10 out of 10 terrorist Jihadists agree…
American gun rights must be restricted!
Tag: guns
Most folks are so unused to seeing normal people carrying guns around, out in the open, that when they it, they freak out.
Among those who are at least, well, unsettled by the spectacle? The police.
Funny, the gun freaker-outers don’t usually freak when they see police with guns. But that may be changing as more and more video footage comes out regarding police shootings of suspects under suspicious circumstances.
It is not exactly by accident that there are protests in numerous cities.
So, police being human, we cannot be surprised when, after the Dallas and Baton Rouge killings of police, “[t]he head of the Cleveland police union called on the governor of Ohio to declare a state of emergency and to suspend open-carry gun rights during the Republican national convention.…”
The governor’s office responded that Gov. John Kasich had no authority to do such a thing. Open carry was a law in the state. Only inside buildings could carry rights be suspended (as they have been, selectively).
Steve Loomis, the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association head, said that he did not “care what the legal precedent” may be, and “couldn’t care less if it’s legal or not.”
If Loomis, a leader in “law enforcement,” boasts this attitude, no wonder police have had so many trigger finger incidents, sparking so much anguish, protest, and debate.
It’s time for police to rethink their approach to people who have rights to carry weapons.
Perhaps more importantly, we should all try not to freak out so easily.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it finally time to get guns out of the hands of … licensed security guards?
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company, and his government credentials included “a Florida state-issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.”
Not to mention that Omar Mateen was twice investigated by the FBI — in 2013 and again in 2014 — and cleared by the agency both times. Though on the terrorist watch list for a while, he was removed from that list after the FBI closed its investigations.
So we need more and tougher background checks? Must the FBI check every gun purchaser three times, is that the charm?
Even if the Feds blocked gun sales to those on the terrorist watch list and the “no-fly” list, it wouldn’t have affected Mateen, for he wasn’t on these lists when he purchased his Sig MCX.
Nevertheless, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy led a 14-hour filibuster to bring attention to his gun control legislation … that wouldn’t have stopped the Orlando massacre … or the shooting in Newtown.
“I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me,” tweeted Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.”
If our government ever uses a secret list developed by security agencies to deny citizens their rights, without due legal process, without innocence until proven guilty, we will sorely need our Second Amendment rights.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Will the government soon quarter troops in your home?
The Third Amendment prohibits that, sure — but if prominent and powerful Democrats are so anxious to toss out the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, who’s to say they wouldn’t jettison the Third?
Last year, every Democratic U.S. Senator voted to repeal the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and replace it with new, broad powers for them to regulate campaign spending, thereby speech.
Luckily, those 54 senators lacked the two-thirds margin needed for their amendment.
Now, in the face of “gun violence” and (pssst) terrorism, President Obama, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, and true-blue MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, want to scrap the Second Amendment. How? By first scrapping the Fifth, which guarantees that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” They demand that Americans on the so-called “terrorist no-fly list” be denied the Second Amendment right to a firearm, despite the fact that the bureaucratically created no-fly list offers not a scintilla of due process: no charge, jury, trial.
Would this new regulation have prevented the San Bernardino murderers from getting guns? No — they had recently flown across the world.
The frequent-flying Boston Marathon bombers didn’t make the list, either.
But the list did label an 18-month-old girl a terrorist, snatching her rights like taking candy from a … toddler.
“Just what will it take for Congress to overcome the intimidation of the gun lobby and do something as sensible as making sure people on the terrorist watch list can’t buy weapons?” Mrs. Clinton asked rhetorically at a campaign event.
Answer: an illegal abrogation of the most fundamental and cherished rights in human history.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Liberty is achieved, when it is achieved, at a price. Vigilance.
And this isn’t just an inspiring political message. It’s practical advice for extraordinary circumstances.
What’s the best thing to do if you meet a mass murderer on a rampage, or a terrorist on his mission? It may not be to merely call 911. As one counterterrorism consultant puts it, “We are conditioned to dial 911 and wait, but, in the case of an active shooter, that does not work.”
This conflict expert, Alon Stivi, went on to explain that “[m]ost casualties occur within the first ten or fifteen minutes, and police response usually is too late.”
And speaking of 911, remember that on 9/11/2001, the most successful anti-terrorist effort was by the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93.
That was heroism. It cost them their lives, but they accomplished something in that they saved lives, too.
Some people don’t like bringing this up for fear of, well, hurting some feelings. But Ari Armstrong has an answer for this:
If we avoid serious discussions about self-defense and survival tactics in cases of intended mass murder out of fear that such discussions are somehow insensitive to victims of past attacks, all we accomplish is to ensure that more people will be murdered in possible future attacks.
There is a reason we should keep ourselves fit, and alert. Who knows when we may be called upon, by circumstance, to defend not only ourselves and our loved ones, but our way of life?
Sure, this “call” is made by the unjust. But we, the just, should answer anyway.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I praised Juan Williams the other day. Let me balance that out.
On Tuesday’s The Five, a Fox news opinion chat show, in the wake of the Mall of America terrorist threat, Greg Gutfeld decried “gun-free zones” advancing the “more guns, less crime” argument that economist John Lott has more famously made.
Mr. Williams expressed incredulity. “I don’t think that makes sense, that everybody in the mall has a gun. Let the police protect us.”
Gutfeld laughed. There was banter. Some accusatory explanation. Oh, you lefties! But then Gutfeld regrouped.
“This is not an either/or — like everybody’s armed [or] everybody’s not. The concealed [carry] permit creates a level of uncertainty on the people that are choosing an attack.”
Other things being equal, the secretly (or discreetly) gun totin’ are safer than the rest of society. The more folks who secretly carry means that those prone to violence face higher risks.
There may be more than one reason why gun violence has plummeted over the past two decades. But one must be this: as Americans have accumulated more guns per capita than ever before, as more households possess guns than ever, the “celerity of punishment” (that old Benthamite term for swiftness of bad repercussions) has increased, nudging the marginally criminal to choose to commit fewer violent crimes.
Making society safer.
Since Williams seemed to have some difficulty with this, let’s translate it for him: compare gun violence and peaceful gun ownership to viral infection and vaccination.
It’s herd immunity, only to violence. Just as the more vaccinated make us all safer, the more peaceful people discreetly carrying guns make us all safer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.