Progressives are evil gun-grabbing idiots
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.”
– Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.”
– Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787
“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
– St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803
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With the massacre in Uvalde, we have yet another school shooting by a mentally ill man, another failed police response, then followed like clockwork by another attempt by progressives to manipulate the emotional response of America. The progressive goal is not to protect children or else the progressives would be hardening schools to make them unattractive targets. Democrats reject that. Their only goal is to impose substantial new laws limiting gun ownership — the Second Amendment to the Constitution be damned.
More specifically, in the wake of Uvalde, Biden (though since walked back by his staff) seems to want to ban the most popular class of handguns in America, while his Vice President explicitly wants to ban the most popular class of rifles. [NOTE: Since I wrote this post but before publishing, Biden also came out tonight arguing for an “assault weapons ban, to raise the purchase age for firearms, and pass red flag gun laws.”] And the usual suspects in Congress are pushing their gun-grabbing agenda as I write this, irrespective of the fact that nothing they propose would likely have stopped the police-enabled massacre at Uvalde. But putting any of these things into law would be a large step down the slippery-slope to nullifying the Second Amendment.
Before getting started on their arguments, it is always worth remembering that history teaches that governments disarm the disfavored parts of their populations so that they can’t fight back against tyranny. Here in the U.S., progressives want to disarm conservatives. A disarmed population can be terrorized as governments seize permanent power and impose their will on a cowed populace.
History is replete with examples of the above. Soon after taking power, the Soviets disarmed all but card-carrying Communists before murdering tens of millions of their citizens, as did the Chinese Communists. The Nazis disarmed Jews before implementing the Final Solution, murdering six million Jews. More recently, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela disarmed his population before packing Venezuela’s Supreme Court and imposing a socialist government that still rules Venezuela by force to this day. So when some progressive piece of garbage in this country speaks of “common sense gun control” laws, don’t give them the benefit of the doubt by believing that they are simply ignorant of history. These people are evil.
Moreover, this focus on guns by progressive is a two-fer for them. Not only do progressives make the argument for disarming America, they do so while completely ignoring the cultural pathologies cultivated by the left and that motivate so many mass shootings . . . or mass murder by other means. It is worth noting, in this regard, that guns were allowed in schools up until thirty years ago. As Star Parker writes at Townhall, no amount of gun grabbing by the progressive left will fix a problem that is cultural and spiritual.
Now back to the precipitating event for the latest gun grab. At an elementary school in Uvalde Texas, an evil 18 years old man, (hereinafter, “POS”) armed with a pistol and a rifle, killed 19 children and two teachers. The old axiom that when seconds count, police are minutes away, played out in spades in Uvalde, for while the local police responded within minutes to the shooting, once they arrived, they were ordered not to storm the shooter by the local police chief, Pete Arredondo, a man who is almost certainly a worthless coward in the mold of Broward’s Scot Peterson. For over an hour, the POS occupied a schoolroom full of children, executing them at leisure while the local police did nothing. In the end . . .:
. . . the Border Patrol agents who killed the school shooter in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday entered the school on their own accord after local law enforcement requested that they hold back, two senior federal law enforcement sources told NBC News on Friday.
The police-enabled massacre at Uvalde led our Moron in Chief to state:
Speaking with reporters outside the White House, Biden [stated] . . . that 9mm bullets have no “rational basis” to be used for self-defense.
“The .22 caliber bullet will lodge in the lungs and we can get it out. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body. The idea of a high caliber weapon, there is simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting,” Biden said.
“So, the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting,” Biden added. “Remember, the constitution was never absolute.”
“You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden said. “You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weaponry.” . . .
“Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons including pistols with 9-mm bullets and can hold 10 or more rounds,” he said.
Everything Biden said in those few short sentences is false, whether as a matter of fact, a matter of law, or a matter of history. It is hard to pack so much bullshit into so few sentences, but Biden demonstrates his mastery.
When Biden was done, Kamala, our Moron in Waiting chimed in, calling for an “Assault Weapons Ban.” And lastly, after Kamala, the evil progressives at MSNBC and elsewhere made the truly ludicrous claim that the complete failure of police to protect the Uvalde students was proof positive that the truism, “it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun” was false.
So lets address these claims:
What in the world is a “high caliber weapon” and is a 9mm handgun a high caliber weapon?
“High caliber weapon” is a nonsense phrase from our Moron in Chief. “High caliber weapon” has no common meaning when referring to handguns or rifles. It sounds scary, but it is meaningless (as is, for that matter, the seemingly related phrase “high powered rifle“). For the record, typical calibers for handguns run from small caliber, i.e., .22, to large caliber, .50, with a 9mm round being on the small size of that spread.
Moreover, the caliber of a weapon is anything but dispositive as to the power of the bullet it fires. For instance:
- A .357 magnum is a much smaller caliber than a .45 ACP, but with a muzzle velocity of 1,240 feet per second, it is traveling much faster than the larger .45 ACP’s 850 fps. It is a more powerful round.
- The same .45 ACP bullet is slower than a 9mm bullet which averages about 1,120 fps.
- The muzzle velocity of a 9mm round is roughly the same as the muzzle velocity of a .40 caliber handgun, but because the .40 cal is a larger bullet, the .40 cal is a more powerful handgun than a 9mm and a .45 ACP.
Things get even more screwy when you go to rifles. For instance, a revolutionary-war era Brown Bess musket fired a massive .75 caliber ball at an estimated 1,500 fps. That is much faster and more powerful than the 9mm bullet decried by Biden.
Today, the most popular rifle in the U.S.. an AR-15 in standard configuration, fires a 5.56mm round. That round, at .223 inches in diameter, is in essence, a .22 caliber round, but it comes out of the AR-15 barrel at a muzzle velocity of 3,025 fps. The rifle is so lightweight and has such little recoil that you could teach a ten-year-old girl to fire it effectively.
And the reality is that the 5.56mm round chambered in the AR-15, the DREADED ASSAULT RIFLE OF PROGRESSIVE NIGHTMARES, is nowhere near as lethal as many of the larger and more powerful rifle bullets found on the civilian market. For example, any semi-automatic rifle firing the .300 Weatherby Magnum round, a purely civilian round favored for big-game hunting, would not be classified as an ASSAULT RIFLE but it would be far more powerful and lethal than an AR-15.
Finally, lethality is relative. If you are firing at children 5 feet away in a classroom, it really doesn’t matter whether you are using a .22 caliber pistol, a 9mm pistol or an AR-15. All will kill just as equally. Indeed, quite often the weapon of choice for mob hitmen firing at close range is a .22 caliber pistol.
What is the damage done by a 9mm handgun?
The Moron in Chief strikes again. Sorry but a 9mm round does not “blow the lungs out” of a person being shot, nor does such a bullet have any unique super-powers. It is not uniquely lethal.
The video shown here (unable to embed) is from two police in Athens, Ga. having to use multiple rounds from their service pistols to stop a criminal attacking them with a knife from a distance of about 10 feet. We can’t be exactly sure of the type of pistol being used here except to say that it is a 9mm or larger caliber pistol, since only those caliber service pistols were then being issued in the police departments of Georgia. Given that the officer who first engaged emptied a 7 round magazine into the knife-wielding attacker, he probably had a weapon with a larger caliber, such as a .40 cal, — a weapon firing a round larger and heavier than the 9mm, but with roughly the same muzzle velocity.
Please note that the attacker does not have his lungs “blown out of his body” by the force of the bullets. To the contrary, even with seven rounds in his body, the attacker is able to get up and overwhelm the policeman, placing himself in a position to cut the cop’s throat.
Is there a “rational basis” to carry a 9mm weapon?
People choose a self-defense weapon based on a combination of factors, the three most important being the “stopping power” of the weapon, the ammo capacity of the weapon, and the ability of the individual to aim and fire the weapon while handling the weapon’s recoil. For example, Ms. BWR carries a tiny Ruger LC9-s 9mm pistol because of her small hands and her difficulty in handling any weapon with a strong recoil.
So while a 9mm is far from the most powerful of handguns, it is such a workable combination of the above factors that it is a good fit for most people:
The 9mm round is the most popular handgun caliber in the United States, accounting for well over half of all handguns produced in 2019, according to Shooting Industry magazine. The data showed that throughout the 2010s, 9mm pistols made up more than 40% of all pistols produced in the United States – or roughly four in every ten pistols.
So yes, there is obviously a rational basis for civilians wanting a 9mm handgun. Adam Smith’s invisible hand never lies.
Lastly, the men and women of the Secret Service, those people protecting Joe Biden and his crime family, carry 9mm handguns, along with a host of other far more lethal weaponry. Does Biden think that his life and the life of his family is more deserving of protection than anyone else in the U.S.? Do you? Our Moron in Chief needs to let us know when the Secret Service start defending him with .22 caliber pistols.
Does the Second Amendment have anything to do with hunting?
One can trace the entirety of the English history of our Second Amendment, beginning at law with the 1181 A.D. Assize of Arms, and never find any mention of it protecting weapons for hunting. The laws respecting the duty of men to keep and bear arms for over a millennium had to do with law and order first and foremost, militia duty second, and lastly, the right to defend one’s self. If you hear some idiot talk about hunting as a component of the Second Amendment – or alternatively condemning a weapon because it is designed to “kill people” (they all are) – you can rest assured that they are trying to blow smoke up your ass. This from a post I wrote some time ago, tracing the history of our Second Amendment back through the ancient rights of Englishmen:
An English subject’s duty to keep and bear arms went back to a time well before 1619. The duty goes back to the Dark Ages after the Romans left the British Isles and the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes moved in. By around 1000 A.D. the Anglo-Saxons had a recognizable militia system in place, which the Norman kings made official following the Norman Conquest in 1066.
By the 1181 Assize of Arms, King Henry II required that all Christian “freemen” in England keep and bear arms in service of the King. This was soon modified by the Assize of Arms of 1252 and then the Statute of Westminster of 1285, to fold the armed militia duty into the proto-police force of English history. Thus, they instituted the requirement that, when constables raised a “hue and cry,” the armed men in each village would assist with capturing lawbreakers resisting arrest.
We can say with certainty that, by the end of the 17th century, it was the unchallenged custom and practice of the English people to keep and bear arms and that had been the case for roughly 1,000 years. We can also say with certainty that, for much of that history, a subset of that right was the freeman’s duty both to act as a militia and to act as part of a local police force.
We cannot say for certain whether the English people during these centuries considered the right to keep and bear arms a private one, but that’s only because the issue never arose before 1688. We can definitively say, after 1689, when King James II forced them to resolve the issue, that the English considered the right to keep and bear arms a private right, inherent in every Protestant citizen. This right was cemented over 100 years before our Second Amendment was ratified.
The reason the British cemented the right in the individual was that King James II, who reigned from 1685 to 1688, systematically began to disarm Protestants, [leaving weapons only in the hands of his Catholic supporters.] The English rebelled against him, forcing him to abdicate to during the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Immediately following his departure, Parliament listed Protestants’ fundamental rights, foremost among which was the right to keep and bear arms. The new monarchs, King William and Queen Mary, acknowledged this right when they signed the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
When the Second Amendment Was Adopted in 1791, Did Any Laws Limit One’s Ability to “Purchase A Lot of Weaponry” or to “Buy a Cannon?”
In making the fallacious argument that the Second Amendment had recognized limits at the time it was adopted, our Weapons Grade Moron made the claim that no private individual could lawfully own a cannon. WRONG.
One, all the militia laws of the era (see, for example, here) required that men of military age own their own musket or rifle and appear with it at muster. Very few people in the army would have been rich enough to have a privately owned cannon, nor would anyone have wanted to have a cannon as an individual weapon – they required a team to operate.
The only place where privately owned cannon made any sense was aboard privateers – i.e., privately owned and operated ships that were authorized to capture enemy ships, then sell them as a war prize. And there were many privateers during the American Revolution, virtually all of them armed with privately owned cannon.
Two, the claim that there was any law restricting ownership of classes of weapons at the time the Second Amendment was adopted is equally false. Even the notoriously biased Politifact called the claim false in 2020.
Biden‘s staff confirms that despite his words, the progressive left is only seeking the usual incremental restrictions on our Constitutional Right to keep and bear arms.
This from the NY Post shows the President’s spokesman clarifying what the Moron in Chief really meant when he seemed to be calling for a 9mm handgun ban, like the budding dictator Justin “Castro?” Trudeau just announced in Canada:
“We’ll leave it up to other countries to set their policy on gun ownership,” Jean-Pierre said during her regular briefing. “The president has made his position clear: The United States needs to act. As I just laid out, he supports a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and expanded background checks to keep guns out of the — dangerous hands.
“He does not support a ban on the sale of all handguns, to answer your question,” the press secretary added in response to Fox News’ Peter Doocy, who had asked: “Canada is making it impossible to buy, sell, transfer, or import handguns anywhere in that country. Would President Biden ever consider a similar restriction on handguns here?”
That said, all of the things Jean-Pierre lists above are the same nose-under-the-tent restrictions that progressives have sought for years as a means of nullifying the Second Amendment. Dana Bash, at CNN, attempted to browbeat Rep. Dan Crenshaw about these restrictions in the wake of Uvalde where, as she puts it “a gun” massacres kids. What an evil asshole. Crenshaw’s answers are spot-on:
Calls for an Assault Weapons Ban:
This from the Moron in Waiting calling for an assault weapons ban because of the police-enabled massacre in Uvalde:
. . . Vice President Harris declared [the AR-15] a ”weapon of war” that has “no place in civil society.” What followed would appear to push beyond where President Biden left the issue as a criticism as opposed to a call for an outright ban: “We are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. You know, we’re not looking for a vaccine. We know what works on this. Let’s have an assault weapons ban.”
In boarding Air Force 2 after attending one of the funerals in Texas, Harris told the press “You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed? It was designed for a specific purpose – to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in a civil society.”
This is the camel’s nose under the tent. If you can ban one class of small arms – i.e., some semi-automatic rifles and pistols of whatever caliber on wholly subjective grounds, then there is simply no logical stopping point. It sets the stage for progressives to chip away at what is allowed under the Second Amendment until the Amendment is fully made a nullity.
Further, as discussed above, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with defense of liberty against people who would take that away. Thus, the fact that a particular weapon is designed to be used against other people, whether in or out of warfare, is, standing alone, meaningless in respect to whether the weapon can be banned under the Second Amendment.
Lastly, the “Assault Weapons” ban of the 1990’s proved definitively to be useless as a crime deterrent. Prof. John Lott has written volumes on this (for one small example, see here), and ultimately, the proof lies in the statistics produced by the Justice Dept.
Has Uvalde Proven False The Claim That It Takes A Good Man With A Gun Can To Stop A Bad Man With A Gun
The latest claim de jure from the fever dreams of evil progressives is that the events of Uvalde prove that one of the most often cited justifications for private ownership and possession of weapons, that “it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun,” is false. For but one example, there is this piece of hot garbage from a columnist at the LA Times:
Can we finally put to rest the dangerously wrong aphorism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”?
Nineteen “good guys with guns” milled around outside a classroom in Uvalde, Texas, some for more than an hour last week, waiting for a janitor with a master key to open the door while children desperately called 911, may have bled out and the 18-year-old gunman squeezed off at least 16 more rounds.
A “good guy with a gun” who worked as a security guard at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., was powerless last month to stop an armed 18-year-old who wore a bulletproof vest.
A “good guy with a gun” who worked as a high school resource officer in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 took cover outside, rather than confronting the armed 19-year-old who mowed down 34 people, killing 17.
If you spout the “good guy with a gun” nonsense, as former President Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) did Friday at the National Rifle Assn. convention in Houston, you are basically saying that mass shootings are simply the cost of living in gun-drunk America, that shootouts are acceptable, that nothing can be done. . . .
This argument was similarly made elsewhere to the near orgasmic delight of fellow progressives. For example, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, we are told by one prog at the Daily Beast, “Shreds NRA’s ‘Good Guy with a Gun’ Theory: ‘It’s All B.S.!’ Actually, these arguments turn reality completely on it’s head. As Ann Althouse mused:
If the police don’t arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.
At any rate, the first thing the LA Times columnist and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes studiously ignore is how was the POS in Uvalde was stopped. A hint — he didn’t give himself up. He was carried out dead on a stretcher after — far too late — BEING SHOT BY A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN.
Uvalde tells us other salient facts that bear upon the massacre, none of which “shreds” the good-guy with a gun truism. First, it tells you that the adults inside the school were unarmed (thanks Joe). Further, it tells you that you cannot rely on people just because they’ve put on a uniform and sworn an oath to protect and defend. There are many “cowardly lions” who freeze in the face of danger and, at the moment of the test of their mettle, fail utterly. That is what happened in Uvalde. It is what happened in Broward with the Parkland school massacre. Neither of those facts in any way disproves the “good guy with a gun” scenario.
Lastly, the “good guy with a gun scenario” has proven in countless situations. For but one instance, compare and contrast this event that occurred on nearly the same day as the massacre at Uvalde.
A woman in West Virginia fatally shot a man Wednesday night who had begun firing an AR-15-style rifle into a crowd of dozens.
Charleston Police identified the man as 37-year-old Dennis Butler.
The people were attending a birthday and graduation party outside a Renaissance Circle apartment complex. He left but later returned and parked in front of the complex before shooting.
The woman was attending the West Virginia party. She drew a pistol and fired on Butler.
No one attending the party was injured. . . .
“Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night,” Chief of Detectives Tony Hazelett told news outlets Thursday.
I won’t even bother addressing the assertions of the truly odious race hustlers being pedaled in the wake of Uvalde. For instance, one such person on MSNBC claimed that the failed police response proved that we should defund all police departments and do away with police entirely. Another said that we should pass gun control because gun ownership is tied up in racism and toxic masculinity.
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In sum, the events of the massacre Uvalde were criminal acts. The response of the Uvalde police was a stomach-turning display of cowardice. The response of progressives — including our Moron in Chief — in the days after this police-enabled massacre have been obscene.
