What no politician wants to admit about gun control – Fortunately, no one wants to take away your guns.
But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
Obama DOJ Forced FBI To Delete 500,000 Fugitives From Background Check Database – But remember, gun violence is the NRA’s fault . . .
The Justice Department under Barack Obama directed the FBI to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, acting FBI deputy director David Bowdich testified Wednesday.
Fugitives from justice are barred from buying a firearm under federal law. But what is a fugitive from justice? That definition has been under debate by the FBI and the ATF.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI considered any person with an outstanding arrest warrant to be a fugitive. On the other hand, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives defined a fugitive as someone who has an outstanding arrest warrant and has crossed state lines.
Here’s Why We Didn’t Walk Out of School Yesterday – A couple of skulls with less mush than the their peers . . .
“What happened in Florida is terrible,” says Clayton, a 16-year-old Garnet Valley sophomore and a highly decorated Eagle Scout. “If this were about that, I would have participated, but that’s not what this is about. This was entirely political. In the original email from the school, it said this was being planned by the Women’s March, which protested Trump’s inauguration. I realized this was political and all about gun control.”
Clayton says that his peers who marched claimed that the event was nonpolitical — and that was certainly the party line being held by the national organizers — but Clayton rejects that idea.
“Just because they say it’s nonpolitical doesn’t mean it is,” he says. “What if Trump says he wanted to host a walkout in honor of all the babies aborted, the millions of them? A completely optional walkout. You wouldn’t be forced to do it. The reaction to that would be completely different than to this walkout.”
Ohio-Based Kroger to Remove Magazines with “Assault” Weapons from Stores Nationwide – Now the (dead tree) magazines are going, too . . .
Distributors for the stores have been given a two-week timeline to accomplish the removal.
Specifically, the announcement calls for:
— Removal of magazines with Assault Weapons content
— Placement of Non Assault gun titles to the Top Tier of mainline
— Verify placement of Non Assault gun titles are next to Teen titles or Kids books
Your Right To Free Speech, Like My Right To Self-Defense, Isn’t Open To Debate – There are at least 325 million guns out there . . .
Where this lands us is that even if today’s protesters get their way and legislators vote to impose restrictions on gun ownership and self-defense, that doesn’t mean that those of us who value those rights will change our conduct. Statutes aren’t like the law of gravity—we get to choose whether we’re going to abide by them, or else actively oppose them and sabotage their enforcement. The laws will mostly be obeyed by people who agree with them and disobeyed by people who are either specifically committed to self-defense rights or who more broadly believe that their liberty isn’t open to challenge. I’ve argued elsewhere, only slightly jokingly, that tighter gun laws will leave libertarians better-armed than everybody else—because we’re not very likely to pay them much attention.
The track record on disobeying such laws is very clear. Residents of Connecticut and New York defied requirements that they register their so-called “assault weapons.” Gun owners in Colorado ignored mandates that they pass all their person-to-person sales through the background check system. Even the French and Germans flip the bird to laws that gun-haters can only dream of imposing in the United States, owning millions of illegal firearms that supporters of restrictions wish they didn’t have.
Bay Area coffee shop won’t serve police for ‘safety of customers’ – What kind of response time do you think they should expect for a 911 call?
A coffee shop in Oakland is refusing to serve law enforcement officers for the “physical and emotional safety of our customers and ourselves,” according to the shop’s social media.
Hasta Muerte Coffee, an employee-owned co-op, will not serve officers in uniform and turned away an officer a few weeks ago, as reported by NBC Bay Area.
The sergeant who was turned away from the shop a few weeks ago said he was surprised by employees refusing to serve him, but walked out without any incident or any coffee.
Coffee shop workers did not respond to requests for comment on the policy, but a post on their Instagram account showed a photo with writing in Spanish that says, “Talk to your neighbors, not the police.”
Shaquille O’Neal’s solution for safer schools is more cops; says gun ban not the answer – He’s roughly the equivalent of two Colin Kaepernicks . . .
“The government should give law enforcement more money,” he said on WABC Radio on Wednesday, via ESPN. “Give more money, you recruit more people, and the guys that are not ready to go on the streets, you put them in front of the schools. You put ’em in front of the schools, you put ’em behind the schools, you put ’em inside the schools, and we need to pass information. … I would like to see police officers in schools, inner cities, private schools.”
O’Neal points out that the prevalence of weapons already on the street would make a ban counterproductive, and allow the black market to thrive.
“There’s a lot of those weapons already on the streets,” O’Neal said. “So it’s not like, if you say, ‘OK, these weapons are banned,’ people are gonna go, ‘Oh man, let me turn it in.’ That’s definitely not going to happen. [Because] once you ban ’em, now they’re going to become a collector’s item and you’re going to have people underground, and they were $2,000. … I’ll give you $9,000 for that gun. So, you know, we just need to keep our eyes open.”
Poconos gunmaker’s vision: an AR-15 for every American – Is Kahr Arms getting into the AR business? . . .
“I’m going to make a standard AR-15 with my brand on it,” he said. “The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America. It’s the most common rifle in America.”
The NRA estimates that eight million Americans own an AR-15. It has also been used in five of the six deadliest mass shootings in the nation in the last six years, most recently in the Parkland, Fla., massacre.
Moon said he follows state and federal firearms laws but does not support age restrictions, limitations on specific guns, or even bans on the bump stock, an attachment that uses a semiautomatic rifle’s recoil to fire even faster — the reason why Stephen Paddock was able to kill so many people in Las Vegas last year. In fact, Moon believes the Founding Fathers intended the Second Amendment to evolve with the times, that citizens should be allowed to own any firearms they can literally carry in order to match the government’s firepower.
After Parkland, Companies Are Selling Uncertified Bulletproof Backpacks – Caveat emptor . . .
BackPack Armor claims its bulletproof insert is “level IIIA certified” and “makes every book bag bulletproof.” Level IIIA–certified products protect against most handgun threats: .357 SIG FMJ flat nose bullets at a velocity of 1,470 feet per second or less, and 44 magnum semi-jacketed hollow-point bullets at a velocity of 1,430 feet per second or less, according to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the Justice Department agency that oversees body armor used by law enforcement.
But BackPack Armor’s backpack inserts are not NIJ certified — none are. The agency has never certified such products; it hasn’t even tested them. “Marketing that claims NIJ testing or certification for such products is false,” it said in a Feb. 28 statement. And level IIIA-certified products do not not protect against assault rifle fire, like the kind unleashed in Parkland. (A previous statement on BackPack Armor’s site that said it does not guarantee protection against an AR-15 round has since been removed.)
Asa a Kahr guy… who only rides motorcycles….
I say bravo, Justin Moon. It might be a little late for it to be profitable (or, who knows, maybe you’re just in time to surf the Next Great Panic again…), but whatever! You said it, and boy it sounded refreshing. Price it and tier it like your pistols, and we will buy them.
(PS…Hey… you know who you are, so stop typing! And just pullleeeeeze save all “But but but Moonie Church! Mooooonies! Sum Dum Moonie!” Nobody gives a single solitary fk about his dad or his church– that’s the 1st Amendment, man. Don’t like the sins of the father, go buy something else.)
Is there a difference between the Obama administration deleting over half a million convicted criminals from a data base and the three L’s, Libertarians Liberals and the Left letting over half a million criminals into the United States with the open borders policy they support????
“And level IIIA-certified products do not not protect against assault rifle fire, like the kind unleashed in Parkland.”
So, it doesn’t protect against full-auto fire, eh? How about semi-auto fire?
7.62 x 51, 7.62 x 39, or 5.56 x 45?
“getting us down to European levels of violence”
you mean “bringing us up to European levels of violence”
Why am I not surprised that a Boy Scout (eagle) knows more about the Bill Of Rights than the average school kid????
Confiscation, collection and destruction of guns is an absolute crime. It is a terrible loss of history as well. I have a particular thing for the SMLE rifle. It pains me to see them thrown on a heap for destruction.
If Mr. Moon markets an AR-15, I may add one to my collection. I have several AR-15s, but I want to support the political statement.
Yep. Me too and I’ll be supporting a local business in the process.
Kahr makes a quality product. I’d buy his AR15…does it seem like the dumbocrats are conspiring with a lonnnnng timeline?!? Alinsky would be proud. Good on you Eagle Scout. Here’s to a successful life…
They absolutely will not take guns on a large scale , the gov knows they can’t take all of America’s firearms. ” Hey Ironicat did you see the price on Lyman’s new single stage reloader? Only $17,776 and 51 cents.” ..,. anyone interested in some paperweights, America’s got tons of them.
Does anyone actually shop at Kroger? Every single Kroger’s in my area has closed in the past decade, due to their high prices. I went into a Kroger’s one time. Walked up and down half a dozen aisles, then walked out without buying a single thing. Went down the road to Food Lion and saved at least a hundred bucks.
I was at a Fred Meyer today and there were no gun magazines in sight. They used to carry a good selection.
“Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.”
Realistically, a … plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking huge numbers of guns away from huge numbers of already prohibited, illegal gun “owners.”
What’s the stats? I wanna see a breakdown of violence with guns, by illegal vs. legal owners. You wanna take guns from lawful owners, demonstrate they’re the problem. (Hint: they’re not.)
Jackholes
Don’t you know? It’s not violence unless a firearm is used. If you’re stabbed or bludgeoned it’s perfectly ok with them.
“What kind of response time do you think they should expect for a 911 call?”
-Not as fast as if there were a cop inside, but I don’t know any cops that keep a list of businesses that they will slow down a response for if there’s an emergency call. If the place is getting robbed cops are going to be trying to get there.
Now, that said, there’s a lot of discretion in policing. So if that same business calls the police for some stupid BS, they might find themselves receiving less patience for it. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t see the guy panhandling from your customers and I don’t have all day to stake the place out to try and write him a ticket.”
But I bet they aren’t going to call the police much anyway since someone in there has a warrant or at least a significant criminal history.
We should chip in and get that Eagle Scout a Kahr AR.
He’s not 21?
That sucks.
In many ways.
@Rick the Bear
I know you’re trying to be funny, but by definition assault rifles have to have a semi-automatic setting (otherwise they would simply be “automatic rifles” like the BAR), and NIJ IIIA doesn’t protect against intermediate rifle cartridges like .223Rem/5.56×45 and 7.62×39 at any rate of fire, much less full-power rifle cartridges like .308Win/7.62×51 NATO.
Kroger also owns Smith’s, Fred Meyer’s City Market, Littman Jewelry, Dillions, Baker’s Fresh/Grocery, Fry’s Food Store, Ralph’s, Waffle house (Kroger, Waffle House Employees May Have Spread Deadly Hepatitis Outbreak in Kentucky) and probably more.
From the same VOX article: “Think about it this way. In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. That same year, the UK endured 144 gun deaths total — or 2.2 gun deaths per million people.”
This is a false equivalence. The 10.6/100,000 figure includes suicides; the actual murder rate in the US is closer to 4.4/100.000 (of which 24% were NOT gun related). Thus the true figure for firearm murders is app. 3.3/100,000, and a full 20% of the increase from 4.2 to 4.4 in 2016 was due to the murders in Chicago.
Presumably the UK gun deaths include few if any suicides due to the absence of firearms. Moreover, there were 427 NONgun murders in the UK; when these are included with the gun murders, the murder rate jumps from .22 to .92 per 100,000.
“Does anyone actually shop at Kroger?”
Depends on where people live. They have stores under a bunch of names. In my town there are basically two choices. A large King Soopers and a small one. I often drive 35 minutes to Sprouts because 85% of the time the King Soopers have no meat worth buying.
They also have insanely high prices because they figure they have a captive audience. Not too many people are willing to drive to a larger town and there you’ll find Sprouts, more King Soopers and the even more pricey Whole Foods.
I wonder how Kroger is going to square pulling Guns & Ammo magazine from the shelves in a Fred Meyer that sells actual guns and ammo. I don’t remember whether the Freddie’s gun counter carries ARs but the last time I was at one they had plenty of Glocks.
Although I’m sure that coffee shop is more concernened about HUr duR guuuuunnNnnZZ (fart noise) and BLM’s asinine, punk-ass bullshit, I actually have a hard time disagreeing with them. Cops aren’t exactly known for being highly trained with their weapons, and in a place like urban CA I’m sure most of the rank and file are NOT gun people. Definitely not beyond the realm of reasonable possibility for a cop to have an ND (I’m sorry, to have the gun “just go off”, because that’s a thing that happens apparently) inside the store
Also, TTaG, WTF? I STILL have to enter my info almost every time when I comment. Didn’t you guys claim to have fixed that shit months ago?
The thing about that Vox article that pisses me off is how open she is at the end about her liberal agenda. “Abolish all immigration laws and give everyone a free check from the government”
*Spit*
I’d like to propose a law that mass shooters must use a bow and arrow.
We have ALDIS and WAL-MART here in Arkansas. Kroger can’t compete but really, who buys they’re magazines at the grocery store? I only read them while my wife shops.
At my kids HS the 7 skulls for of mush who wanted to “walk out” Wed were told to get back to class or getting detention. They stayed in class. Failed prog devotion to riot.
I contacted the Iowa extremeleftist progtard Attorney General to inquire what they were going to do about the abuse of students by teachers organizing. They weren’t interested “contact the State Teacher Licensing board”
The ATF has this one right, and Obama probably did too. A guy with a bench warrant for failure to appear for a traffic ticket should not be on the Fugitive List and be denied a firearm.
The coffee shop is well within it’s rights to deny service to government thugs. They probably don’t have any dogs that need to be shot or kids that need to be molested, so why have a cop around?
I don’t want an AR. The AR sucks as a platform. Every one I have bought I ended up selling within a couple weeks. If you want one, go for it.
The irony of the Vox article is breathtaking. On the one hand, they have the courage to admit that confiscation is their ideal end goal “going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners“. On the other hand, they are too cowardly to have a comment section. Nevertheless, I wish more of these Liberal Terrorist™️, and bonafide domestic enemies would be this honest, all the time. Show some consistency with that new found, emboldened backbone, you soy sc@mbags. In fact, make an official plank to the Democrat Party. “Yes we can…take your guns, the second it becomes politically expedient”!!!!
The “War of Leftist Aggression”, or as I like to call it, the Great Restorative War, where we see our country restored to what our Founders intended, is coming. Buy rifles, ammo, rifle plates, and training for all your family members.
Please help save our 2nd Amendment rights. Please pass the first link to others so we can get this petition sent to the White House.
Oppose Gun Control and Weapons Ban Legislation
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/oppose-gun-control-and-weapons-ban-legislation
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov
I think the NRA’s estimate of 8 million AR pattern rifles already owned privately in the U.S. is low. I meet people who have multiple AR’s all the time. A few years back I spent a rainy afternoon gathering estimates of how many armed boots the gub’ment could commit to enforcing a confiscation scheme and came-up with about 1.2 million in Military, Law Enforcement and Armed Govt Agencies, then you subtract estimates for non-combatants, Military overseas and those whose duty station cannot be left unattended, and I got about 400,000 who could actually be committed to forced seizures. Then, you might reasonably estimate a 150,000 would simply refuse to participate, so that leaves about 20% of 1.2 million, or around 240,000. IF there are 100 million gun owners and 20% of them actively resist, that’s 20 million, or about 83 to 1 [if all 400000 participated that makes the ratio around 77 to 1]. So, it looks like the Feds and States would have a real problem.*
Personally, I think Shaquille O’Neal is right about the large number of guns that would flow into the Black Market, or “Iron Pipeline”. I’d add to his remark the U.S. would see a tsunami of increased criminal activity.
*NOTE: The figures I found are about two years old. I simply took the best information I could find and best estimates I could make based on those figures and other information. My suspicion was that the number of 100 million private gun owners and 300 to 500 million privately owned guns was larger than the number of armed Government personnel. I was surprised about how much smaller the Government’s numbers turned-out to be. My findings possibly have a margin of error of +/- 20%, but I was looking for a “ballpark” result, so, if anyone else has better, more accurate numbers and wants to share. Great! I suspect the end result will look much the same. Another reason to Thank the Founders for the Second Amendment.
The coffee shop is probably a front for an illegal alien smuggling ring.
Do people actually still buy paper magazines?
Also, who broke the Reply button?
From the VOX site:
“Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate. Countries with more guns have more gun homicides. States with more guns have more gun homicides. Individuals with guns in the house are likelier to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.”
This comment summarizes some of the most often repeated rationalizations for gun control (in this case, making an argument for actual gun confiscation). The “research” the author mentions, however, is correlational research which basically consists of taking one factoid, comparing it to another factoid and then declaring some kind of “causality”. Chicken Little getting hit in the head by an acorn and then deciding the sky was falling was “causality”.
Political activists love this stuff because you can correlate anything with anything else and call it “research”. Thus you get this oft repeated, completely witless canard that guns in the house make it more likely to be killed with a gun. This, of course, makes wonderful sense to people who don’t much like guns but this is hardly the great truth it appears to be. Using the same logic we can comfortably state that the presence of a gun in the house makes it more likely you’ll defend yourself with a gun during a home invasion. Or, even worse, it’s equally easy to claim that since affluent home owners can more easily afford firearms, they’re more likely to kill a underclass-class minority home invader who is already oppressed by chronic income inequality and “grinding poverty”. Or, as the relative of a recently deceased home invader asked,
“He’s from the hood, how he goin’ get money for school and stuff?”
Why do many of TTAG’s posts not include the source of the quotes that they print?
It’s very confusing when a major chunk of the context of the article is missing. When the source of the information printed is not revealed, us readers often have no idea what the point of the article is. Not naming the source of the quotes coupled with the heavy doses of sarcasm used by TTAG’s bloggers often leave us readers wondering what we just read.
@Rad in Co:
The reason the coffee shop in question won’t serve LEOs has nothing to do with guns.
Instead, it has to do with the patrons usually including illegals, at any given time. Plus, the shop is employee owned, so some of the owners could very well be illegally here as well.
I can’t “reply” either but I agree about Kahr/Moon. I like everything he said. I think his dad was a kook and cult leader big deal I own 2 Kahr’s and bought a Tommy Gun (since sold.) I’m not supporting the Moonies, I’m buying guns.
That Reason article was excellent. I’m less supportive of those chirping to strip me of my rights, but he makes an excellent point. We should be vocal (and honest) to say “I will not comply” if you want violate our rights en masse its gonna get real ugly. Consequences.
We now live in a reality where Shaquille O’Neal is a voice of reason.
Color me shocked about how far we have fallen as a society where he is more rational and intelligent than the rest of the useful idiots out there. I expect him to lose all of his endorsements now for speaking against the narrative.