11 Defensive Gun Uses Show How Lawful Gun Owners ‘Get It Right’

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Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Often lost in conversations about gun violence is the reality of who is responsible for the bulk of that violence. Most gun crimes aren’t committed by lawful gun owners but by a small subset of repeat violent offenders who already are prohibited from legally possessing firearms.

At the same time, the vast majority of the nation’s millions of lawful gun owners will never use their firearms to harm themselves or others (excluding, of course, actions taken in lawful self-defense).

Nevertheless, sometimes people make questionable—or even downright abhorrent—decisions with their lawfully owned firearms. This was quite apparent in recent weeks as several gun owners made national headlines for all the wrong reasons, recklessly resorting to the use of lethal force when it likely wasn’t warranted.

Although these individuals rightly should have their actions scrutinized, the reality is that Americans with legally possessed guns are far more likely to “get it right” than they are to “get it wrong.”

Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.

For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accounts here from past months and years. You also may follow @DailyDGU on Twitter for daily highlights of recent defensive gun uses.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in April. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

  • April 4, Fort Worth, Texas: Police said a dispute inside an apartment complex ended with a chaotic exchange of gunfire among several individuals, including two juveniles who began shooting at a maintenance man. The maintenance man, who received minor injuries, was armed and returned fire to defend himself. Police arrested two teens.
  • April 6, Glendale, Colorado: Just six minutes after a pawn shop opened, an armed robber entered and pointed a gun at employees, police said. The pawn shop’s jeweler—working at the other end of the store—was able to retrieve a firearm, approach the robber from behind, and fatally shoot him. The dead robber, who had a lengthy criminal history, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery in 2014. He apparently had been paroled, only to plead guilty in February to aggravated auto theft. He was paroled again just one month into that sentence.
  • April 6, Noblesville, Indiana: Two robbers disguised as food delivery drivers forced their way inside a home at gunpoint, only to be fired upon by an armed housesitter, police said. One robber was killed; the other was arrested two weeks later and charged with murder for the death of his accomplice, as well as with burglary and armed robbery.
  • April 7, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: Police said an elderly man and his wife returned to their truck after a shopping trip only to find a would-be thief trying to take the vehicle. The man drew his gun, prompting the thief to flee to his own car. Thinking the situation was resolved, the elderly man holstered his gun. The thief, however, quickly accelerated his own car toward the man, lifting him onto the roof and leaving him hanging on as the car sped off. Police said the elderly man was able to draw his gun again and fire, killing his assailant. The man was treated for injuries he received when he was thrown from the thief’s car shortly before it crashed.
  • April 9, Bronson, Florida: On Easter Sunday, a woman fatally shot a former boyfriend who showed up at her home with a firearm, leading to a physical struggle between the two. Eventually, police said, the woman retrieved her own gun and shot the man once in the chest.
  • April 14, Bakersfield, California: Police said an elderly woman’s mentally ill adult son arrived at her home and, apparently hallucinating and accusing her of keeping lottery winnings from him, broke through a metal security door with a shovel and assaulted her. The woman’s 86-year-old neighbor intervened and fatally shot the son, likely saving the woman’s life.
  • April 15, Houston: A robber wanted for murder in a different state approached a man as he made a withdrawal from an ATM, ordered him to hand over his money, and pistol-whipped him, police said. An armed good Samaritan, driving past the scene, saw what was happening and stopped. He fired several rounds at the robber, wounding him in the leg and foot.
  • April 17, Goodyear, Arizona: A homeowner confronted two burglars whom he caught trying to break into his car, police said. One pointed a gun at the homeowner, who was armed, and they exchanged gunfire. Police said the armed burglar was wounded, and he and a juvenile accomplice fled. Police later arrested them; the armed suspect faced charges of aggravated assault, third-degree burglary, and unlawful discharge of a firearm. The homeowner wasn’t hurt.
  • April 20, Cleveland: A man and a friend arranged over Facebook Marketplace to meet for a car sale, police said, but when they arrived, they were ambushed by three armed robbers. The two victims drew their own guns and exchanged fire with the robbers, who fled. Neither victim was injured. Responding officers found the bullet-riddled getaway vehicle and arrested two wounded suspects, police said. It reportedly was the third time in recent weeks that area residents had been lured into armed robberies by bogus sellers on Facebook Marketplace.
  • April 22, Albuquerque, New Mexico: A business owner fatally shot a burglar whom he caught tunneling through a wall in the middle of the night, police said. The store owner had warned the burglar that he was armed but, instead of fleeing, the burglar assaulted him with a large hammer and an ax. The victim told police that he had been sleeping in his store because of a previous overnight burglary.
  • April 25, Philadelphia: Police said a concealed carry permit holder turned the tables on a man who tried to rob him at gunpoint, drawing his own firearm and firing “at least 10 shots.” The robber was fatally wounded; a female accomplice fled in a vehicle.
  • April 29, Grand Bay, Alabama: A woman fatally shot a man who was staying temporarily at her uncle’s home after he set fire to the residence while several people, including a child, were inside. Police said the man dragged her into a bathroom and poured acetone on her when she tried to get relatives out of the residence. Police records indicate that the man had been drinking heavily and had “an extensive violent criminal history,” including a 2021 arrest for first-degree arson.

Defending the Second Amendment doesn’t mean we have to defend every action by every gun owner. Those who choose to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms should strive to be proficient with their guns, but also level-headed and judicious about when they resort to the use of lethal force.

Sometimes, gun owners get it wrong. When they do, they should be charged and prosecuted, and, if convicted, face appropriate consequences.

But on the aggregate, a well-armed civilian population does far more to benefit public safety than to undermine it. And, as these defensive gun uses in April help demonstrate, when lawful gun owners do have to rely on their right to keep and bear arms, it often can mean the difference between life and death or serious injury.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Armed Teachers

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Americans were outraged to learn of the Nashville school shooting, where a transgender female shot and killed three children and three adults at a Christian school.

As always, a fierce political debate broke out after the murders. Gun control advocates, mostly Democrats, again made impassioned and often vitriolic pleas for more stringent gun laws.

It would be a wonderful world if there were some laws we could pass, some clever strategy to keep criminals from having guns. The big problem is that gun control laws don’t work, much as we might wish otherwise. If they did, Chicago, Baltimore, and other big cities, with their strict gun laws on the books, wouldn’t be the murderous hell-holes that they are.

It’s been pointed out many times, but it’s still true: violent criminals don’t follow the law. The victims are the law-abiding citizens who bring knives to a gunfight.

Conservative commentator Matt Vespa recently wrote a thoughtful column advocating instead for posting “resource officers” in every school. He notes that it took 14 minutes for police to arrive at the Nashville shooting and that other killers have had even more time before facing significant deterrence.

On the other hand, there are many accounts of officers in schools who were able to prevent potential murders just by being present.

But there’s a problem.  There are approximately 115,000 K-12 schools in the US, according to Dun and Bradstreet. If we lowball an estimate of $50,000 yearly to support an FTE, that means placing an officer in every school would, according to my back-of-the-napkin calculator, cost at least $5 and $6 billion annually.

That would be a justifiable cost if we were facing an epidemic of school killings, but the numbers tell a different story. Although the especially traumatic nature of school killings and extensive media coverage make the shootings seem commonplace, for the last 35 years school shooting deaths have hovered around 20–30 per year, less than one for every two states.

From 2010 to 2019, there were 305 incidents involving guns and 207 deaths, or about 20 per year. Arizona, with about 2700 schools, has had one shooting death ever, in 1987, in addition to four suicides and one accidental death.

For American schools, this computes to an annual average of one shooting death for every 4000 schools. Full-time school resource officers would, over the course of a career, have an infinitesimal chance of preventing even one shooting.

Throwing money at a problem without a sober cost-benefit analysis, however passionately we may feel about it, seldom works out. A more practical solution would be to authorize one or more teachers per school to carry concealed weapons.

These teachers would be volunteers who are licensed carriers and would undergo additional training in the very focused area (confronting an armed criminal in a school setting) that their duty might entail. They would receive a modest stipend.

Would recruiting be a problem? I like to think there are enough teacher-heroes with a heart for their students who would be willing and up to the task if called upon. Remember, it has often been teachers who answered the call when peace officers cowered in emergency situations, as in Uvalde and Parkland.

Moreover, the deterrent effect of armed teachers would be inarguable. Schools would be changed from soft targets with idiotic “Gun Free Zone” signs into places where criminals with bad intentions would know they were risking their lives by entering.

Unfortunately, the teachers’ unions have pitched a fit. Their purported worries include the safety of their members, the qualifications of the volunteers, and the image of teachers involved with violence.

Their arguments are easily rebuffed, remembering that no solution is perfect and the point is to pick the best available. But the unions are powerful, tough competitors in public debate, even when the facts and arguments are against them, as when the schools were shut down during Covid on their demand.

Wasting a few more billion in a nation over $30 trillion in debt may not seem like much, but we have to start somewhere. Let’s believe in our educators and look to American resilience and resourcefulness to protect our children.

Four Underused Tools to Stop School Shootings

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Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

In the aftermath of school shootings, media outlets often amplify calls for gun control while ignoring or spurning evidence-based ways to protect students. Here are four life-saving tools they are missing or dismissing.

Shatter-Resistant Entryways

As documented in the academic journal Victims & Offenders, an “immediate and economical” way to protect students “is to tighten” access to school buildings. Many school administrators have done this simply by locking doors. However, there are roughly 460 million firearms in the U.S., and the bulk of them will quickly shatter the glass entrances that are a common feature of schools, allowing killers to enter in a few seconds.

That is precisely what happened in the Covenant Christian school shooting in Nashville where the killer took the lives of three 9-year-old children and three staff after shooting out the school’s glass doors and walking into the building.

Likewise, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT broke into the building by shooting out a glass panel at the school’s entryway. He then proceeded to slaughter 20 students and 6 adults.

These and other such tragedies may be prevented if schools took a simple and affordable action: apply a security film that prevents glass entryways from shattering when bullets hit them.

Note that the treatment doesn’t make glass bulletproof or impenetrable. Instead, it makes the glass shatter-resistant. This slows down intruders and affords precious time for students to flee or help to arrive.

Nor does every piece of glass in a school need to be treated. Just installing the film on exterior entryways can substantially improve safety, and selecting other strategic locations can help as well.

Security film is relatively inexpensive and quickly installed. From large public schools to small private ones, the cost of this potential lifesaver is typically less than 1% of a school’s annual budget. Once applied, it lasts for the lifetime of the glass.

For example, it took one day and cost $5,000 in materials and labor to treat a church with more than 20 glass entryway panes on the front, side, and back of the building. Similarly, public school administrators who were hesitant to install security film due to cost concerns found they were able to apply it in a lot more locations than they originally anticipated because it was so affordable.

Seemingly unaware of this life-shielding opportunity, ABC News recently reported:

Brad Garrett—a retired FBI agent and an ABC News contributor, who has done security audits on schools—said fortifying entrance doors with material like bulletproof glass, is cost prohibitive for most schools, especially a small Christian school like Covenant. He said metal doors are a cheaper option, but they make schools feel dark and “prison-like.”

Thus, it appears that a massive media outlet and a former FBI agent who specializes in school security are unfamiliar with an option that addresses those concerns.

Don’t Make Celebrities of Mass Murderers

The 1999 Columbine High School massacre was the first mass shooting that received wall-to-wall media coverage, and ever since then, the press has made the perpetrators of such slaughters into household names. During this same era, fatal school shootings have occurred every year in the United States.

Documenting the impact of this and offering a simple solution, Dr. Peter Langman, a Ph.D. psychologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on the “psychology of school shooters and other perpetrators of mass violence,” writes that:

because of the frequency of mass killers citing previous perpetrators as role models or sources of inspiration, it is critical that media outlets give careful consideration to how they cover such incidents. It seems likely that the more the media focuses on the perpetrators rather than the victims, the more people who are at risk of violence will be influenced to commit their own attacks, whether due to imitation, inspiration, idolizing, perceived similarities, sympathy with the cause, or their desire for fame.

Compulsory Mental Health Treatment

While the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, the perpetrators of mass shootings are far more likely to suffer from serious psychiatric disorders than the general population. This is especially true of people who commit indiscriminate mass shootings in which an attacker wantonly kills people in a public setting like a school, park, or church.

A study published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that 35% of people who committed indiscriminate mass shootings from 1976 to 2018 had paranoid schizophrenia, and 60% of the shooters “had been either diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack.” Some examples include the perpetrators of the slaughters at:

  • Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
  • Sandy Hook Elementary School.
  • Virginia Tech.
  • Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
  • the Orlando Pulse Nightclub.
  • an Aurora, Colorado movie theater.
  • a Boulder, Colorado grocery store.
  • Fort Lauderdale International Airport.
  • the Tucson, Arizona “Congress on Your Corner” event with Gabby Giffords.

In comparison, less than 1% of the U.S. general population have schizophrenia or a related disorder, and 4.6% of noninstitutionalized U.S. adults have a serious mental illness.

Perhaps more telling, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology published a study of people who committed a mass shooting from 1982 to 2019 and survived. The study focused on the survivors, as opposed to those who died, because the ensuing legal proceedings revealed “the most reliable psychiatric information.” Among the 35 mass shooters who survived, 51% had schizophrenia, and 80% had a psychiatric diagnosis.

Although 18.8% of U.S. adults received mental health services in 2021, people who desperately need such help often refuse care. For instance, the:

  • Parkland killer “received extensive mental and behavioral health services until he turned 18 and decided himself to stop treatment.”
  • Sandy Hook killer “refused to take suggested medication and did not engage in suggested behavior therapies.”
  • Virginia Tech killer “was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health.”

It is important to understand that correlation does not prove causation, but there is a very strong correlation between the rise of indiscriminate mass shootings and the mass deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients that occurred in the U.S. from 1955 to around 2010.

During that period, the portion of the U.S. population in public psychiatric hospitals declined by 96%. Highlighting the implications of this, a 1997 academic book about “America’s mental illness crisis” explains:

  • “The magnitude of deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill qualifies it as one of the largest social experiments in American history.”
  • About “763,391 severely mentally ill people (over three-quarters of a million) are living in the community today who would have been hospitalized 40 years ago.”

Over the periods before, during, and after the U.S. experiment in mass deinstitutionalization, the rates of indiscriminate mass shootings sextupled.

With no regard for those facts and without presenting any evidence to support his claims, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D–CT) has declared, “Spare me the bullshit about mental illness. We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world. You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness, because we don’t—we’re not an outlier on mental illness. We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their hands on firearms. That’s what makes America different.”

Likewise, media outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times allege that the only material difference between the U.S. and developed countries with vastly lower murder rates is that America has more guns. Thus, they conclude that guns must be the problem—commonly using Japan as a comparator because it has very low gun ownership and murder rates.

In reality, however, a major difference is that the U.S. has one of the lowest rates of psychiatric institutionalization in the developed world, and Japan’s rate is about 10 times greater.

It is not easy to craft policies to ensure that people who seriously need help get it without forcing others to undergo unnecessary mental health treatments. However, cases like the Virginia Tech massacre—the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history—show there is much room for improvement. As detailed in the official report of this tragedy that cost the lives of 32 students and faculty:

  • “It is common practice to require students entering a new school, college, or university to present records of immunization. Why not records of serious emotional or mental problem too? … The answer is obvious: personal privacy.”
  • In social and classroom settings, the student engaged in a pattern of “threatening behavior,” such as taking out a knife at a party and “stabbing the carpet.”
  • A poetry professor “began noticing that fewer students were attending” her class, so she “asked a student what was going on, and he said, ‘It’s the boy … everyone’s afraid of him’.”
  • While the chair of the English department was personally working with the student, she wrote a letter to a dean stating that “all of his submissions so far have been about shooting or harming people because he’s angered by their authority or by their behavior. … I am encouraging him to see a counselor––something he’s resisted so far.”
  • After numerous incidents and a finding by a clinical social worker that the student “was mentally ill, was an imminent danger to self or others, and was not willing to be treated voluntarily,” the student was involuntarily hospitalized for one night. However, he was released after he falsely denied “any previous mental health treatment.” The psychiatrist took his word for this because that’s the “standard practice” and “privacy laws impede the gathering of collateral information.”
  • Upon his release, a special justice ruled that the student “presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him “to follow all recommended treatments.” However, the counseling center he went to had a “policy” of allowing “patients to decide whether to make a followup appointment,” and the student did not.

Similar circumstances surrounded the mental health of the mass murderer in Parkland and the perpetrators of other such massacres.

Arming Selected Teachers

Despite knee-jerk reactions to arming teachers, this action can significantly and discretely improve the safety of students for a fraction of the cost of employing officers or security guards. This is because teachers and other school employees:

  • who are willing and able to protect students can be quickly trained to be as safe and proficient with a firearm as police.
  • are ubiquitous in schools and can provide ample coverage of buildings and campuses, something that has been severely lacking in school massacres.
  • would covertly carry, giving them an advantage of surprise over would-be attackers.
  • can be seriously trained, appropriately armed, and generously paid for about 1% of what is already spent on schools.

Large crowds—like those found in schools, concerts, and sporting events—are prime targets for mass murderers. That’s why the Superdome in New Orleans—which has a seating capacity of 73,208 people—has more than “900 public safety personnel” on duty in the stadium and surrounding area during “large events such as football games.”

That amounts to one security personnel for every 80 people, including “armed public safety officers, non-armed game day security guards along with officers from the Louisiana State Police, New Orleans Police Department and Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

In comparison, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—which had about 3,200 students at the time it was attacked—had only one armed guard on duty. This is about 1/40th of the security per person at the Superdome.

Columbine had about 1,900 students and one armed guard, or 1/24th of the Dome’s.

During the Virginia Tech slaughter, the campus had 26,370 students and “131 major buildings spread over 2,600 acres,” while “only 14” officers were on duty, including “5 on patrol and 9 in the office.” In other words, each patrol officer was responsible for protecting about 5,000 students, 25 buildings, and 500 acres.

Such security is grossly inadequate because killers can easily find a soft spot without guards. This need not be the case. Given that the average pupil/teacher ratio in public schools is about 16 to 1, arming one out of five teachers would equal the Dome’s ratio of 80 to 1.

Moreover, teachers would carry the weapons covertly, making it nearly impossible for assailants to determine who is armed and who is not. This can provide an element of surprise crucial to saving lives.

Contrary to claims spread by CNN and NBC, teachers can rival the firearm skills of police officers. This is because even recreational shooters fire as accurately as police, and most officers only receive a modest amount of firearm training.

In 2015, the International Journal of Police Science & Management published a study on the risks of “deadly police shootouts.” This involved testing “the level of shooting accuracy demonstrated by law enforcement recruits upon completion” of “their firearms training in comparison with novice” recruits who had not yet received this training. The study found:

  • “no difference” in accuracy at any distance between recruits who had completed law enforcement or military handgun training and those who only had “recreational” handgun experience.
  • trained officers were “only 10% more accurate” than recruits with “minimal/no experience” at ranges of 3 to 15 feet, which is where a “majority of gunfights and critical situations will likely” occur.

On average, police receive 71 hours of firearms instruction in their initial academy training and less than 15 hours per year thereafter. They also get very little real-world experience with firing guns. A 2017 Pew poll found that “only about a quarter (27%) of all officers say they have ever fired their service weapon” in the line of duty.

These facts point to the conclusion that selected and well-trained teachers would be very effective in protecting the lives of students. Even the general public saves far more lives with guns than are lost in accidents. U.S. civilians use guns to stop potentially lethal violence more than 100,000 times per year, while there are less than 600 fatal firearm accidents per year.

Despite claims that arming teachers would be too costly, it would amount to a drop in the bucket of current school spending. Even under a high-cost scenario where teachers receive five times more gun training than police and are well paid for their training time, the annual cost of equipping, training, and supervising one out of five teachers would be about 1% of government spending on schools.

Summary

Assumptions, politics, and sentiments aside, people can quickly and inexpensively reduce the risk of school shooting deaths by:

  • hardening the glass entryways to schools by treating them with films that prevent the doors from shattering if shot.
  • limiting the amount of fame bestowed on the perpetrators of mass murders.
  • implementing policies to ensure that people with serious psychiatric disorders get the help they need, even if they are unwilling to be treated.
  • arming and training selected teachers who are willing and able to protect students.

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This article was published by Just Facts and is reproduced with permission.

‘Not A Firearms Expert’: Biden’s ATF Chief Admits He Can’t Define What An ‘Assault Weapon’ Is

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Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Director Steve Dettelbach was unable to define the term “assault weapon” during his agency’s Tuesday budget request hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee.

Dettelbach told Republican Texas Rep. Jake Ellzey that he had expressed support for passing an assault weapons ban in Ohio during his unsuccessful 2018 campaign to become the state’s attorney general, noting that the Biden administration endorses instituting “an assault weapons ban.” Ellzey asked Dettelbach to define an “assault weapon” in 15 seconds.

“I’ll go shorter than that, because honestly, if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance,” Dettelbach said. “I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.”

Ellzey had said he has some expertise in weaponry and self-defense weapons, citing his status as a military veteran and 20-year gun owner. The Senate confirmed Dettelbach to lead the ATF in July, despite 15 state attorneys general arguing he would “merely rubber stamp” Biden’s “partisan anti-gun platform.”

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This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

Tennessee

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Whenever one blinks these days, there is a new story about which people get hysterical.  Tennessee has always been best known for Nashville country music and Memphis barbeque.  But it has become focused currently on two cultural events that are related, but in their own way completely separate.

You certainly are familiar with the fact a transgender individual entered a Christian day school and killed six people – three older adults and three young children. If you read the “wrong” news service, there is no mention the shooter was transgender.  Or you might read seven people were killed due to the fact that the Nashville police did their job and killed the shooter –possibly saving many lives. That is not the topic of this column. It is another incident.

A gun control proposal was put forth in the Tennessee State Legislature. Everyone I know is in favor of gun control. It is just the Left wants to control guns for law-abiding citizens.  They cite countries that have confiscated guns from their citizens, and you pretty much saw what happened during the pandemic where these countries ran roughshod over people’s rights in ways Americans could not imagine.

Republicans and Conservatives want to control guns in the hands of people who are most likely to commit crimes and punish those who use guns in the commission of a crime. There is an argument that reasonable procedures should be analyzed to see if that would help in controlling incidents like what happened in Nashville at the day school.

That is where the story goes off the rails. The Tennessee legislature is a part-time bicameral body. It meets 90 days a year. The Senate voted in a committee to floor any gun laws until 2024 to give people a chance to analyze what might be best. The Left wanted to “strike while the iron is hot” and move legislation now. The Republican-controlled legislature paused on the issue until 2024.

That was not good enough. I previously stated: “It never fails to amaze me how focused or preoccupied some get on issues like this that they cannot accept reasonable boundaries. And then they call the opposition zealots.”

The first moment I became aware of the issue continuing was when I read the Assembly was moving to expel three members. My initial thinking was that was an extreme action. I knew nothing of the three members other than they were Democrats.  This to me was an over-the-top reaction.

Then I read up on the facts and not the slanted press that omits facts. I found out two of the members had not only goaded a crowd to disrupt the Assembly, but they had also used a bullhorn on the floor of the Assembly. One of the two expelled said he was not educated on the decorum of the Assembly. He asked how he could be tossed for being ignorant. If he was ignorant, it was willful ignorance. When I found out the two had used a bullhorn, I knew nothing about the two — sex, ethnicity, etc. I just knew they were either idiots, zealots, or both. 

I found out Justin Jones in his short 27 years has been arrested multiple times for his political activism. He ran for office before but this time he beat another Democrat in the primary and received 8,596 votes (100%) in the general election. He appears to never have had a job in private industry. His running mate, Justin Pearson, bills himself as a “community organizer.” He is currently 28 years old. Pearson won his special election with 52% of the vote (1,235 votes).    None of these facts were known to me when I decided they were justifiably expelled. They apparently think they can harass the other members of the Assembly into complying with their policy wishes.

Here is a fun fact: The leadership of their caucus told them to stop their errant behavior. They “walked off the House floor after a heated confrontation with their own Democrat leadership.”   BTW, the white woman who was the third protester did none of this extreme behavior. She survived the expulsion vote because of that, but not by much.

It was pointed out to me that if the two were expelled then the third person should also have been because it now seems it was based on race.  I responded that it would then be characterized as being racist and sexist. Sure enough, Rep. Gloria Johnson argued the expulsion was racist despite arguing in her own defense that she did not participate in the same activities as Jones and Pearson. Then she claimed the action was sexist and racist. She invoked possibly the stupidest expression in history (and it’s a high bar), “I was talked down to as a woman and man-splained to.”

This isn’t about race, ethnicity, or sex. But that does not matter to some as race-baiters like Kammy Harris rushed to Tennessee to assuage the wounded miscreants.  While Democrats in the Assembly understand the proper conduct of a legislator, the band of “everything you think is based on race,” jumped in to defend these two juveniles in men’s clothing.

The problem we have in this country is there is a lack of boundaries. No sense of propriety.  Even the Three Stooges would have understood you don’t whip out a bullhorn on the floor of a legislature and start having a rally.

Members of their community have stated they will reinstall these two knuckleheads into their seats. My question is, don’t you have anything better to offer? A wise man once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

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This article was published in Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

 

 

 

 

FACT CHECK: Has One In Five U.S. Adults Had A Family Member Killed By A Gun?

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation claims that 19% of American adults say a family member was killed by a gun. They note that this includes death by suicide but fail to add any more context to the gripping headline. So how true or helpful is this claim?

The biggest issue with this new gun death statistic is the lack of definition for a “family member.” As some have pointed out, “Is your great-aunt’s second cousin you’ve never met a family member?” Or as one of my IW colleagues quipped, “Since my great great great grandpa, who was a bank and train robber in California, was killed by gunfire, I can claim that I’ve had a family member killed by guns.”

Even the bare numbers don’t make sense.

The most problematic aspect of the Kaiser poll is that it hides how small its poll sample was. If you track down the methodology, you find that this study was conducted online and by telephone among a sample of only 1,271 U.S. adults. That number is hardly enough to represent the 258.3 million American adults, nor make the claim that familial gun death has affected 51,660,000 U.S. adults.

It is a tragedy for anyone to be killed, and the recent shootings in just the last two weeks have brought the issue of gun violence to the forefront of many minds. And the mental health crisis in the U.S., noted in the study by the mention that “about half of deaths (55%) in the U.S. involving guns are suicides,” is a real problem we need to address as a nation and as individual communities. But using vague and likely inflated statistics to get an attention-grabbing headline is no way to make headway on the issue.

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This article was published by Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

That Kaiser Gun Study The Media Love Is Garbage

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s become virtually impossible to find reliable data or polling on gun violence these days. A new Kaiser Family Foundation report being shared by virtually every major media outlet this week offers us a good example of why. The headlines report that “1 in 5 adults” in the United States claim that a “family member” has been “killed” by a gun. And, let’s just say, that’s a highly dubious claim.

There are 333 million people living in the United States, and somewhere around 259 million of them are over the age of 18. Twenty percent of those adults equals nearly 52 million people. There were more than 40,000 gun deaths in 2022, and around 20,000 of them were homicides — a slight dip from a Covid-year historic high that followed decades of lows. So, according to Kaiser’s polling, every victim of gun violence in the past few years had hundreds, if not thousands, of “family members.”

Now, to be fair, we can’t really run the numbers because Kaiser doesn’t define its terms or parameters. For example, what constitutes a “family member”? Is your second cousin a family member? Because if so, that creates quite the nexus of people. What about your stepbrother’s second cousin? Or how about your uncle who died in Iraq? Or how about that grandfather you never met who committed suicide in 1968? Kaiser could have asked people about their “immediate” relatives. The opacity is the point.

Then again, you can always spot a misleading firearms study by checking if the authors conflate suicides and murders. Kaiser does. The underlying problems leading to a homicide or a suicide are typically very different. So are the solutions. There are numerous countries with virtually no private gun ownership that have persistently high suicide rates. There isn’t any other societal problem in which Kaiser wouldn’t stress the distinction between criminality and mental health struggles.

But even if we count suicides, the claim is fantastical. As are many of the others. If we trust this poll, we would have to accept that around 50 million Americans were personally threatened with a gun. And that 54 percent of American adults — which can be extrapolated to mean 140 million adults — have personally or have a family member who has witnessed a shooting, been threatened by a gun, or been injured or killed by one. (Another 28 percent, or 72 million people, contend they have carried a gun in self-defense — which is also exceedingly unlikely.)

Kaiser’s “key findings” highlight many issues tied to anti-gun activist talking points. In the middle of polling, Kaiser conveniently switches up the definition of an “adult” from 18 and older to over 19, so it can regurgitate the claim that firearms are the leading cause of death among children. Kaiser wonders if your “health care provider” has talked to you about guns or gun safety. Did you know, Kaiser asks, that 6 in 10 parents with guns in their households say a gun is stored in the same location as ammunition?

What Kaiser doesn’t mention in its press-friendly “key findings” — and no media piece I’ve read mentions — is that 82 percent of those polled feel “very” or “somewhat safe” from gun violence in their own neighborhoods. Only 18 percent of Americans say they worry about gun violence on a daily or almost daily basis, while 43 percent say they worry about it “rarely” or “never.” So, you’re telling me, half of American adults have personally experienced gun violence themselves or toward someone in their family, but less than 20 percent worry about it often?

There are numerous other problems with Kaiser’s findings. Perhaps the most important, though, is the sample size. Granted, I’m no polling expert, but I suspect that the self-reported thoughts of 1,271 people — answering a bunch of poorly defined questions about a highly emotional and politically charged issue “online and by telephone” — should not be relied on with any certitude. And yet, there isn’t a single establishment media reporter writing about the report that exhibits a hint of skepticism.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Another Win for Bruen, This Time in Anti-gun Minnesota

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The effort by anti-gun Minnesota politicians to keep its citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 from keeping and bearing arms failed last week.

But the ruling was closer than it appeared, and the state’s radical Muslim Attorney General Keith Ellison is appealing the decision.

At issue is the state’s law limiting the Second Amendment’s rights to citizens aged 21 and above, neatly infringing on the rights of citizens 18 to 20 years of age. Three of those brought suit, along with the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC).

On the surface, the decision appeared to be clear. Wrote U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez: “The Supreme Court’s recent decision in … Bruen compels the conclusion that Minnesota’s permitting age restriction is unconstitutional, and Plaintiffs are entitled to judgment [in their favor].”

Menendez, a Biden appointee, tried her best to come to a different conclusion. She gave ample space in her 50-page ruling to the testimony of various anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment witnesses brought by the key defendant in the suit, John Harrington, Minnesota’s commissioner of public safety.

First up was a case decided in Florida on a similar issue in which the question of the applicable time frame was to be considered: 1791 (when the Second Amendment was ratified as part of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution) or 1868 (when the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” the Second Amendment against the states in addition to the federal government).

Menendez was forced to quote from Bruen:

…Constitutional rights are enshrined within the scope that they were understood to have when the people [the Founders] adopted them.”… [Emphasis in original.]

[W]e hold that when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

To justify its regulation, the government may not simply posit that the regulation promotes an important interest. Rather, the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s “unqualified command.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen was so unambiguous that Judge Menendez, after hearing the arguments brought by Harrington et al. in the Minnesota suit, was forced to conclude:

Because the Second Amendment’s text presumptively guarantees Plaintiffs’ right to publicly carry a handgun for self-defense, under Bruen Defendants must demonstrate that the age requirement in [the Minnesota law] is consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation.

Based on a careful review of the record, the Court finds that Defendants have failed to identify analogous regulations that show a historical tradition in America of depriving 18–20-year-olds the right to publicly carry a handgun for self-defense.

As a result, the age requirement prohibiting persons between the ages of 18 and 20 from obtaining such a permit to carry violates the Second Amendment.

Defendant Harrington brought in another Second Amendment “expert,” college professor Saul Cornell. Cornell tried his best to persuade the court that the Second Amendment didn’t really mean what it said, that what the Founders intended was that possessing firearms was not a right but a duty citizens owed to the states, and that “imposition of a duty does not necessarily confer individual rights.”

The judge expressed her disappointment that Cornell’s testimony wasn’t sufficiently persuasive to save the Minnesota law:

Professor Cornell’s testimony raises a compelling question about the propriety of drawing conclusions about a modern regulation’s validity from the absence of laws prohibiting 18-to-20-year-olds from possessing weapons during the founding era….

Ultimately, the Court is constrained to conclude that Defendants have not met their burden to show that Minnesota’s challenged law is consistent with the nation’s founding-era history and tradition of [firearms] regulation.

That should have been the end of it. Case closed. Next.

Not quite.

Biden appointee Menendez whined that, under the old way of determining whether Second Amendment rights had been violated by state law, she would have ruled differently:

If the Court were permitted to consider the value of these goals [the “old way”] and how well Minnesota’s age requirement fits the ends to be achieved, the outcome here would likely be different.

But whatever the evidence may reveal about the wisdom behind enacting a 21-year-old requirement for publicly carrying a handgun, such analysis belongs to a regime of means-end scrutiny scuttled by Bruen. [Emphasis added.]

Under Bruen, the balancing of interests in public safety and the right to keep and bear arms has already been [quoting Bruen] “struck by the traditions of the American people.”

She then preached from the bench, holding that the times have changed and implying that the Constitution simply hadn’t kept up:

Second Amendment jurisprudence now focuses a lens entirely on the choices made in a very different time, by a very different American people.

Given the relative dearth of firearms regulation from the most relevant period where that lens is aimed, the endeavor of applying Bruen seems likely to lead, generally, to more guns in the hands of more people, not just young adults.

Some Minnesotans are surely fine with that result. Others may wonder what public safety measures are left to be achieved through the political process where guns are concerned.

But Bruen makes clear that today’s policy considerations play no role in an analytical framework that begins and ends more than two hundred years ago.

In laymen’s terms, the judge laments the olden days when states were largely free to emasculate the Second Amendment at will, using “public safety measures” as the scalpel.

But she did properly rule:

Because the plain text of the Second Amendment covers the Plaintiffs’ proposed course of conduct and Defendants have not met their burden under the historical prong of Bruen’s test, Plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law on their Second Amendment claim.

Immediately following her ruling, Minnesota’s AG Ellison filed an emergency motion to delay its implementation so that he could have to time to prepare an appeal. And Governor Tim Walz, a favorite of the NRA, is at the same time pressuring Minnesota lawmakers to pass bills allowing for unconstitutional expanded background checks and an unconstitutional red flag law.

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This article was published by The New American and is reproduced with permission.

WaPo Writer Agrees Transgender Killer Reacted Against Christian Brainwashing

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

In the wake of the tragic shooting today that left three nine-year-olds and three school employees murdered, a sick Twitter user took to the platform to claim that, while murder is wrong, the shooter was just reacting to cruel indoctrination. You see, the murderer was a 28-year-old “transgender” woman named Audrey Hale who claimed the pronouns “he/him.” Furthermore, the targeted elementary school, Covenant School, is a private Christian institution, in a state (Tennessee) that restricts transgender surgery for minors and drag shows.

And a Washington Post contributor (Mike Wise) apparently praised the assessment that the school suffering from the tragedy was pushing “religious indoctrination.” One wonders if these freaky leftists would have had the same interpretation if the targeted school had been Muslim (Islam of course also condemns transgenderism)? Or if the shooting had happened in California?

About as inappropriate a response as Joe Biden cracking jokes about ice cream before speaking on the shooting.

Wise is already using the shooting to call for more gun confiscation, even though more than 90% of mass shootings occur in gun free zones and, as of 2019, “43 percent of criminals had bought their firearms on the black market, 6 percent acquired them via theft, and 10 percent made a retail purchase.” All of which is to say that Wise is completely delusional about “gun control” making mass shootings less likely. (Also, as a side comment on Wise’s post, the number of school shootings in the listed countries is deceptive about the countries’ safety; Afghanistan, for instance, is in the grip of the terrorist Taliban and China’s government is committing mass genocide).

You can also find Wise’s profile at the Post.

And it seems transgenders have been threatening violence in reaction to Tennessee’s anti-LGBTQ policies.

PJ Media reported:

“Nashville Chief of Police John Drake has since confirmed at a press conference that Hale identified as transgender. She was a biological female who identified as a man. Police also confirmed that Hale was a former student at the school and that she had a manifesto…The victims have been identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 9 years old; Cynthia Peak, age 61; Katherine Koonce, age 60; and; Mike Hill, age 61. Katherine Koonce was the head of The Covenant School.”

The fact that Wise and the other Twitter user immediately began bashing the victims and defending the murderess is not surprising, because leftists typically sympathize with the victimizer rather than the victim; but it is disgusting. Three young children and three adults have been tragically killed. It’s not a situation that should be exploited for shallow, woke virtue-signaling.

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This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

Florida to Become 26th Permitless-Carry State

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Matching “permitless concealed carry” bills are progressing through Florida’s legislature. With Republican supermajorities in both the state House and Senate, passage into law with Governor Ron DeSantis’ signature is a foregone conclusion. This will make Florida the 26th state to remove the infringement of requiring a permit to carry a concealed firearm.

Celebrations, however, are muted. Nothing in either bill addresses Florida’s rule that prohibits open carrying of a firearm, even for those with permits. And that’s highly annoying to Second Amendment purists such as Dudley Brown, head of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). Back in late January, when the House bill was first introduced, Brown said:

While this bill does allow for most adults to carry a concealed handgun without a permit, we’d love to see it also include open carry as well.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is already on the record supporting Constitutional Carry and [with majority] Republican control [of] the state legislature — amending the legislation to include open carry would be an even greater win for the Constitutional Carry movement.

I hope the bill sponsors are willing to amend the bill and make it stronger.

They didn’t listen, and the bills are generating lackluster support from some Republicans and delighting anti-gun Democrats who have little chance to stall either bill due to those Republican supermajorities in both houses.

Constitutional Carry isn’t synonymous with “permitless” carry. Constitutional Carry is defined as the Second Amendment defines it: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Historians accede that, at the time the amendment was added to the Constitution, the Militia was a reference to able-bodied citizens in each state. Therefore, any requirement attached to the exercise of that right is an infringement.

As the NAGR explains:

Constitutional Carry is the basic principle that if you are legally eligible to possess a firearm, you should be able to carry that weapon, open or concealed, for self-defense without government permission.

Said Brown: “Florida is one of the most populous states in America and passing Constitutional Carry into law — especially a Constitutional Carry bill which applies to all law-abiding adults — would be a major victory for the gun rights movement nationwide.”

Once the new Florida bills are passed into law, Florida residents may carry concealed without first obtaining permission, or taking a gun class, or submitting to other infringements. But carrying a firearm openly comes with a $500 fine. And the bills also limit permitless concealed carry to citizens aged 21 and over, neatly prohibiting those aged 18 through 20 from enjoying the same rights.

One therefore must be careful when parsing the language of politicians such as Florida House Speaker Paul Renner when he announced that the bills were being introduced on January 30:

Florida led the nation in allowing for concealed carry, and that extends today as we remove the government permission slip to exercise a constitutional right.

The Florida Sheriffs Association and the Florida Police Chiefs are on board with the bills as written (and likely to be signed into law). Said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, “This concealed carry permit requirement serves nothing for Florida, and the reason it serves nothing for Florida is because it has no bearing on who goes and buys a gun.”

The Senate version includes school-safety measures, such as expanding the school-guardian program to allow private school staff to be armed, in addition to public- and charter-school guardians.

Floridians who want to enjoy reciprocity rights in other states that don’t have permitless carry laws may still obtain a permit if they wish.

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This article was published by The New American and is reproduced with permission.