Northam creates separate school safety work group that could look at gun control
TTAG reader Chris thinks this is an attempt to end-around the legislative committee, designed to put more gun control options on the table.
As Virginia lawmakers grapple with the best way to approach student safety, Gov. Ralph Northam has created his own group to investigate the issue — and it could look at gun control.
Northam on Thursday announced the Work Group on Student Safety, a 20-person panel made up of state, local and school officials, along with some community members, that will consider ways to improve school safety.
The issue has been front and center in education since a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine’s Day.
The governor’s formation of his own work group comes as members of the House of Delegates continue to meet through a special committee formed by Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
Yorktown sheds olde light on modern gun debate
At the founding, the militia was the people . . .
Independence led to a loose confederation with myriad problems. Hamilton and Madison pushed for the 1787 convention that group-wrote the federalizing Constitution for a “more perfect union” and co-authored the Federalist Papers that greased the skids for its approval. The initial amendments were 1791 add-ons to coax ratification from the 13 wary states: Having recently won independence, they didn’t want to surrender key rights to a new central government.
“The Second Amendment has to do with concerns about the federal government controlling state militias,” says Kevin Hardwick, a colonial history professor at Virginia’s James Madison University. “Pretty much all agreed that a standing army in times of peace was a bad idea: It could be misused to put the government in a more authoritarian direction. How do you protect against this? According to the theory of the time, you rely on citizen militia, like what is now the National Guard.
“In slave states, they took this pretty seriously; they were always worried about slave insurrections. But all states had their own militia.”
In 2008, Hardwick notes, the Supreme Court affirmed in District of Columbia v. Heller that Second Amendment militia protection extends to individuals who own/use weapons lawfully for self-defense.
An Important Turning Point for the Supreme Court and Our Second Amendment
The extent of the anti-gunl left’s freak-out over Kavanaugh is a very positive sign . . .
Ten years ago, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that the 2nd Amendment protected the right of individuals to have a gun for self-defense.
This ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down an outrageous District of Columbia law that prohibited residents from keeping a handgun at home. It was landmark victory in support of our Constitutional freedoms and the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their families.
However, since Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court has largely shied away from considering other important cases on gun rights. It takes the votes of four justices to hear a lower court appeal and five votes to issue a ruling. However, the suggestion has been that Justice Anthony Kennedy who has long been the key swing vote on the Court was not willing to go further on critical outstanding issues like constitutional carry and concealed carry reciprocity.
David Hogg’s Hyped Book Hit the Market with a Thud
You mean no one is interested in reading a ghost-written gun control screed by that happy-faced kid? Get outta town! . . .
A look into the book’s sales is a bit of a challenge. For one week the New York Times listed “#Never Again” on its top-10 non-fiction list, but this is a bit of a dubious source.
For one, the Times’ list is infamous for being more about editorial selections than it is for an accurate reflection of what’s popular with readers. Secondly, the paper of record does not provide actual sales figures. I combed through a few weeks of Amazon’s sellers in a few different categories, yet even on their larger top-20, the title does not appear. Likewise at Barnes & Noble.
It took the figures provided by Publishers Weekly to get a grip on this title’s fortunes. PW provides an even more expanded weekly list, as well as actual sales numbers. On its July 2 tabulation, “#Never Again made its debut on the tertiary Trade Paperback list — managing to reach the list at No. 25. By that date, the Hoggs’ book had sold a total of 3,741 copies. To offer some perspective, the top-selling book that week sold more than 60,000 copies; the top non-fiction paperback, more than 15,000 copies.
That chart result was a reflection of the Fallon appearance and other tour stops, but by the following week, the book had fallen from the list. It becomes apparent that when it came to buying into the Hogg message, few buyers have pulled the trigger.
The latest protests against the Chicago police are about more than one shooting
Oh, there’s no shortage of reasons to criticize the performance of the CPD . . .
The latest round of protests in Chicago over the police is, at face value, about the police shooting of 37-year-old Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a black barber working in the city’s South Shore neighborhood. But the demonstrations — and the anger that led to them — are really rooted in generations of criticisms against a police department that has been repeatedly found to be abusive of residents and racially discriminatory.
It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them.
This history helps explain why the department’s insistence that the shooting was justified and the video footage showing that Augustus was armed have done little to quell community skepticism and criticism.
Freedomtoons makes a lot of good videos. The Debunkers is good but arguments with Strawmen Is hilarious.
I agree with that.
Northam and Hogg…the hysteria is real and the facts don’t matter.
I know what I’d like to do with Hoggs book and it would be done to Hogg himself. I’ll leave that up to your imagination what I’m talking about.
If Hogg held his book in front of him, one could wonder what caliber would be the biggest that wouldn’t go through the book. Besides 6.5 CM, of course.
“But the demonstrations — and the anger that led to them — are really rooted in generations of criticisms against a police department that has been repeatedly found to be abusive of residents and racially discriminatory.”
And yet, after years of the Chiraq fuzz riding roughshod over the African-American neighborhoods in Chicago, they remain cesspools of violence.
It’s amazing!
Got a suggestion to the demonstrators. If you do not want to be treated as ” animals or sub humans ” then quit acting the part !
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey poop all over you.
“take our advice, at any price…”
Please Ralph, please. Send this comment to chiraq’s editorial page. It would cause massive strokes to all the progs who read it. Wait, they’d never read it. Lets rent some billboards! The cognitive dissonance would cause widespread aneurysms. Like the killer joke.
Loved the video. I cracked up when it referenced calling Tom Woods a thousand times. As far as I knew, Tom isn’t a gun guy, he’s not against them, just not in his wheel house. But he’s incredibly smart, nice, and very hard working. And super down to earth.
The National Guard is not the militia. To be a militia:
Cannot be used outside of your home state.
Use PRIVATELY owned weapons.
The National Guard is 100% equipped with federal arms and equipment. Every pistol on up is marked ‘property of US government’.
To argue that the National Guard supports the premise that the 2nd amendment, strangely, is simply the right of the government to arm itself.
Anyone of military age and that owns a weapon that has military applications is part of the militia.
Same thing I have been saying but you supplied more info, thank you.
It drives me crazy how that misinformation gets abused. The National Guard is a standing army. Part time, but a standing army.
My understanding of language usage at the time does not hold the National Guard as a “standing army”, since the definition at the time was an army housed in the private homes in the surrounding area, such as a British army taking over your home while fighting against your militia. Feel free to disagree, I wasn’t there either.
@ Larry, that is the point. The national guard — today — is a standing army and we know for a fact that the founders did not mean to use militia, in and of its definitions (all the people during non conflict periods , and less commonly called up militia) as anything like todays guard — which is a standing army.
So either way the claim the guard is the “militia” in either a contemporary or historic sense, for Second Amendment purposes, is we all agree not supported. The guard is not the “militia”
The “National Guard” (pick a state) is an arm of the “government”. The Bill of Rights” recite protections FROM government. The “protector” cannot also be what is being “protected from”, and all is superseded by the 2nd Paragraph of The Declaration of Independence.
Everyone knows the Bill of Rights devoted 9 amendment to the rights of the people and states, but 1 amendment to giving the government a power that’s entirely redundant with the power it already had to raise and maintain armies.
Everybody knows that the Bill Of Rights are collective and thus give the government more freedoms. The Rights do not apply to individuals.
@ Tom in IN
Everybody knows your logic is broke (D)1ck. The Constitution (of which the Bill of Rights is a part) is our third attempt at securing what we demand of/by/for/from each other as delineated in The Declaration of Independence. The Second Paragraph of that document clearly leaves open TO THE LAST-MAN (individual) the inexorable right to chuck the “government” with severe, permanent, and capital, violence aforethought. They are ALL
INDIVIDUAL
RIGHTS
or they are not rights at all, and if the former is claimed true by anyone that should cost them their pelt, because we’ve already adjudicated the point sufficiently, with requisite violence, so we only break that seal open to the detractors’ detriment.
“and if the former is claimed un-true by anyone that should cost them their pelt, “
Damn no edit on cell phone posts.
I guess people forgot that the National Guard was sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to work checkpoints. Seems like the militia became the National Guard, then the National Guard became the International Guard.
The same creep is happening to police departments with their militarization. They can be a much bigger danger to America than the Army, Navy, National Guard and Coast Guard. I heard a lot of military guys, from my generation, say very negative things about the current police force (mostly about the guys who never served).
David, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
I have nothing against the National gaurd but they are not a militia by any historical or modern definition.
The National Guard is a wholly owned entity of the Federal government and can be taken from the states at any time, without their permission.
If you don’t believe me, ask any of the Democrat governors who tried to withhold Guard troops from the missions to Central America on which Ronald Reagan sent them.
But the Guard belongs….
to whom exactly?
Huh, and here I thought that both armies in the Civil War had large numbers of independent militias acting under a unified central command engaging in military aggression outside their states of origin.
And at the Battle of New Orleans Jackson’s forces consisted of the following: Jackson’s total of 4,732 men was made up of 968 United States Army regulars, 58 United States Marines (holding the center of the defensive line), 106 seamen of the United States Naval Battalion, 1,060 Louisiana militia and volunteers (including 462 free people of color), 1,352 Tennessee militia, 986 Kentucky militia, 150 Mississippi militia, and 52 Choctaw warriors, along with a force from the pirate Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians.
Just sayin.
The fact is that the purpose of the militias was not just to maintain local defense, but to replace a standing army. That we maintained a small army had to do with the fact that the ban of a standing army in the Articles of Confederation was dropped in recognition of hte fact that a well trained officer corps and a core of experienced soldiers was necessary to the national defense.
During the revolutionary war the militia stayed home and only augmented the continental army when the war was in their state.
Huh? Where did we get a “continental army” in 1776?
larry,The Continental army was chartered by Congress and was full time enlisted persons. what it was not was the militias (nor state armies also used in revolutionary war). The militias sometimes fought on their own, sometimes supplemented the continental army when the army fought in their state.
They were not comprised of the same people, not under the same authority, were fundamentally different in their organization.
You do understand that Congress and its appointed military leaders could tell the Continental Army personnel to go fight anywhere, under pain of capitol offense if refusing, but could not tell the militia members any such thing?
The Continental Army was modeled on European army structures, the militia quite the opposite.
Organized Militia and Unorganized Militia.
“It’s not, then, just about this police shooting…”
Ah yes, the perennial moving of the goalposts whenever yet another supposed ‘police brutality event” is shown to be bullshit. Oh, it’s not really about suspect X getting shot, it’s about the pattern! Look at the case of Y! Oh, you happen to have video that shows Y was armed too? Well, you’re missing the context. It’s REALLY about when the police shoot people like Z, who was just getting his life around! Oh, yes, well he had just robbed a store and was trying to flatten a cop, but let’s not forget about what they did to X! And so on, and so on. Even as incidents were shown to be justified they are thrown on the narrative to establish it further because when some community activist lists off the names of twenty men killed by the police (and no the 500+ killed by their fellow community members) no one is going to have time to explain why 19 of those incidents were legal and often entirely necessary shootings.
Such convoluted attempts at deflection wouldn’t be necessary if BLM and associated groups would hold off on trying to start a riot until any facts of the case were available. But hey, Good Morning America wants to make a statement and doesn’t need facts to mess up the racial narrative that cops put on their uniform every day looking to shoot minorities.
You’re missing the context.
Americans have their human right to self preservation written into the supreme law of the land. They need not ask for permission from a chief to exercise that human/civil right inside the constitutional republic. Americans also have the right to provide the security of a free state. That shall not be infringed.
Creating a law requiring permission to keep and bear arms is an unlawful act of insurrection. The militia has the duty to put a stop to the enforcement of such bills. If an American — by default a member of the militia —
stands in armed resistance of such treasonous acts, they should not be looked at as a criminal, they should be considered a patriot.
Nobody trusts the Chicago PD. No sane, knowledgeable adult COULD.
If you don’t know why, ask Carolina Obrycka.
If one is actually interested in what is happening in Chicago you will need to go to secondcitycop.com and heyjackass.com. There are no filters at either site.
i wouldn’t say none. ssc moderates each and every comment, and hja! disabled comments entirely years ago as some fairly fierce bigots had set up shop there. as far as content, i agree. brutal truths that the ivory tower tracks and denounces. it was very satisfying when pheather phuquetard acknowledged one of the blogs recently.
trust [chicago] cops? i certainly do. i trust them to behave exactly as i expect them to. they seldom disappoint. it’s a job. act like a jackass and reap even more predictable responses.
“No filters”? That’s a joke.
SCC regularly censors:
1. people critical of the CPD
2. comments that would give an indication of how Chicago cops REALLY feel about the public at large. Example: He started censoring comments that referred to EVERY Black person on the South Side of Chicago as “savages”… but not until the Sun Times and other media outlets started commenting on it.
In what way did Carolina Obrycka, her employer and her co-workers act like “jackasses”? By refusing to serve liquor to a woman beating coward? By refusing to turn over the tape of the beating? Or by standing up to the intimidation and pressing charges?
Most people don’t think of the 2nd Amendment in terms of protecting the people’s right to form a militia and for it not to be controlled by the government… They think a standing Army, Marines, etc, is a fantastic idea. Republicans love to advocate for socializing a powerful standing army that polices the world and joins tangling alliances. The Democrats love to have a police department provide the security of the state and Republicans don’t mind.
Hardly any American wants to follow what the founders wanted; which was the people keeping and bearing arms, being well trained and policing their own community/state. Some places in Mexico are doing just that. Kind of a surprise that Mexico would be more American than Americans in that regard, although, some are doing so by breaking their laws. Try going around protecting your neighborhood armed, see how long that (or you) lasts.
The words “well regulated” wasn’t implying there are to be laws that govern the rights of Americans, it refers to how one is to conduct war and operate their weapons. So, these days “well regulated” would be called “highly trained.”
Don’t worry about Hogg’s book, Bloomberg will probably buy a few.
B-Loon-Berg can always use his copies for starting a fire in his fireplace,that or bird cage liner.
I’ll just add, Thomas Jefferson was so fanatical about not having a standing army, and having all military power in the hands of the people, he was very resistant to the idea of a deep water navy at all. He wanted our navy to be tons of single cannon boats (effectively rowboats) swarming any navy that attacked us. I.e. he wanted civilians to have cannons on little rowboats all up and down the coast (effectively beyond any government control) to defend from navies and pirates. Makes the argument about “military” arms in the hands of civilians not being acceptable sound really dumb, but I doubt many people have taken naval history. Or, for that matter, read some of the old state constitutions, those people were HARD core. Live free or die meant the right, codified in the state constitution, to revolution against tyranny. You need some heavy duty weapons to enforce the right…
I’m not for a standing army nor defining the National Guard as the militia.
There is an argument that can be made for having a strong and ready air force and navy. The air force is not used against the American people like the army is and modern invasion is done via the air. The navy roams the waters surrounding the continent, it obviously doesn’t patrol on land. That doesn’t mean you are free to create a ground force within the navy and air force.
When a country has a standing army it loses its liberty and eventually its freedom. The whole “just following orders” and “get some” mentality.
And yet it was Jefferson who sent the newly formed Marines to the Barbary coast to kill off the pirates who were raiding th oceans, taking prisoners and demanding outlandish ransoms for their return.
So, in truth, we’ve been at war with the musloids for a couple hundred years.
Jefferson changed his mind, somewhat and eventually, and the Barbary Pirates has a part in it for sure. Mind, I agree he had a point, though I think we definitely need something for land defense. But while we can’t mimic them exactly, I like the Swiss model. Heavily armed, everything mined, and willing to leave everyone else alone if they are left alone. Something to be said for that…the founders thought so too, from what I’ve read, and really liked the Swiss republic even then.
“At the founding, the militia was the people . . .”
The Leftards can’t come to grips with the fact of the Constitution,to whit the Hogg Book Thud or is that Turd.
I’m continually surprised the natives don’t riot in Chiraq. Oh and it’s my 35th anniversary moving to Chicagoland today. Do I blame homie for acting up??? Dunno’ what burning down the Westside/Southside 50 years ago accomplished…I’ve met some pretty sh###y cops in 35 years. Hoggboy’s 15 minutes is up. Jr. College for you boy(did you even graduate genius?!?).
“Dunno’ what burning down the Westside/Southside 50 years ago accomplished…”
it created schaumburg and hoffman estates.
and naperville.
In Virginia with Northam you know damn well the failed casting couch gloryholer-backstage-boi/failed Broadway “actor” Andy Parker of Smith Mountain Lake is involved in the scheming to grab guns. That effeminate POS just can’t stand not being on the stage or in front of an audience, I’ll be he thanks Satan every day that his daughter was murdered on live TV giving him another shot at the spotlight…
correction:
I’ll bet he thanks Satan every day
Independence led to a loose confederation with myriad problems.
The Constitution led to a tight federation with myriad problems.
Patrick Henry may have been more right than wrong.
The Chicago PD lost the benefit of the doubt when it explicitly refused to protect the Black community from White arsonists and rioters like future mayor Richard J. Daley in 1919. I’m probably only here because returned doughboys like my great uncles broke into the National Guard armories and armed themselves in defense of their community.
From being bag men for mobsters, to operating robbery and home invasion rings, to trying to stomp barmaids to death, then threatening to frame the victim and witnesses, the Chicago PD has earned its reputation in spades. It’s the most corrupt “law enforcement” agency in the U.S., if not North America.
Like everything else in Chicago “government” it’s cravenly corrupt, and shockingly incompetent.
But then Chicagoans must like the backed up toilet in which they live. After all, they’ve been voting for the same thing for over a hundred years. By the way, I’m almost sixty two and there hasn’t been a Republican mayor in my lifetime.
“In slave states, they took this pretty seriously; they were always worried about slave insurrections.
See, the 2A really was instituted so evil white men could oppress negroes. Another form of institutionalized racism that has to go.
Only the government has the wit, fortitude and training to be trusted with guns.
We can’t trust some people with freedom of speech. Especially those who use it to try to limit others rights.
Actually, the 2A ensures that government National Guard units have rights to guns. A collective right if there ever was one!
Yeah, that was a pretty stupid argument.
Uncle Tom’s not from here.
Joe, you need to get your sarkasm meter checked.
This fellow is being accused of calling the Parkland Brats “silly little immature media prosti-tots.”
Yeah, so he speaks the truth, what wrong with that?
https://abc11.com/politics/critics-blast-appalling-speaker-invited-to-hillsborough-gun-rally/3797251/
The portion of the Heller decision affirming the RKBA as an individual (not “collective”) right was 9-0. The portion of Heller regarding what guns can be banned and striking down part of D.C.’s gun control ordinances was 5-4.