How The Congressional Baseball Shooting Didn’t Become The Deadliest Political Assassination In American History
A lot of luck and a couple of Capitol police officers . . .
There’s been a lot of discussion the past year about where this broader moment fits in American history, which past era it might resemble. Are we living in 1968, on the precipice of more violence, assassinations, disruption, unrest? Is it more like the 1970s? Or a different period, something new altogether?
What is certain is the disquieting way June 14 slipped beneath the news so quickly. The shooting felt much further away by July, August, September than mere months. If people joke about how the weeks feel like years in the current era, there’s an unsettling truth behind the joke — the way anything can lose scale and proportion. Two dozen members of Congress were nearly killed one morning last year, and the country didn’t change very much at all.
U.S. Supreme Court Turns Away Gun ‘Right to Sell’ Appeal
Another Supreme Court cold shoulder . . .
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to endorse a constitutional right to sell firearms, rejecting an appeal by three men who were denied a permit to open a gun store in northern California.
The justices, without comment Monday, left intact a federal appeals court decision that said the Second Amendment doesn’t protect the rights of would-be firearm sellers. The lower court also said potential customers could buy guns elsewhere.
It’s the third time this year the court has rejected an appeal from California gun-rights advocates. The court hasn’t heard arguments in a Second Amendment case in eight years.
Lou Ferrigno Pumps Up the Crowd at the N.R.A. Convention
The New Yorker is thoroughly mystified by the whole thing . . .
The National Rifle Association held its annual conference earlier this month, at a Dallas convention center. Thousands of people milled around hundreds of exhibitors, including Armageddon Gear (beer bivy sacks), WMD Guns (not nuclear weapons), and RCBS Precisioneered Reloading supplies (“leaving varmints mystified since 1943”). A long line snaked around the booth of a firearms company called Brownells. At about 9 a.m., a staffer looked at his watch. “He usually gets a pretty good line,” he said, referring to Lou Ferrigno, the former Mr. Universe and star of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series (which aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982), who would soon arrive to sign autographs. Nearby, at another table, attendees filled out paper slips for the “Gun-A-Day Giveaway.”
Ferrigno showed up at nine-thirty wearing a black polo shirt with the Brownells logo, jeans, and black shoes. He had a graying goatee and a tan, and, for a sixty-six-year-old, he was ripped. He said that he’d worked out that morning, to pump up his “flexing muscles.” He now lives in Santa Monica, but he grew up in New York, the son of a Brooklyn cop who taught him about guns.
“When I was twelve, I remember watching my dad shoot at the range,” he said. He described seeing holes in the head of the target. “My dad said to me, ‘You ever misbehave, the same will happen to you.’ That was kind of a joke.” He went on, “He always left his gun and his badge on the refrigerator. Today, it’s a different story; you can’t leave guns in plain sight.” A few hundred firearms could be seen on the surrounding convention floor. The air was full of clicking.
Exhaustive Study: Murder Rates Rise Every Place that Bans Guns
Who could have possibly predicted such an outcome? . . .
Perhaps the most striking thing is that three of the case studies here — England and Wales, Jamaica and Ireland — are on islands. That means you don’t exactly have guns coming over a land border. So, why did murder not only persist but rise after these gun bans?
Maybe it’s because criminals found other ways to get guns. Maybe it’s because there were less armed citizens to protect themselves. Maybe it’s because criminals will always find ways to kill other people if they want to kill them. And maybe it’s all of these.
No matter what the reason, the conclusion from the data is clear: gun bans don’t stop murder. Far from it. This is the kind of data gun rights advocates need to know for themselves. And these are by no means the only examples — as the CPRC noted.
More states approving ‘red flag’ laws to keep guns away from people perceived as threats
They used to be gun violence protection orders. Now they’re red flag laws . . .
While most legislative proposals to address gun violence stall, the “red flag” laws, as they are known, have passed with bipartisan support and the collaboration of activists on both sides of the gun control debate. The momentum for these laws comes after investigations revealed that the shooters often showed warning signs that they would commit violence.
Nine states now have such laws on the books and dozens of others are considering such proposals.
The most recent law came in Delaware, where Gov. John Carney on April 30 signed the Beau Biden Gun Violence Prevention Act into law. It allows mental health professionals to report potentially dangerous people and have their guns seized through a court order.
Study: Gun Violence in PG-13 Films Is More Acceptable as Long as It’s ‘Justified’
Now they want a PG-15 rating . . .
As the debate around gun control in the U.S. has crescendoed, gun violence in Hollywood films with PG-13 ratings is becoming more acceptable, according to a new study.
Parents with children under the age of 17 are more desensitized to gun violence when it’s deemed justified, according to the study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania.
The study determines justified gun violence as that which is used in the defense of a loved one or for self-protection. Unjustified gun violence would be when it has no socially redeeming purpose.
Angry American moms have had it up to here with gun violence
Another big wet media kiss for the billionaire-funded civilian disarmament organization . . .
Five years ago, the notion of a group of moms challenging the deep-pocketed National Rifle Association in their spare time seemed ludicrous. But by many measures, the NRA has shifted to its back foot in recent months.
Despite the fact that the US president and vice president showed support for the NRA by speaking at its annual convention this month, more Americans than ever before hold an unfavorable view of the group. Sparked by a post-Parkland student movement, national support for strengthening gun laws is the highest it has been since the mid-1990s.
“One of the NRA’s most powerful assets was their ability to mobilize and be noisy,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Mike Bloomberg-funded Everytown For Gun Safety, which was formed when Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns merged with Moms Demand in 2014. But angry parents and students are now out-shouting the gun industry and gun owners. Moms Demand, Feinblatt notes, is “driven by a ferocious desire to protect their children, and an ability and willingness to show up anytime, anywhere.”
Court to Texans: Leave your AK-47s at home if you come to Massachusetts
Or, you know, stay out of Massachusetts entirely . . .
The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a Texas native’s conviction for illegal possession of an assault weapon and illegal possession of another gun, ruling that the Second Amendment still gives Massachusetts the right to ban assault weapons and regulate ownership of other guns.
At issue were the “AK-47-style pistol,” four 30-round magazines and a 9-mm pistol that had been modified to hold up to 20 rounds that John Cassidy brought up here with him in 2010 after he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Law School in Dartmouth. Cassidy obtained copies of Massachusetts gun-registration forms but never filed them, saying the fees were too expensive for him. He also cited Texas law, which let him walk around with the weapons – something he legally might not have been able to do here with the AK-47 pistol, in any case, since it’s classified as an “assault weapon” banned under Massachusetts state law.
Cassidy was arrested in March, 2011 on seven counts: Illegal possession of an assault weapon, illegal possession of a gun, illegal possession of four high-capacity feeding devices and illegal possession of ammunition, after Dartmouth police obtained a search warrant for the apartment he shared with another law student.
For NRA members that have bought more guns out of an irrational fear of us the NRA does provide some safety tips for guns please be sure to be a safe and responsible gun owner. Around 900 children commit suicide with parents gun every year. https://t.co/0rPzQGrcIZ
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) May 14, 2018
Exhaustive Study: Murder Rates Rise Every Place that Bans Guns
I have been pointing this out for years. Though it doesn’t prove, but is strong evidence for, the claim that lawful gun ownership reduces murders it absolutely discredits the claim that gun control lowers murder rates.
I noticed a distinct lack of comparison to similar or nearby locations that did not ban guns. That would be much more informative. Cherry picking a half-dozen places is meaningless.
Is there a place nearby Ireland and the UK that relatively recently imposed such restrictions, and would serve as a basis of comparison? I don’t know.
I have seen data on New Zealand, however, which shares proximity and similar socioeconomics with Australia, but which did not go full retard banning guns after Australia’s Port Arthur shooting. Essentially, both had nearly identical murder rates going back to 1980. Both countries’ rates had been declining for years prior to Port Arthur. Australia banned guns, New Zealand did nothing. Australia’s murder rate continued to decline, as did NZ’s.
i̾ a̾m̾ c̾r̾e̾a̾t̾i̾n̾g̾ a̾n̾ h̾o̾n̾e̾s̾t̾ w̾a̾g̾e̾ f̾r̾o̾m̾ h̾o̾m̾e̾ 1900 d̾o̾l̾l̾a̾r̾s̾/w̾e̾e̾k̾ , t̾h̾a̾t̾ i̾s̾ w̾o̾n̾d̾e̾r̾f̾u̾l̾, b̾e̾l̾o̾w̾ a̾ y̾e̾a̾r̾ a̾g̾o̾n̾e̾ i̾ u̾s̾e̾d̾ t̾o̾ b̾e̾ u̾n̾e̾m̾p̾l̾o̾y̾e̾d̾ d̾u̾r̾i̾n̾g̾ a̾ a̾t̾r̾o̾c̾i̾o̾u̾s̾ e̾c̾o̾n̾o̾m̾y̾. i̾ c̾o̾n̾v̾e̾y̾ g̾o̾d̾ o̾n̾ a̾ d̾a̾i̾l̾y̾ b̾a̾s̾i̾s̾ i̾ u̾s̾e̾d̾ t̾o̾ b̾e̾ e̾n̾d̾o̾w̾e̾d̾ t̾h̾e̾s̾e̾ d̾i̾r̾e̾c̾t̾i̾o̾n̾s̾ a̾n̾d̾ c̾u̾r̾r̾e̾n̾t̾l̾y̾ i̾t̾’s̾ m̾y̾ d̾u̾t̾y̾ t̾o̾ p̾a̾y̾ i̾t̾ f̾o̾r̾w̾a̾r̾d̾ a̾n̾d̾ s̾h̾a̾r̾e̾ i̾t̾ w̾i̾t̾h̾ e̾v̾e̾r̾y̾b̾o̾d̾y̾, h̾e̾r̾e̾ i̾s̾ i̾ s̾t̾a̾r̾t̾e̾d̾…..
░Ａ░Ｍ░Ａ░Z░Ｉ░Ｎ░Ｇ░ ░Ｊ░Ｏ░Ｂ░Ｓ░
═══► marssmart.comᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵ
“Are we living in 1968, on the precipice of more violence, assassinations, disruption, unrest? Is it more like the 1970s? Or a different period, something new altogether?“
I would say 1770s…
Where do I get a box for my AR??
And to David Hogg is a child’s death more tragic when involving a gun vs prescription pills?
“At issue were the “AK-47-style pistol,” four 30-round magazines and a 9-mm pistol that had been modified to hold up to 20 rounds that John Cassidy brought up here with him in 2010 after he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Law School in Dartmouth.”
Well, he’s about to get an education in the law he wasn’t expecting.
Are firearm felonies grounds for denying him a law degree?
He also had an active arrest warrant for explosives in Texas and allegedly assaulted his roommate in MA. The story is a bit different than just “Texas native gets arrested for bringing gun to different state”
Absolutely–in pretty much any jurisdiction, conviction for (or no contest/first offender plea to) any felony triggers disbarment. While I agree Mass.’s gun laws are ridiculous, one would think that a law student would check the legality of any guns he planned to bring there.
The MA Board of Bar Overseers crawled up every orafice I had before I was allowed to sit for the exam. Even if this kid graduates the individual states have the final say as to whether he’ll be a lawyer or not.
Good on Lou Ferrigno! Saw him compete in the 1971 Teenage Mr.America and get 4th. I was in the the weightlifting meet(I sucked). Yeah now I feel old but its good to see an action star/personality take stand…
Time for the weapon shops of Isher to start appearing…
By the way, TTAG, thanks for restarting the daily digest!
Glad you’re enjoying it.
“For NRA members that have bought more guns out of an irrational fear of us”. Sorry, but if I buy a gun it will not be out of fear of wimpy anti-gun folks. It will be to stick a finger in your eye!
Hogg is right about proper storage of firearms, however it will not stop any attempt at suicide. Instead of guns, another method will be used instead; if the person is that motivated to quit life. I am aware of several persons that either committed suicide or attempted to. Half of them used methods other than firearms.
Jumping in front of trains is a popular method in Japan.
They still spouting that lie that Moms is a grass root effort? If bloomberg and soros stopped the funding it would end tomorrow.
Well, probably not really.
The paid leadership would be out of there the same day, but the true believers would likely flounder around for a bit, trying to figure out what they could do after nobody would pay for their buses, signs, etc.
I believe the large crowds would dissipate without the Bloomberg funding. If you want a bunch of kids or millenial females to come around, offer them some free goodies and some sort of platform for them to appear to be relevant, especially if you can get some news cameras around.
If someone wanted to create a “Stand Up For the 2nd Amendment” school protest and had the money to bus in kids to a single, media-covered event, with free pizza and drinks about 4/5 of the kids who’d be there would be the same ones who were marching with Hogg and the Moms. (Maybe we could do better with those “Moms” if we billed “gun violence” as a form of retroactive birth control… Hmmmmmmm)
“Large crowds”. If big daddy Bloomberg quit funding them 100 percent tomorrow then the 200 people who showed up to protest the 80,000 NRA members in Dallas during the convention would be whittled down to less that 10 die hard grandmothers with nothing else to do.
I don’t know where you got your “200” figure, Eric. I was there, if there were 200 people those counting were including passersby and other people who just stopped for a couple of minutes to see what was going on. Nothing at all near the events center areas. i was surprised that the tiny protest was all they could muster- I figured Bloomberg would bus in the entire Hogglot. Nope.
Sounds like traveling to MA is like traveling to Mexico – just leave any and all weapon at home and hope you somehow make it out alive.
Well…. MA is almost entirely Democrats; and we all know Democrats want their victims unarmed and defenseless when they decide to rape, rob, and kill them…
Mass-of-chewed-shits is a problem heading towards it’s own solution, in that they are (like other evil blue houses of satan’s cack-sackin MFn (D)) shitting the bed, Venezeuela-style. We’re stringing them along with enough tax money rope to hang themselves, and when they reach critcsl mass, we’ll yank it back we’ll be ready with a few flame throwers to beat back their dumb, World War Z asses.
Trump approved the Omnibus bill with a ny/nj tunnel funding (that Schumer was banking on for funding graft). Trump’s going to yank it back in (nearly 30 days) and watch NYC schumer into a prune.
Perhaps Americans have had it with Demanding Commie Mommy’s trying to subvert the Constitution.
If that softball field shooting had been a Republican shooter, or any other kind of conservative, on a bunch of Democrats it would still be on the front page today. The liberal media considered that shooting to be an embarrassment. Not an atrocity.
Notice also that in the buzzfeed article on the congressional shooting that the attacker is said to use a, “Century International Arms SKS-style semiautomatic assault rifle” while the defending law enforcement used a functionally identical but neutrally described, “Bushmaster rifle.” How doubleplusungood of buzzfeed!
“The liberal media considered that shooting to be an embarrassment. Not an atrocity.”
The liberal media considered that shooting to be a failed attempt at a good shooting.
F em all. The revolution will not be televised.
Don’t forget a SWAT team went to Pelosi house to make sure the Former SotH was safe, in case well you know the rest.
That was bullshit cover. Call in the cops on yourself in order to attempt to establish plausible deniability.
Scalise was specifically targeted on-purpose, and I would bet that several POS GOP (even his fellow Senators)people even knew ahead of time. But a whole lotta Fucking (D) did, and they should all be made to pay for that, at least in a small way. When the evil Fucking POS bastard psychotic fucking (D) totally disarms ALL of their satan worshipping ranks, they can come for the guns of the rest of us.
What revolution? A revolution by vote, or a revolution by violence. I doubt either one has a Snowballs chance in hell. I liken the Democratic party and the Republican party as a prosecuting lawyer and a defense lawyer sitting down at a luncheon discussing how they can fuck the defendant and still make it look good. Republicans, Democrats good cop bad cop, they both work for the same precinct.
FV<K:
SCOTUS, CA, EVERYWHERE THAT BANS GUNS, MA (2x in each eye). AND THE MFn EVIL POS (D).
Red flag the communist (D)NC, all of those MFrs have created so much ruin, strife, poverty, ignorance, hate and discontent, and murder, that they are impossible to catch up to, if you spent every last second of your life trying.
F em all.
“The most recent law came in Delaware, where Gov. John Carney on April 30 signed the Beau Biden Gun Violence Prevention Act into law. It allows mental health professionals to report potentially dangerous people and have their guns seized through a court order.”
A “mental health professional” implies a degree of competence and expertise that simply doesn’t exist in many “professionals” in the mental health biz. The most common mental illness is depression. It is also the most easily treated although, in some cases, some people need to take medication for their entire lives.
Laws like this are a genuine threat to people with histories of depression because that clinical social worker doing an employment background check could believe that depression+guns and/or hunting mean that you’re potentially dangerous. And, once so labeled, it will be almost impossible to ever be seen as “normal” and you can forget about getting your guns back or being able to purchase new guns. Think the Mom’s won’t start encouraging their “medical professional” members to take advantage of this? Think again.
The Center For Disease Control is working very hard to define simple gun ownership itself as a form of mental illness. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this is liable to go. A lot of therapists are going to go out of business because people experiencing clinical depression are going to be fearful of seeking help. I can’t blame them one bit.
Just curious, but do you have a source about the CDC trying to define gun ownership as a mental illness?
It’s called the “medicalization of deviance”. Gun ownership and gun culture is first defined as a social pathology which then allows the new pathology to be viewed as deviant behavior so dangerous that appropriate “treatment therapies” are necessary. Think alcoholism.
They named it after Beau Biden to shame people intonsupporting a law which violates the 4th and 5th amendment. When they ban guns it will have Beaus name on the bill.
I wonder how do we turn back the ERPO/GVRO/red-flag laws in a time when no one cares about the next guy’s 6A?
Perhaps a colored map would help illustrate the issue.
And I wonder about gun violence restraining orders… if one is issued, does gun violence obey the order? 🙂
Cassidy was also facing (I don’t know if he was ever taken to trial and/or convicted) of a serious crime back in Texas at the time of his 2011 arrest. The police there say he torched the car of a drug dealer that had ripped off/robbed Cassidy in a drug deal gone bad.
“Study: Gun Violence in PG-13 Films Is More Acceptable as Long as It’s ‘Justified’”
This is *excellent* news!
Now the kids can see at a younger age good guys with guns saving the day, correcting injutices, etc.
It’s a classic move from the Leftist’s playbook, and using it against them – Start the indoctrination for pro-gun rights as young as possible…
*snicker* 😉
It speaks to fundamental notions of justice that are embedded in human nature. Even people who want laws to get rid of icky guns know, deep down in a place that’s immune to politics, that defending yourself and those you love by getting rid of those who would do you harm is Good.
That’s why they write stories in which individual people (not the faceless state) take matters into their own hands, and that’s also why the audience doesn’t perceive the violence in those stories as icky “gun violence.” It’s also why their topical tales of do-gooders using state power to “tackle gun violence” never sell; there’s no visceral sense of good in them; only politics.
But they’ve been so completely propagandized, most of them, that they don’t realize why their own stories continually violate their superficially pacifistic code. The evil of progressive Marxism is that it cripples its adherents’ ability to recognize the immutable truths of human nature, prompting them to “fix” humanity without ever understanding what really makes humans tick.
As long as money actually matters, the Left’s Entertainment Industrial Complex will keep subconsciously undermining its own propaganda via its own storytelling. That’s a very good thing.
Regarding the SCOTUS, they are probably avoiding the issue because both sides may be too afraid it would go the other side’s way. It is quite possible that some of the pro-Heller justices think that Heller went “far enough” regarding gun ownership and who might well rule the other way on some of these issues.
Or else they are waiting for RBG to assume room temperature and Kennedy to finally retire. Go into it with 6-3 and you can steamroll it .
The June 14th shooting was swept under because they were republicans. If they were progressives we’d still be hearing about it.
And because the shooter was a leftist who was effectively stopped by proverbial good guys with guns. Nothing to advance The Narrative there.
I remember back in the 70’s when a hunter needed to drive through Massachusetts it was required to get a form from a Massachusetts police chief in order to travel through the state with their hunting rifle.
They also had a law of a mandatory one year in jail for possessing a firearm. One of my friends was caught showing a Walther SS pistol that was his father’s to someone in front of his house and got caught.
The softball shooting died so quick for 5 major reasons.
1. They were Republicans.
2. Nobody died.
3. The shooter was a Democrat.
4. He didn’t use an AR.
5. The Senator that was shot didn’t turn anti-gun.
Once it became clear that Scalise wasn’t going anti, the press couldn’t sweep it under the rug fast enough.
I remember the stories out of Jamaica after the gun ban.
The police would conduct house to house searches for firearms in a neighborhood, and that night armed gangs would show up to rob the occupants.
Bernie Sanders, June 2017, “you should be angry. Take out your anger on the right people.”
Speaking of red flags, the Alexandria shooter was a member of the Facebook group called “terminate the Republican Party.” Of course the professional investigators found that he had merely fallen on hard times.
The Shooter visited Bernie Sanders shortly before the shooting and was in email contact with two democrat senators. They refused to publicly release any emails from him to them. I believe that he would have revealed his plans to them, but they either were complicit or did not believe he was telling the truth.
The Supreme Court not going through with those fellers rights to start a gun shop is pretty serious business. Down right scary if you ask me.
As I have said before the Courts across the U.S. are sanctioning every gun ban law being past especially in California, assault rifle confiscation, no right to carry, restrictions on ammo purchases etc. Massachusetts Attorney General got away with banning assault rifles by “decree” with absolutely no new law being passed and blessed by the courts. Maryland assault rifle ban blessed by the courts and it goes on and on while the corrupt Supreme Court refuses to hear all of the cases. All this is keeping with the rule of ” Rule according to public opinion” because we can ignore the Second Amendment because we are Dictators for life and are able to do anything we please. Think you still live in a democracy that gives you any Constitutional rights? Forget it, take the Constitution and wipe your ass with it. Gun owners are on their way to becoming an extinct species.
We aren’t “given” any rights, we lose any that we choose not to defend.
If gun buyers can buy guns elsewhere, then why are Christian bakers being successfully sued?
On Hogg:
If only he had omitted “irrational”, he would have had the space for punctuation.
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