This is TTAG’s weekly roundup of legal and legislative news affecting guns, the gun business and gun owners’ rights. For another look at the topics discussed here, check out this week in gun rights at FPC.
Matt Gaetz and the gun community call out ATF for possible brace ban
If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’re probably well aware that Congressman Matt Gaetz has written the ATF a letter about their apparent plans to ban arm braces for AR-15 pistols. If not, here’s a quick summary: the ATF may have been trying to discreetly re-classify certain pistol braces as “stocks.” Braces are often used for AR-15 pistol configurations as they aid the operator in maintaining control of the pistol while using it with one hand.
The reasoning, the exact text, and how much the ATF has done is uncertain. Were they motivated by the Supreme Court’s decision to ignore all ten pending Second Amendment cases this week? Are they anticipating a Biden win in the general election in November? Is it simply an ideologically motivated power move? Are they simply animated by a callous disregard for our liberty, the rule of law, and our Constitution? Maybe it is all of the above.
What matters is that the ATF, an agency that exists under the Executive Branch, whose members are not elected, and who are not generally accountable (or even really known) to the public, have made up and begun exercising a power to categorically ban certain firearm parts based solely on their preferred, randomly shifting interpretation of various definitions under gun control diktats such as the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Just as was the case with bump stocks, the ATF has stated publicly that a number of these items are lawful to own. These assurances came in the form of opinion letters sent to various manufacturers such as SB Tactical, and included clarification stating that certain braces could also be shouldered “incidentally” after the infamous “alchemy” letter that said shouldering a pistol constituted a “redesign.”
Of course, despite frequent assurances, the ATF may have again decided suddenly and arbitrarily that arm braces are now suddenly unlawful. Given their move against bump stocks, would that really surprise you? You can read FPC’s formal statement on this issue here.
Federal judge strikes down Jackson, MS open carry ban
Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba learned a hard lesson last Friday: the Constitution still applies, even during a crisis. Back in April, the mayor issued an order declaring the open carry of firearms to be unlawful during the COVID-19 state of emergency. Not only was the order wholly unconstitutional, it was totally irresponsible from a practical perspective.
If the residents of Jackson cannot rely on the government to keep them safe, why should their ability to protect themselves be limited? The order issued by the federal judge, which you can read here, includes a decree where the city of Jackson acknowledges it lacks the authority to issue such gun restrictions, and where it agrees not to attempt to do so in the future.
Grandma takes Northam to court in first challenge to Virginia’s new gun laws
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has been pushing gun laws through the Virginia Legislature since the new legislative session began late last year. This week, Valerie Trojan, aided by Gun Owners of America and the Virginia Citizens Defense League, filed a challenge to a new gun rationing law, which is slated to become effective on July 1.
Ms. Trojan intends to purchase multiple firearms this summer, presumably as gifts for her family. In the complaint, the plaintiffs claim that the law is impermissible under the Virginia Constitution, and that restriction of constitutional rights cannot be based on the frequency with which they are exercised.
The challenge makes that case, no doubt to the certain chagrin of Northam, that just as the state has no authority to place a limit on the number of times someone might exercise other rights, it lacks the authority to do the same when it comes to buying a gun. We’ll be watching this case closely, and wish all the best to the plaintiffs.
Information request yields documentation of Bloomberg’s exploitation of Sandy Hook
The internet is forever. This is something that most people understand, but apparently former-Mayor Bloomberg, former mayor Rahm Emanuel and other past members of the Obama Administration aren’t amont them.
Files recovered by Judicial Watch and recently republished by the good folks over at Moms at Arms show that less than 24 hours after the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary school, Bloomberg staffers conspired to make him out to be a hero by promoting his gun control agenda. It’s an interesting glimpse at how the gun control industry is ready to jump on a tragedy immediately in order to further their anti-2A agenda.
The Bloombistas suggested that he use survivors of the incident as props and celebrities to create commercials. Two days after the incident, then-Secretary of the Department of Education Ann Duncan and Rahm Emanuel were in correspondence. Emanuel suggested that they push for a vote on banning so-called assault weapons within a week, “before it fades.” In other words, never let a crisis go to waste.
Are Chicago police no longer responding to shootings?
With the current state of things in major cities across the country, it is unsurprising that calling for emergency assistance can be difficult. In fact, we talked about the situation in Chicago just two weeks ago. Now police in the Windy City have been caught in radio chatter, indicating that they may have no desire to take any action, even if they expect violent crime to occur.
In an uncovered audio cut, unidentified officers are informed of a shootout between “gangbangers.” Instead of requesting more information, at least two officers respond, the first saying “let ‘em do it,” and the other saying “let it be.”
This type of situation highlights, yet again, why our Second Amendment right is so essential. When we can’t depend on the state to protect us, we have to depend on someone. Like everything else in life, when those we count on fail, the buck stops with us. You might even say that you are your own first responder.
Safety, or security? Florida gun shop bans the wearing of masks
The “reopening of the economy” has created an interesting scenario for both consumers and retailers. While many businesses have insisted that customers wear masks when they enter their stores, a gun store in Florida has instead established a no-mask policy.
Alex Shkop, owner of Guns and School Training Center in West Palm Beach, insists that his policy is for safety, expressing concern about would-be robbers. The natural result of the policy is a lack of protection for the shop’s employees from potential exposure to COVID-19 (masks are intended to keep other people safe, not the wearer).
Both concerns are equally valid, but after all the compulsory closures of these stores by anti-gun state governments, I can only hope that this doesn’t create problems for gun shop owners in the case of a second wave of illness, or attract unwanted attention from the state.
Some of the family run stores we frequent have relaxed the mask requirement; the signs are still posted, but not enforced.
Sitting in the park, right now, with my wife and daughter, none of the picnicking families are masked. None of the runners, or bike-riders either. Very few mosying about are masked.
Seeing an ethnic pattern: India Indians more likely to be masked. Other Asians, not so. Hispanics, blacks, Whites mostly not masked, unless elderly.
In my rural area there are no places that require a mask. We’re doing fine. I had to journey into the city the other day and was required to wear a mask in a large, mostly-empty music store. It just pissed me off.
You are outside… OUTSIDE!
Jesus, great job there, really wallow in that mindless fear.
FDR and JFK (among others) said it best, “Fear is the scariest thing, give in to it mindlessly”
Or something like that.
Maybe I was not clear….we are glad to see people taking time outside, unmasked. We are also glad our mom-and-pop shops are making masks optional.
Not at all afraid.
https://www.nap.edu/read/25776/chapter/1#6
So the study discusses the efficacy of various types of masks with respect to several viruses including corona viruses.
Here is an excerpt of the relevant bits from the conclusion:
“There are no studies of individuals wearing homemade fabric masks in the course of their typical activities. Therefore, we have only limited, indirect evidence regarding the effectiveness of such masks for protecting others… The current level of benefit, if any, is not possible to assess.”
Thank you for posting that, Jason!
The effectiveness of masks has been studied long before C19 showed up. You can Google these studies. They conclude that masks are better at keeping pathogens in than keeping them out. Your conjunctiva are a good pathway for infection. If your eyes aren’t covered then you can be infected.
That’s not remotely the case. The evidence out there is that yes masks help.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/do-face-masks-help-studies-leaning-towards-yes/
There is little evidence they don’t help and a reasonable amount that they do.
Next question, if they don’t help even a little, why is it that doctors have been wearing masks for more than a century? Because it has been shown to reduce the risk of getting others sick. Surgeon’s don’t wear masks to keep a patient from getting them sick. They wear them to keep from getting bacteria and viruses in to a surgical site.
I can grok the concern of a gun store. Not sure it really raises their risk that much more that someone would attempt to rob them simply because they could wear a mask and maybe “blend in” a little longer and be a little less likely to get caught later.
For those saying masks do nothing, okay try this little experiment. Hold a piece of paper up. Blow really hard on it at arms length. Does it flutter? I am going to guess yes. Now cover your mouth with a mask, try the same experiment. I am guessing it doesn’t move at all. A mask, even a crappy one, reduces how far viral particles can spread from your breath. Period. Better ones will reduce how many actually exit the mask. Both are good things, but even not being able to breath particles on to someone 6 feet away is a huge help.
If you can’t possibly stand wearing a mask in public, you should probably re-evaluate your life. I feel worse for those who have to wear them all day long, but if you can’t manage for half an hour in a store, you should probably get that looked at. If it offends you so much you can’t bear the thought, you do need to re-evaluate your life choices and value system. Take the approach that science has some basis in reality. The abundance of evidence shows masks help. So if you go with “its an infringement to do something to help protect everyone around me that requires me at most to be slightly uncomfortable in a store” your value system is probably crap.
For a regular store, no excuses. We have evidence they help. Cases are raising again, extremely fast in TX and FL (of note).
@Matt. Doctors wear masks to prevent breathing, coughing and sneezing on a patient with an open incision, and to protect them from blood and puss splatter while cutting, poking and prodding the incision. Viruses are too small and not stopped by these N99/N95 environment masks, surgical masks or cloth rags. Medical technology and Biology 101.
@Matt
Well said I agree 100%
It seems like people who just don’t like being told what to do are looking for any reason to justify not wearing a mask. It may not be 100% effective but it helps and its common courtesy to others to wear one.
Most gunstore employees don’t wear masks, and they’ve talked to more people in the last couple months than just about anyone. And none of them are getting sick.
Defund cops? No, defund ATF!!!
There is no US Justice Department bureau called ATF (or BATFE if you want to get technical.) There’s a US Govt. supported terrorist group that steals from, kidnaps and murders Americans that goes by that name, sure. But since the existence of such a bureau is blatantly unconstitutional and under the doctrine of judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison any unconstitutional law is void when passed (rather than merely when a judge says so) there most certainly is no such bureau. Just a bunch of soldiers operating outside the law on US soil against US citizens and with the full support of the US government.
We should do a lot more than defund them.
What useful purpose does the ATF fulfill, aside from providing jobs? Really, how do they make the USA a better place?
Excellent question. I have been trying to figure out just what benefit the ATF provides (other than demand for a different set of yellow letters on a blue windbreaker) for years.
The fact that we have a federal agency dedicated to exercising control over that which is defined as not-to-be-infringed is prima fascia evidence that the federal government does not and will not adhere to the rules set forth in the very document that defines it’s existence. The ATF only exists because control freaks gonna control.
They are great if you want to burn people to death or shoot a woman holding a baby.
Both of those were done by the FeeBI, not the ATF.
As all gun control is un Constitutional to begin with, secondly ATF was never a Constitutionally authorized agency from it’s inception.
Then again when are elected representatives going to be held accountable for violating their oath to the Constitution as it’s written, no wonder the ATF is worried of the Boogeymen movement while ignoring Marxist anarchists.
They enforce tax collection on alcohol, tobacco products and guns.
People think the ATF was created to infringe on guns specifically. Nope. The modern ATF is the descendant of “the Revenuers” of the Prohibition era. The ATF licenses producers, distributors and sellers of alcohol, tobacco and firearms – collecting a tax at one or more of the “three tier” model in all products.
This is why the ATF used to be under the Department of the Treasury.
This is another scheme that could go away if we just got rid of the income tax and went to a national retail sales tax.
DG,
I used to be stridently against replacing the income tax system with a sales tax. Reasoning: sales taxes are regressive. HOWEVER, the income tax system has become impossible to fix and is skewed heavily in favor of big money. The Feds use tax incentives to favor industries and for social engineering. That all needs to stop. So, I agree, abolish the income tax and institute a sales tax.
Get rid of the income tax. Especially on Corporations. They never pay it anyway. They just pass it on.
Huntmaster,
Cancel the corporate income tax on Monday. By Friday, every major corporation in the free world will be registered with the USA as its home base. That might just be a economic expansion of unprecedented proportion.
Taxation is theft.
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/is-taxation-theft
Let’s hear it first Matt Gaetz!
+1
+1
Ban masks and ban state/ federal employees from coming into your shop…. they can only enter by appointment only lol… and ONLY if wearing a mask…
Good! Plandemic cancelled, bitches.
When I was a kid, if you were wearing a mask and entered a back, you would likely have had a revolver in your face in a few moments after entry.
People wore masks during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Get over it. No one is a responsible adult anymore.
And they were required under penalty of arrest if not worn. In nearly all major cities.
Ok…..so you are fine with some level of government dictating every action and managing every nuance of your life?
I would be more willing had the authoritarians and their media organs not so obviously over-hyped the whole thing. About 80% of the Corona hysteria is BS so I am behaving accordingly….like a responsible adult should.
Yup. Right now, after two + weeks of heavy protesting, rioting, demonstrations, etc, we should be in the middle of a HUGE outbreak. There should be lines at ER’s. There should be piles of dead people.
Instead?
More phase one, two propaganda.
This has been the biggest scam in history. Pushing a big ol reset button.
“Ok…..so you are fine with some level of government dictating every action and managing every nuance of your life?”
No, just having you wear a damn mask in public when inside to try and slow a pandemic until there’s a vaccine because idiots like you watch youtube videos and think you know what the hell is going on. Not “dictating every action and managing every nuance of your life.” Grow up.
Tell ya what, you can stop wearing a seatbelt until the mask stuff ends. Fair trade?
I haven’t worn a seatbelt in years. None of the government’s business. If you want to wear one, be my guest.
And under my state’s laws, I can demand a jury trial for a $25 seatbelt ticket. You can be damn sure I will make sure the badge thug is there to testify.
It’s all pollitical. In Illinois, motorcyclists don’t have to wear a helmit. Drivers have to wear a seatbelt. Illinois doesn’t really care about saving lives. Chicago politicians don’t care if gangs kill gangs. They know who the drug pushers are. They’ll arrest you for selling a bit of coke, tho. Follow the money…………
There’s no vaccine for AIDS yet. How long are you willing to wait for this virus vaccine (with a mask on)?
there is no lobby against seat belt wearing; brain bucket laws would be here without a lot of effort.
my village can pull you over for non compliance. thirty five dollar non moving violation= parking ticket. i’ve paid it twice since it was instituted some years back. i consider it freedom tax.
It’s easy to play the part of Karen – until you have a spike in crime and criminals getting away because everyone is wearing a mask.
We will see this show up in crime stats quite shortly.
I respectfully suggest that you are making the risky assumption that the relevant crime statistics will ever be publicly reported. There’s precedent: If I recall correctly, it was in 2011 when the Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped reporting crimes categorized by the race/ethnicity of the criminals and victims.
You mean like here, with the last 30 years of crime stats by race?
https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2018-nibrs-crime-data-as-transition-to-nibrs-2021-continues
Then wear a mask. I am not it’s pretty simple to understand except for morons like yourself. We already succeeded in successfull guarantine of those not sick any other stupidity you wish to promote?
isolate the few at risk for the good of the many. don’t isolate the majority to protect the few .
it’s marxism vs. capitalism.
Happy Fathers Day Gentlemen!!!
Matt’s the real deal IMHO. If you haven’t seen him decimate the clucking hens on The View it’s worth watching. It’s the only time I could get through more than 30 seconds of that depravity…
We need many more Conservative Leaders like Matt!!!
God Bless and Carry On!!!
Yep saw Matt Gaetz on Tucker(?) Very impressed with him. Anywho the po-leece in Chiraq have taken their time responding to ghetto gun use. Last night a 3 year old was murdered. Beetljuice was “upset”. RE:gunshops…only ILL shops(& Point Blank)range “require” masks. I was slightly shocked when I went to my LGS in Griffith,IN (about 6 weeks ago)and I was the only person out of mebbe 20 with a mask on.
Wearing a mask into a gun store SHOULD get you shot on sight. Try walking into the local gunshops around here wearing a mask or carrying a un holstered /un cased firearm will result in a gun or two in your face . As it should be.
Don’t be retarded.
I sold my pistol braces two days befor they get banned whenever that day comes.
FUDD
I’ll give you a fucking dollar. For both of them.
His humor went over your head didn’t it? Mine will get lost in a boating accident like anything else Trump wants to ban.
No. I never had any… prove I did 😉
whooosh! never had any humor, sad.
While not banned, a local pawn shop has done the same… he is a good guy…we all know this is about control not stopping a virus
If you want to wear a mask, it’s personal choice. If the government tries to make it mandatory, they can fuck off. Lastly, I’ll put whatever kind of fucking stock I want on my weapon. Come and take them.
Anyone getting their “health” information from the government, UN, WHO or CDC deserves to suffer from the disease they are promoting. I bet everyone on here (although we are mostly breathren in many ways) has spent way more time researching what next gun to buy than bothering to educate themselves on how the body actually functions and what the background is behind this particular “virus”.
I agree, it’s a complicated subject, much more so than the latest and greatest 9mm compact, however there is no more important subject to get schooled on.
One fact is easily accessable and probably innately known by most, is that genetics does play a role in all biological functions. Removing that variable, you cannot place “rules and regs” generically on everyone on how to behave.
Another commonly known fact is boosting the body’s ability to ward off intruders is universal fact, no matter who you are. Why wasn’t there a fierce encouragement for people to get into sunlight, take Vit. D3, Zinc, Vit. C, Vit. K, etc….? That is the ONLY way to prevent disease (biology 101, 200 years ago when Big Pharma didn’t exist). Rudolph Virchow, who is considered by all to be the father of pathology famously said, “Saying that germs cause didease, is like saying mosquitos cause swamps”. In other words, keep the environment (your body) clean and create an unpleasant place for pathogens to thrive, and disease cannot exist. FACT.
Masks are being used as symbols. They have already been proven to cause more health issues than they prevent. Foucci should have every accolade ever bestowed on him, taken away and sued by the citizens of this country for malpractice and eventually treason. Medicine itself has as much to do with HEALTH care as a wrecking ball has to do with precision construction.
Ben Willard,
Except for the criticism of about researching guns more than Covid, fully agree. Thank you for speaking up.
We’ve been following a couple of virologists whom we have met at health conferences; they despise Fauci, calling him out as a fraud and worse. One of my relatives is a virologist, also. He specializes in vaccine research. All three, the two we met at conferences, and my relative, are warning strongly about the pending vaccines, that they will not be safe and may kill more people than the disease.
I am NOT trying to start a vax/anti-vax thread. What I am reporting is very specific to Covid and to the current attempts at developing an immunization.
If they actually knew what they are talking about they would have told you that the virus will have mutated by the time they bring a vaccine to market. Dr. Benjamin Neuman, a Texas A&M virologist who studies coronaviruses, says that every attempt to develop a human coronavirus vaccine has failed for this reason. He also pointed out that immunity from existing coronavirus strains is gone within 6 months of infection so even if you successfully developed a vaccine it would require frequent revaccination.
As far as the vaccine being more dangerous than actually getting the virus. I am throwing the BS flag.
And while I am at Re:. My post below we are now starting to get hospitalizations.
my oft repeated take as well.
The virology community got itself into a complicated situation and, I suspect, tried to CYA its way out. The result is what we have today.
IMHO the world wanted the medical version of Foxconn, pursued that concept and didn’t realize they were getting tlinto bed with a combination of incompetence, paranoia, and the CCP which doesn’t have a good grasp of science but sees it as another tool in their toolbox for world conquest.
Strych9,
Good insight, but I would shape it a little differently. The desire for a Foxconn of virology was being organized and funded through the CCP’s financial and political influence in our universities. So often it is money that precedes opinion.
Having been balls deep in the university system for most of my life I tend to doubt this analysis in general terms. It’s part of the problem but it’s far more complicated than most people want to imagine because the reality doesn’t fit into nice neat little boxes.
IMHO, it goes to the way the universities themselves are funded. It also has to do with a bunch of the cutting edge research that’s been going on within virology in the last few years, diffusion of risk to the point of a lack of accountability and an attempt to hold biotech/medical costs down for the next generation of advances for things ranging from genetic disorders to induced problems like renopathy, neuropathy, degenerative diseases and cancer.
I actually have an entire theory on how this happened. Most of the PhD’s and other science degree folks I associate with, including virologists, microbiologists, biochemists etc agree with my theory and urge me to not open my mouth unless I want the rest of my life to be destroyed. “Leave the university system first and make sure you never need or want to return” is what I hear from all of them.
Strych9,
I believe you. My few years teaching part-time at 2 local universities has your words ringing true.
You can, however, post your research here on TTAG. We will all promise to keep it hush-hush. 😉
Since you’re asking… also apologies in advance for the length here. TL:DR heads are going to explode. In fact I may have to cut this up into multiple posts to get it through TTAGs filters….
IMHO, this is intimately tied to two things I’ve discussed [ad nauseam] here before. Those things being the necessity to take back the educational system from the ground up and our brain’s pattern seeking/creating behavior.
Also, I don’t really have “research” per se in the classical sense. This is more a series of observations that all tie together into a hypothesis.
I started to notice this kind of problem when I was in high school. Both my parents are PhD chemists. They noted certain things back in the late 1990’s that caught my attention, such as K-12’s complete inability to prepare kids for science work due to a lack of math (which as Sam correctly notes is directly tied to reasoning, logical thinking, “flow” and other necessary skills for life but particularly the hard sciences).
The root of the issue, IMHO, has been growing since the late 1970’s. That is the issue of how universities are funded. More and more they’re heavily reliant on grants. Not tuition or alumni donations but grants. Big grants. Due to the way that grants are given this applies two pressures to the system.
The first is for universities to hire specific people with the right name, that is a history of successful grant applications for big, big grants. Every science has a few of these people, the rockstars. Every postdoc wants to work for them, every PhD candidate wants to research under them etc. They also teach very little because they don’t have to. The University gives them a lab, as few PhD candidates as the person wants and as many postdocs as they can use. This is because when it comes to grants the university usually takes nearly half, 50%, of the money from the grant. In this regard they’ve become like tort lawyers seeking big cases.
The second issue here is that this puts a lot of pressure on graduate students to pick up the slack. It’s not new for PhD students to teach undergrad but it’s becoming increasingly common. It’s also becoming increasingly common that PhD students are foreign, mainly Chinese or Indian (I’ll get to this in a minute). The concerning thing here is that universities are increasingly more responsive to grants and a very select number of PhDs who get them. So you sometimes end up with what initially appears to be odd, a phone directory for a department that’s mostly admins. What do they do? They deal with regulation for some government agency like NIH for example. That’s all they do, they’re essentially compliance officers for the grant programs.
This has placed enormous pressure on the graduate student population. The story of the “poor grad student” is largely true but due to the way the system has evolved it’s gotten far worse. The result is that only those who can afford it go into post-graduate programs. If you’re poor and got a BS or a BA, your best move is to avoid a Masters or PhD and just go to work. I won’t bother with the stats here but, long story short if you get a PhD the only real “money maker” right off the bat is to be a Professor, which usually is something like 5% of the PhD’s granted in any given discipline. The rest go to private industry and do about as well as someone with a Bachelor’s degree does. This cost is why universities rely heavily on foreign students with a visa. Because if you’re from India or China this system is still a “win” for you. If you’re lower-middle class or above from this country the post-grad system makes little sense for you to enter since it’s a loss 95% of the time.
This is the grant-gravy train and it’s pretty exclusive for people, but it’s very profitable for institutions. It’s also why universities don’t put pressure on K-12 programs to produce more people with math. The real money is from grants that undergrads don’t get and the post-grad system is one most Americans will find is a losing bet. It makes sense to get your student population, and therefore the backbone of your money-making system, from abroad.
However, this system is also tied to private industry, particularly in places like virology. For example there are some very exciting advances in the manipulation of viruses to make them do good things for us, and this isn’t just theory. In curing problems with damage retinas, damage due to genetic issues, poorly managed diabetes etc there have been people actually cured. The process, essentially, was to take a benign virus and rewrite it’s code so that it’s 1) very susceptible to amoxicillin, which most viruses are unaffected by, 2) to make it both have an affinity to infect the retina while 3) rewriting the DNA of the cells in the retina to rebuild the retina. When the repairs are complete the virus is killed off by a course of very cheap, common and well tolerated antibiotic. Genius. Fucking genius. Such a therapy, if it can be mastered for other problems holds the promise of curing everything from cancer to MS to injury based neuropathy.
It’s also, incredibly expensive to do. This is where Foxconn enters the picture. We design Apple products in the West, we just have them made in China because it’s cheap. Japan figured this out with high-end electronics decades ago and, over time, started producing their own. Korea is on this path as well, just compare a Hyundai today to one from 1995. China does this with trinkets mostly but in recent years, like the last 20 or so, they’ve started to compete very, very heavily with the Indians for higher-end chemical production and medicines. They’re also doing it along the lines of metallurgy. The problem is, generally, they’re where Hyundai was in 1995, they’re not great at this high-tech shit and they’re prone to cutting corners.
The cost of many of these new biotech treatments that are on the near horizon is something biotech and pharmaceutical companies are sensitive too. These companies operate in a bizarrely complicated international world where prices are dictated by a dozen or more factors that most people don’t understand and don’t care to understand. They’re in danger of being regulated into the ground or being put out of business entirely by something like Medicare-For-All, and they’re aware of this situation. As such, cost cutting measures are the order of the day. So…. Foxconn for everything!
The issue here is that the Chinese are not actually that good at biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, virology etc but they’ve shown an enormous willingness to play in the deep end of the pool where they don’t belong. This has generally been allowed due to the promise that “If we can just get them up to speed… FOXCONN!”. The result of this is that many, many Western countries have allowed various universities, companies and government agencies to give the Chinese a “helping hand”.
So, the Chinese get a lot of investment in something they’re not really competent at. And lurking in the background is the CCP. The CCP is power-hungry, sure but they’re also paranoid as fuck.
Starting in the late 2000’s there’s increased chatter (of which I have personally only become recently aware) about Coronaviridae in bats and how this might be the next pandemic. Why exactly this particular vector and family are focused on I am unsure. There’s a bevy of evidence that this is overblown but… whatever, fighter pilots call this “target lock” from what I’ve been told. Either way, it’s an intense and almost fanatical focus to the exclusion of other issues. Simply put the chances this kind of disease could 1) jump to people and then 2) pull the second trick of spreading within a population it’s never “seen” before is very, very, very unlikely.
Then, in the mid-2000’s a Chinese mining firm explores a mine. Six members of the team are sickened and three die. Symptoms are pneumonia like, and viral in origin. OoooOOoooOOOoooo!
This is where I suspect that things go off the rails in this particular case. If you’re afraid that such a disease might make the jump to people (it did) and then might spread within the human population, how would you research that? Enter “gain of function” testing. You make it able to do these things and you give it human tissue samples to do them in and then you sit back and watch evolution in progress. The problem here is that you just took your own worse nightmare and actually made it a reality. What if it gets loose? I think that’s probably what happened here.
Skipping a bunch of things here for brevity (long ago lost) what you end up with is what you have today. This virus shows a remarkable ability to infect a wide variety of human cells, spread fast etc. Almost like it’s seen us before, which brings up the question of why haven’t we seen it? The chances we never seen it before and it made jumps 1 & 2 (above) plus can invade all these different cell types this fast… unrealistic. Then we have other oddities. It doesn’t seem to spread outdoors. At first this seems like a UV light issue but it also seems to be true at night. Strange. And WTAF is going on with the antimalarial drugs having some effect? Why would anyone even think that? (This is what got my wife really, really deep into this shit. WTAF does anyone think a drug that inhibits a parasite from infecting a blood cell would work on this virus?). Well, there are a few reasons, and those reasons if you understand genetics at a level far above my own understanding would seem to point (according to a couple dozen people who know this shit and whom I know personally) towards this disease being created rather than coming about naturally. My wife got into it because she thought that this virus acted like it was almost a patchwork of parasites (she’s a parasitologist) and a variety of viruses she saw before deciding that virology was boring.
Regardless, skipping a bunch of shit again, this brings up a bunch of other questions which can be distilled down to this: Why is there so much bullshit from the experts on this disease? Why all the obfuscation? I mean, yeah, the public and the media are demanding the impossible: direct empirical knowledge we have no zero diseases and they want it all nailed down and served on a platter in two weeks. It’s insane.
However, there are other outright lies that make little sense. The most obvious tend to come from the W.H.O. which initially seems like it might be due to the fact that the head of the W.H.O. was essentially picked for the job by President Xi. Without getting into pages of it all there are things coming from respected virologists that make little sense and the question is “WHY!?!?”.
The answer I suspect is that this is a giant CYA. Mis-allocation of resources within the Western educational system combined with the retardedly expensive and convoluted nature of pharmaceuticals, the end of the “big molecule” era in medicine and some other factors created a situation where this is not a “Chinese problem”. It’s that the world scientific community, particularly in virology, created this issue in pursuit of another Foxconn. Now that incompetence on the other end has resulted in disaster they’re terrified of being held accountable and probably more scared that the gravy train will stop.
Now, the big set of questions. If I’m right how much further does this rot go? What other “CoV-2’s” are lurking out there, landmines we’ve created and are stumbling towards unawares? If the top experts lie like this, even to the POTUS (and the world, really) how the hell can we ever trust them again? What verification processes can we put in place to stop this? How can we fix this absolutely necessary system so that it goes back to being a useful tool rather than an uncontrollable monster?
Big questions, the beginning of the solution is obvious but no one’s going to want to hear it. A full investigation with blanket amnesty for those who come forward up front. No matter how you cut it we have to figure out what the hell is going on before we can fix any of it. Otherwise we’re just grasping at straws in the dark.
Sorry, strych9. I didn’t read the post, but I promise I’ll watch the movie.
Ralph:
Just go watch one of the Mad Max movies.
That’s where this ends if we don’t pay attention to the details and if you can’t be bothered with the details you might as well just skip to the end since it doesn’t really matter how you got there anyway.
“…about Coronaviridae in bats and how this might be the next pandemic. Why exactly this particular vector and family are focused on I am unsure.”
Bats are mammals with a high metabolic rate with an efficient pulmonary system.
Meaning, their O2 uptake to body mass ratio is off-the-charts efficient. And they fly. That makes a wonderful virus-spreading system. They cover large distances in flight, spewing virus particles as they go.
That theory is plausible.
As to man-engineered, read this, it’s by a guy ‘in the trenches’ of drug research :
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/19/a-wide-look-at-coronavirus-mutants
Geoff:
When I say “vector” I mean the bats. When I say “family” I mean Coronaviridae specifically.
That particular combination captured world attention for no real apparent reason. Bats carry A LOT of other shit that is far, far, far more worrisome but for some reason since the early 2000’s there’s been a drumbeat about Coronaviridae very, very specifically. It’s not something that anyone has been able to explain, in fact, most people in virology, microbio and even “bat people” are just as puzzled by this… zeal, as I am. There’s no real reason for it, and in fact a number of reasons very specifically not to worry about it because of the way that family of viruses tends to act as a group species-specialists.
There are a number of influenza (and other) viruses which, logically and from a microbio point of view, make far more sense to worry about because of their known ability to hop species. Yet no one really does worry about them.
As for the article, I personally don’t know enough genetics to fully understand it. I can tell you however that the original paper caused my wife to go to the whiteboard while mumbling to herself about deletions creating frameshifts that prevent the creation of a stop codon. She expects to spend about three hours tearing apart the genetics for funzies. But she says right off the bat that it’s further evidence of “engineering” or “tampering” depending on what words you want to use.
1) Happy Father’s Day to those of you who actually raised your kids.
2) If the government is going to try to ban something related to OC they should shutbdown Uncle Mike’s.
3) Chicago is unsurprising.
4) The most recent JRE with Bret Weinstein is an interesting take on CoV-2, the election, the state of politics, science and education and it’s reasonably an interesting take on Biden considering that Weinstien considers himself a Progressive and Rogan is quite liberal in a lot of regards.
Is he really concerned about robbers or is he making a political statement? In my area restaurants and some stores have been shutting down again on their own. We had 30 cases total at the end of May and 200 since then with 100 in the last for days in a community of 130k. Nobody is going to the hospital so we may be dealing with a degraded mutant strain.
“Nobody is going to the hospital so we may be dealing with a degraded mutant strain.”
There are a variety of options to explain this, the milder versions winning the genetic race due to enhanced ability to spread undetected is certainly one of them. It’s almost guaranteed to happen over time.
In reality to overarching answer is probably that in combination with other things.
Could be wrong, but wearing a mask and carrying, even with your CWP, is a felony.
Depends on your location, but the first time I walked into the bank with my gun on my hip and a mask on my face I really felt strange. Not that anyone could see the gun under my shirt, but still…
It’s legal here too but I 100% agree.
When the locjdowns started I was like “Damn, it’s almost like I’m out here to rob and steal”.
Kinda got used to it since.
Most people have. Which is why this gun store owner is no better than the other side. If they are they to rob you, they are going to do it anyways. Mask… no mask… Anyone who robs a gun store either already knows everything about that store and it’s owners/employees, or they are incredibly criminal (stupid) and there is no such thing as planning outside of hitting a glass dick and thinking about it for an hour before they do it.
It’s the owner’s store, his business, his livelihood. If people are unhappy with his action, there are other gun shops that they can patronize.
Good for them, I would ban masks ( mind control devices) from my property also ) Morons wears masks. Would not force anyone to wear one or not wear one, but the last place you don’t want to be mistaken for a robber is a gun store…
so people who wear masks because their work made it mandatory are morons? Also, masks to mitigate the spread of germs, plain and simple. I hate wearing them too, but the thought process of airborne particles is not hard to understand. I’m all for sick people wearing masks, and since you can’t tell with COVID, better safe than sorry? It would be nice to get beyond this way of thinking you have to let people who might have any kind of sickness wear them if they want, you know, to keep others from getting sick. How extreme the germophobia is would be up to them. Not sure about you, but I was a germaphobe before. I don’t see the need to shake hands, or do as foreign countries do and kiss cheeks. Lets just go ahead and continue to evolve, k?
Not morons just unnecessarily. I retried from a 500 man FD in NY . Exactly one guy on the dept has tested positive for it . They live together, eat , sleep together, go home to their families , work side jobs , float between firehouse , go out drinking , shake hands, hug, and so on .
The only mask wearing is on ems jobs , not in the firehouse , or non ems calls . 500 “ front line “ workers in NY one case over months .
Must be different in the densely populated areas of Montana .
500 men in one department? Ok.
Must be different all over the US…
Dude… you are taking the mask things way too… surgical and sterile. They are meant to decrease the amount of airborne particles from yourself. Nothing more, nothing less. Quit trying to turn it into a sterile clean room or some operation every time you wear one. 99% of people know everything you said. Still does not change the fact that with them airborne particles spread up to 14 feet… can you guess how far they get with the mask on? Nobody said anything about filtering. You want to filter air? Wear a gas mask. You want to decrease the spread distance, cover your face, with anything. Same as you would when you sneeze (hopefully into your sleeve).
Simple, right? Now that you and the rest of society know this, seeing people wearing masks should not trigger your fear mongering they are going to become criminals. If you cannot operate of a business around it, then you might lose those people, no matter how small or large that number is, it’s still a loss. It’s obvious you don’t crunch the numbers or own a private business or you would know this. It’s just not worth being a dick to people over.
@Montana Actual Yup, if you wear a mask into a gun store, you are a moron. If you wear a mask out on street in public, you are a moron. If you wear as mask driving your car you are a moron. If you wear a mask at your job, well, I just feel bad for you, and maybe you should look for a job with smarter bosses that really care about their employee’s health, and not so much about getting sued by some germaphobe.
N95 masks: are designed for CONTAMINATED environments. That means when you exhale through N95 the design is that you are exhaling into contamination. The exhale from N95 masks are vented to breath straight out without filtration. They don’t filter the air on the way out. They don’t need to. And a virus is about 100 times smaller than the smallest particle a N95 mask is designed to block.
Conclusion: if you’re in Walmart and the guy with Covid has N95 mask his Covid breath is unfiltered being exhaled into Walmart because it was designed for already contaminated environments, it’s not filtering your air on the way out.
• Surgical Mask: these masks were designed and approved for STERILE environments. The amount of particles and contaminants in the outside and indoor environments where people are, CLOG these masks very VERY quickly. The moisture from your breath combined with the clogged mask with render it “useless”. In addition, if you come in contact with Covid and your mask traps it, you become a walking virus dispenser. Every time you put your mask on you are breathing the germs from EVERYWHERE you went. They should be changed or thrown out every “20-30 minutes in a non sterile environment”.
• Cloth masks: Useless, false security blanket for uneducated and the paranoid.
My teeth are all fucked up, so I kinda like this whole mask thing.
@ Peter LOL me too, a mask to hide my ugly face is a good thing, but I don’t want to breath all that CO2 and bacteria, so no masks for me, people will just have to look at my ugly face… Sorry everyone.
Dude… you are taking the mask things way too… surgical and sterile. They are meant to decrease the amount of airborne particles from yourself. Nothing more, nothing less. Quit trying to turn it into a sterile clean room or some operation every time you wear one. 99% of people know everything you said. Still does not change the fact that with them airborne particles spread up to 14 feet… can you guess how far they get with the mask on? Nobody said anything about filtering. You want to filter air? Wear a gas mask. You want to decrease the spread distance, cover your face, with anything. Same as you would when you sneeze (hopefully into your sleeve).
Simple, right? Now that you and the rest of society know this, seeing people wearing masks should not trigger your fear mongering they are going to become criminals. If you cannot operate of a business around it, then you might lose those people, no matter how small or large that number is, it’s still a loss. It’s obvious you don’t crunch the numbers or own a private business or you would know this. It’s just not worth being a dick to people over.
@Montana. Wearing a mask is a symbol of your blind unwavering allegiance to the New World Order that’s being ushered in. I see all the good little communists blinding following orders from the central committee wearing their masks to destroy their immune system. Enjoy your captivity, CO2, and Pleurisy, you are free to commit suicide as slowly as you wish. I have never worn a mask and never will and anyone who tries to make me will regret it.
Lighten up, Francis.
Are Chicago police no longer responding to shootings?
Dunno. How could anyone tell?
the 2nd Amnd was to fight a tyrannical government, the type that brainless bimbos like AOC want us to have. the type like Joe Braindead want us to have , the communist type of authoritive government. even the state governments like that. and also about our self protection. NEVER about ” sporting purposes”. I never wanted a ar-15 “pistol, but would have liked something with a collapsible stock and a 10 or 11 inch barrel like the Commando. but having a ” pistol with a brace is as close as you can get with out the restrictions, so I understand the trend. so now that they were legal and everyone has them, of course the ATF has to make them illegal. considering all of the things going on right now , it is funny how they think they have to protect us from these.
it’s actually not funny.
People that don’t wear their own personal sneeze guard when up close and personal with strangers are either ignorant or selfish.
They learned this 100 years ago during the Spanish Flu.
If you are worried you might be taken for a Biden supporter, get yourself a MAGA mask.
https://donaldtrumpstoreusa.com/products/maga-face-mask
What kind of gun store can’t protect itself against robbers, whether they wear masks or not? Not very competent staff.
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