citizens have always lived by. All this is placed in great peril by allowing hate speech.

    I disagreed with the New Zealand gun ban but trying to use the gun ban to justify hate speech against minorities is to travel down the same path Hitler and Trump took to get elected.

    • How about NO!
      Who will decide which speech is “hate speech”? It’s really easy to mark any opposition’s ideas as hate speech to stifle it as we already see from progressives.
      Unpopular speech is exactly the kind that needs protection

      • Come on get serious. WE are not children here. You know damn well what we are talking about and if you don’t you have serious mental health issues. I suggest you listen to either Adolf Hitlers speeches or Trumps speeches when he ran for president. The hate speech is even far worse or was on Right Wing Hate sights many of which have now been eradicated from the internet. In one of Trumps latest hate rallies they had one Storm Trooper yell that they should start shooting refugees asking for asylum and Trump and the Storm Troopers smiled from ear to ear. It reminded me of Hitler and his speeches and the reaction he got from his crowds of supporters. It was Nazi Germany all over again word for word.

        • ” You know damn well what we are talking about and if you don’t you have serious mental health issues ”

          Then I guess I have some serious mental health issues, because I damn well DON’T know what we are talking about. I know what I’m talking about when I refer to hate speech– I’ve got a pretty clear picture in my head. What I don’t know is what YOU are talking about when you say hate speech. And therein lies the problem– my idea of hate speech tends to fall pretty wide of the mark of what the gubmint calls hate speech. That’s something I can deal with if its just a couple of folks idly talking about hate speech. But the gubmint makes laws and policies and has a near-monopoly on violence to back it up, and in that picture whatever they decide is hate speech is hate speech, and anyone who disagrees could end up in a shit sandwich pretty easily.

          So, yeah, it’s pretty important to hammer out a tight definition of what hate speech is. “You know damn well what we’re talking about” just doesn’t cut it.

    • Progressives only use hate speech against their class enemies. Marx and Engels both in their documented writings used terms that would be regarded today as antisemitic hate speech.

      And Russia has cultural antisemitism. It’s where the Protocols came from, after copying a lot of Machiavelli’s The Prince.

      • Past events are more complex.

        History is created with intentional self fulfilling prophecies and reverse psychology. World wide secretive societies make it so. Socially engineering outcomes.

        Eventually they will get their world government/religion. Currently, the IQ trends say that is the case. They will have their capital in Jerusalem, they will lord over the inferiors.

        Russia will have whatever they are told to have. They will follow orders like America does.

    • Tepes, if you ban hate speech, then you will
      also have to ban hate thought. It is also more
      efficient to deal with issues when they are front
      and forward, rather than being on the back burner.

      Hate speech is emotion and you will never be able
      to reduce nor produce a human being without emotion.

      • Yep, the closest you are going to get to having no emotion is to turn all into narcissistic sociopaths. Yes they get angry when things dont go their way but they have little in the way of most of the rest of the range of human emotions. So you are left with people who only have the worst of emotions but not the best…. nope that not going to work either

  19. Banana Republic turned Police State. She gets way more play than she should for running a country smaller than most major cities.

  20. FDR attacked both, quickly followed with concentration camps for his own people. Remains a Democrat Party hero. Should tell you everything you need to know about the Democrats and those who think like them.

    Canadian Liberal party, which also put its own people in concentration camps, which has promised a gun grab by cabinet. Why haven’t we had an article on this?
    https://twitter.com/TonyclementCPC/status/1126574249236488192

  21. New Zealand’s laws never protected free speech. No other country in the world outside the USA has law protecting free speech, at least to my knowledge.

    • “New Zealand’s laws never protected free speech. No other country in the world outside the USA has law protecting free speech, at least to my knowledge”

      Actually studies have been done on this comparing the U.S. to other countries. The U.S. often has “less freedom of speech” for a variety of reasons but most (but not all) are related to real and also potential lawsuits which prevent many news media organizations from printing hate mail, hate speech, slander etc. etc. Various States and Cities also often have laws against unlimited hate speech or slander as well.

      France was found to have more freedom of speech than the U.S. has but it was also found to be less successful (as liberal as it is) in assimilating refugees but to their credit have taken in 2 million of them and Germany 4 million while the U.S. under the current rabidly racist President has actually lowered its quotas for legal refugees and legal immigrants. One point for each country and one point each against each country excluding Germany. I am comparing France to the U.S.

      U.S. citizens who are not products of education erroneously think the U.S. is number one in everything which really does not hold up to reality. Health Care, Child Care, Vacation time, holidays off, hourly wages, life expectancy, union rights, job retraining by both government and private enterprise, educational programs and their affordability etc.etc. often surprise many U.S. citizens when they see studies that compare the U.S. to foreign countries and the U.S. often comes in far behind other nations. Our child mortality rate was 29th which put some 3rd world African Countries out ahead of us which is the most shocking of all.

  22. Free speech does not exist on social media. Oh, they hide behind “free speech” when the government tries to regulate content, but they actively suppress certain content (making their assertions of being a platform of free speech in congressional testimony a bald-faced lie).

  23. They went after free speech first trying to criminally punish anyone who dared watch the video. More amusing is the way this little irrelevant country that has a primary export of hobbits has been trying to bully the world into quashing free speech everywhere.

  24. Really regretting the planned trip to NZ booked for next month. Booked last year. Not bothering to take rifle anymore.

    NZ police website has had the overseas visitors section removed. If call them they will send you a form but not being published on line.

  25. The true motivation for banning the video of the mosque attacks was to obscure the fact that the prinary weapons were a Mossbrg 930 shotgun and a Remington 870 shotgun rather than the semiautomatic rifles that were banned by this bitch.

    BTW, Jacinda Arden is no Sarah Palin.

    • Not only did the Government State it was a semi-auto rifle but the man who actually attacked the Terrorist specifically stated he took his rifle away from him when he either ran out of ammo in the magazine or it jammed. The Church goer than chased the man with it and then smashed the rifle against the terrorists car which caused him to drive off.

    • That is factually incorrect, have you seen the video?

      2 ARs were used to kill the majority of the people in the video.

      That is not a reason to ban anything.

  26. JWC
    I watched the video. He used the shotgun when he was entering the building. When it ran dry, he dropped it and used his AR. Most were killed/injured by his AR, not his shotgun.

  27. “Her” ??? Ummm not to sure about that. Looks like Crocodile Dundee’s first New York trannie bar hoojup to me.

  28. She completely misses the basis of US law, the US Constitution. Just because her country does not have anything like a Bill of Rights does not mean she understands our law. Oh, and drag the French into this for effect. What do they know about constitutional rights? Might as well draw the Russians into it as well while you are at it.

    • Both France and Russia also have constitutions. I have found the U.S. abides by its Constitution no more religiously than they often do especially Russia. France is less hypocritical of theirs while the U.S. Government are complete hypocrites especially when it comes to 2A which is largely ignored by both politicians who only give it lip service occasionally and by the courts who ignore it altogether. In a way one can expect this as 2A was deliberately written in the most vaguest of terms and can be interpreted either way as far as an individual having any rights. Constitutional Scholars have agreed on this for decades. It was done this way to give the people in government a way to regulate firearms to keep themselves in power. The Founding Fathers were it is true greed mongers, hypocrites and power mad but never the less very clever ones. They made absolutely sure of this by their vaguely written 2A and by avoiding a British style true democratic government and replacing it with a Representative Government installed by the rich and for the rich and it remains so to this very day. (Its interesting to note that the Americans look down their noses at the British but the British were the ones that persevered a democratic government. The U.S. has never had one.) The U.S. Courts have continually chipped away at 2A for decades to strengthen their power over the people whether they be Liberal or Conservative. This is not to say other foreign governments have done the same it is to say that the U.S. is no more sanctimonious when it comes to gun rights than any other country. Bulgaria by the way still permits a person to buy a brand new machine gun while a Republican President (Reagan) outlawed them as “not suitable for sporting purposes” which was soon picked up as gospel by the Democrats, who then wanted to ban about everything military and who also thanked Reagan immensely. President Bush also supported banning semi-auto rifles and even sent his NRA card back to the NRA. So think about this next time you rant and rave against Obama and his anti-gun stance. At least he was unsuccessful while Reagan was successful in banning guns.

      Another example is France. I have not kept up on French law but at one time you could buy a silencer over the counter. I once saw a French Priest shooting pigeons off his church roof with a .22 rifle equipped with a silencer. So much for the myth that the U.S. always has more liberal gun laws than all foreign countries. I once saw a man in Canada hunting with a silencer but Canadian laws also have changed much in recent times. I cannot say if you can still do this. In the U.S. there are States that prohibit hunting with silencers because they fear poachers will use them. Their fears are not unfounded as in Ohio they caught a gang of poachers that had a complete mini-canning factory going using poached deer meat. They did not use silencers but were using .22 mag rifles and when asked why they stated , because of the low noise level. Its amazing Ohio now lets people use silencers when hunting as its now a poachers dream come true. When he may be seen out in the field with one he can say he is target practicing when it is not hunting season and say he is hunting when it is hunting season.

      One thing is certain studies have shown as far back as the 1960’s that with an increase in population there is a increase in crime and mental illness all out of proportion to the actual increase in population. In my short life the population of the U.S. has shot from 225 million to over 300 million. In other words say a 20 per cent increase in population would result in a far higher percentage of mentally ill people and or anti-social behavior and the result in all countries has been more and more restrictions on deadly weapons including the U.S. California Courts have recently stated that civilians carrying guns openly or concealed is a threat to the people in power and their henchmen that guard and protect them therefore carrying a gun for self defense by the public should not be permitted. And they have done just that as some places prohibit concealed carry and they still have older laws also prohibiting open carry. They did not specifically state this but obviously they consider the public to be expendable when it comes to self defense. Obviously California has raped away 2A rights and as usual the courts ignore it all.

  29. ” This enemy you cannot kill, you can only drive it back, damaged, into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for it’s return”

    Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies

  30. Why is she trying to silence Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib?

    Maybe she’s some kind of Islamophobe.

    She needs to be “deplatformed”…

  31. This is why we have the Second Amendment worded specifically the way that it is.
    This is why there is NO argument that can be made for the removal of it.

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