As a former soldier who has been to war in your region, Matti, I call upon the notion of self defense; when your government fails to protect you as seen throughout the world, you need to defend yourself regardless of the weapon. The last thing rational People want to do is morph into a killer of others, but when another man puts a gun to your face you have two choices...

The Men Who Wanted to Be Left Alone

“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy… but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”

– Author Unknown

The call, as I guess Mom suspected, was because her father died.

One of his possessions we inherited was a beautiful silver .38 revolver. Firearms of many kinds were all over rural Ohio in those days. Autumn was a dangerous time to be a deer or pheasant there or a little kid playing frontiersman in the bushes.

Dad’s childhood came on a dairy farm in rural western Canada in the years before electricity. “You need to know about guns,” Dad had said. So, we took a thick board out back and leaned it against a tree.

Dad pulled out this shiny pistol. “Here,” he said. “It’s not loaded.”

I reached for the gun. With no warning, the thing went off with a huge bang and blasted a large hole in the board. I may have yelled an unpleasant word. Dad was just standing there, all calm and fatherly.

“You said the gun wasn’t loaded!” I screamed.

“Everyone says the gun’s not loaded,” Dad replied.

That’s another thing my father said.

Schools would benefit from an injection of morality and responsibility. Christianity and guns can teach those two things. Let people have these clubs.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ruled on March 8 that a federal law prohibiting illegal immigrants from owning guns is unconstitutional, arguing the law did not adhere to the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that stipulated gun control laws must fit historical tradition. //

But someone who broke the laws of the land and is illegally residing here is not entitled to the same rights that the Constitution secures for U.S. citizens. Foreign citizens instead must have their rights secured by their own governments.

The Second Amendment reads: “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.”

The Supreme Court ruled in D.C. v. Heller that “the people” refers to “all members of the political community.” Foreign citizens are by definition members of a different political community. Writing for the majority, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. “the people” “refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.” //

The topic was also argued more than a decade ago in a different case, with a panel of the Fourth Circuit ruling in U.S. v. Carpio-Leon that “illegal aliens are not law-abiding members of the political community and aliens who have entered the United States unlawfully have no more rights under the Second Amendment than do aliens outside of the United States seeking admittance.”

One interesting twist is that in the Harrel v. Raoul case, the National Association of Police has filed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” brief supporting the Harrel Petitioners. This brief, available for review here, argues that the “Seventh Circuit’s legal standard eviscerates the Second Amendment, that the Illinois law’s “restrictions [approved by the Seventh Circuit] threaten to leave American citizens without effective means to utilize the sort of weapons employed by criminals throughout the country—and employed by nearly all police departments to fight them.”

And in a key paragraph:

In the world far removed from courtrooms, judge’s chambers and lawyers’ offices, Americans are using guns to defend themselves and others at extremely high rates—up to 2.8 million times a year. More than half of the incidents of self-defense involve more than one assailant, in which the ability to fire more defensive rounds obviously assumes more importance. Indeed, 3.2% of incidents involve five or more attackers, where the ability to shoot more than ten rounds is obviously critical. There are, of course, numerous reported incidents of citizens defending themselves who have been required to use more than ten shots to do so—or failing to defend themselves when only ten rounds were available. //

henrybowman | March 17, 2024 at 2:23 pm

“The panel did so after ruling that “large capacity magazines” (LCMs) are rarely used in self-defense…
…owners of the affected magazines, which come standard with most modern firearms.”

And the second observation proves that the first must indeed have been not a finding of fact, but an arbitrary ruling. //

oldvet50 | March 17, 2024 at 2:37 pm
This amendment was explained to our class in junior high school American History when I attended in 1962. A well regulated (trained) militia is necessary to protect our country. A standing army did not exist at the time, but could be formed when needed out of the citizenry (males). They would need to supply their own weapons and be proficient in their use. It has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with fighting our enemies both foreign and DOMESTIC. How we even got to this point in banning certain weapons is beyond my comprehension. //

SHV | March 17, 2024 at 2:58 pm
This one is interesting. A 2A ruling from far left judge.

“District Judge: Gun Ban For Illegal Immigrant Unconstitutional”

https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2024/03/16/district-judge-gun-ban-illegal-immigrant-unconstitutional/

“The Court finds that Carbajal-Flores’ criminal record, containing no improper use of a weapon, as well as the non-violent circumstances of his arrest do not support a finding that he poses a risk to public safety such that he cannot be trusted to use a weapon responsibly and should be deprived of his Second Amendment right to bear arms in self-defense.”

The bill is headed to Governor Henry McMaster, who is expected to sign the bill.

Few things make Leviathan more terrified than free people.

"This is a permitless carry," Sen. Margie Bright Matthews said. "Why are we going to allow people to carry more guns, and this time without a [concealed weapons permit]? //

Weminuche45
7 hours ago edited
What a lot of people don't grasp is that freedom while great, isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Freedom also has a lot of really terrifying aspects to it too. Freedom includes the freedom to fail, the freedom to be poor, the freedom to die from our own mistakes, and the freedom to die from our own stupidity, our own incompetence, our own cowardice, and our own laziness.

It's much more comfortable for many people to abdicate responsibility for their own life and that of their family, to someone else or an entity like a government, than to feel the weight of that responsiblity on their own shoulders. This is why you see people begging to be disarmed and the desire to offer themselves up to be a slave, a child under the protection of Daddy, or Mommy, or the government. //

Random US Citizen Weminuche45
6 hours ago
Franklin's quote seems even more appropriate to our modern age than it was to his own. There are far too many citizens who'd give up liberty to obtain what isn't really isn't security.

The states that are now on the permitless carry bandwagon are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. South Carolina is reportedly considering similar legislation, which would make the Palmetto State the 29th constitutional carry state.

Hawaii's Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision finding that Hawaii was subject to federal law and Supreme Court precedent, and found that the Supreme Court had erred in its New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Todd Eddins said, "We hold that in Hawaii there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public." //

While they were declaring Heller and Bruen were wrongly decided and violated Hawaii's understanding of what the US Constitution means, the court took a swipe at the Dobbs decision that found infanticide was not a Constitutionally protected activity, accusing the Supreme Court of engaging in "historical fiction." //

As RedStater Bill Shipley noted on "X,"

The Hawaii Court could have written its entire opinion just the way it has, and added a single sentence/ paragraph at the end that began "Nevertheless" and explained the SCOTUS decisions in Breun and Heller required it to uphold the lower court decision dismissing the charges.

They could have had their diatribe for 50 pages while respected their place in the Constitutional order of things -- even if they didn't like it.

Instead, they just lit themselves on fire.

Wednesday, the grand jury "no billed" the shooter. //

Dieter Schultz
11 hours ago edited

I don't have a problem shooting a man's weight in lead at him to bring him down. In this case, I thought a solid, indestructible self-defense case was available for the first four rounds. The next four were decidedly in the "gray area" of legality. The ninth round, in my opinion, could, in the right lighting, be mistaken for an execution.

While I can see streiff's point, why is it OK to train cops to 'keep firing until the person is no longer a threat', and they won't get dinged for doing it, but we're willing to put a shot count on civilians that aren't trained like the police are?

I get the last shots may have been unnecessary and overkill, but with adrenaline flowing how do we place these, seemingly, higher standards on civilians? //

anon-608f Asurea
3 hours ago
I appreciate your testimony. However, I believe this philosophy is outdated. Why are we changing the responsibility from the thug to armed civilian? No. The thug was willing to kill them all for pennies. He forfeited his life the minute he began the encounter. The armed citizen should only be held to account their behavior before the encounter- once it starts all accountability should be transferred to the thug. No more armed citizens should be prosecuted for ending, however completely, deadly encounters they didn't begin. The way we're handling it now is cruel and unreasonable. You were just as likely to have shot a fleeing felon in the back and been imprisoned for it...after they invaded your home! It is a sick theory that only attorneys could come up with. //

We agonize over a thug who, milliseconds before, was preparing to kill a truly innocent person- they have no good will, their humanity is forfeit. And so they get shot.

Why are we ever going after the armed citizen for injuring or killing a worthless thug? Why are we holding them to standards even police are hard pressed to meet??!!

No. I say no. When certain situational and evidentiary thresholds are met (not hard in this age of digital recordings), we shouldn't care if a thug is shot in the face or in the back, or even if already fleeing in a car. They forfeited their humanity and the citizen had every right and responsibility to ensure that they weren't coming back. Because they do. They'll rob multiple places in a night so long as they meet no resistance. Letting them flee is NOT morally superior to shooting a feral thug while fleeing.
As far as I'm concerned, you don't stop shooting at a predator attacking the flock just because it runs, and I respect coyotes and wolves far more than felons.

I just think our moral philosophy is outdated. I'm not saying this should be the "wild west" and people are shot dead with no account, but I do believe the threshold for "justifiable" and "reasonable" ought to be lowered in self defense.

"Let's see," Reason magazine associate editor Billy Binion posted on X. "Some recent stats: Mississippi's gun homicide rate: ~13 murders per 100,000 people; Louisiana's gun homicide rate: ~15 murders per 100,000 people; Missouri's gun homicide rate: ~11 murders per 100,000 people; Chicago's gun homicide rate: ~29 murders per 100,000 people."

"Why do you pick just a couple of states to compare?" John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, posted on X. "Is that how public health researchers do research? Why don't you look at local crime rates where policing policies are determined and where DAs and judges are almost always selected?"

If you remove the blue cities from the red states, such as New Orleans, the murder rates tend to fall.

Zack Smith @tzsmith
Nov 29
·
State-level murder rates are highly misleading. As my @Heritage colleagues and I explained in our Blue City Murder Problem paper, crime is a localized phenomenon.

https://heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-blue-city-murder-problem

And guess what? Remove the blue cities from the red states...and the murder rates fall.

Joe Scarborough @JoeNBC
Watch the Senator pretend that he didn’t just hear that his home state has higher death rates from firearms than Chicago. Then he blows past that reality and thinks that insulting a woman will make us forget…that his own state has higher death rates from guns than Chicago.
Zack Smith @tzsmith
·
As you can see from this table, take New Orleans' murder rate out, and Louisiana's murder rate falls by over 15%!

And take Chicago's murder rate out, and Illinois' falls by a shocking 55%!
3:24 PM · Nov 29, 2023 //

Clare Boothe Lucid
11 hours ago edited
Also note how gun control proponents often want to talk about the overall gun death rate which includes many suicides as well as some accidents along with homicides. Obviously suicides and accidents are important, too, but those are substantially different issues with different causes and potential solutions compared to homicides. One can see examples above…one person mentions death rates from firearms and another answers with homicide rates

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. //

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?

If Americans allow their firearms to be outlawed and then confiscated, would we, in fact, become like Australia or New Zealand? The answer is clear. //

In 1857, Mexico had a constitutional right to bear arms, then in 1917 the country excluded weapons that were reserved for military branches only and added additional restrictions, and today the right to have a firearm is restricted to your home. In 1968, in response to civil unrest, the Mexican government established a Federal Arms Registry that resulted in the following: handguns in .380 or smaller, and 12 gauge (or smaller) shotguns and rifles that use less than .30 caliber are legal. Citizens have to go to a military base to apply for a permit and if one is issued, guns can only be purchased at one store in Mexico City run by the Mexican military.

I bet there isn’t a cartel member in Mexico whose gun conforms to restrictions, let alone that he has a permit. In a country of more than 100 million people, only 4,300 permits have been issued. No surprise they are reserved for the wealthy, the politically connected, and the bodyguards who protect them.

Has the tradeoff in Mexico made the country safer and more law-abiding? Hardly. The murder rate per million people is 218.49; that’s five times higher than the United States. For a never-ending parade of statistics regarding gun violence in Mexico versus the United States, click here.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Mexico/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime //

Like Mexico, our rate of murders and violent incidents would rise, not fall, as a result of gun bans. The reason cartels flood the U.S. with people and fentanyl and not guns is because there is no money in smuggling weapons — until we ban them, and then Mexican cartels would become the unofficial supplier of firearms to America. Times change, human nature does not.

Gretchen Carlson @GretchenCarlson
·
Ordinary people didn’t have AR-15s before 2004. They’re not some time-honored American tradition, they’re a recent mistake that we could fix and save thousands of lives in the process.
Ben Shapiro @benshapiro
No, I Won’t Give Up My AR-15
Embedded video
Readers added context
“ For more than a half-century, the AR-15 has been popular among gun owners, widely available in gun stores and, for many years, even appeared in the Sears catalog.”

npr.org/2018/02/28/588…
Context is written by people who use X, and appears when rated helpful by others. Find out more.
12:05 PM · Oct 30, 2023 //

The debil Blue State Deplorable
3 hours ago edited
Also, the FBI reported around 364 deaths, in 2019 from rifles, all rifles not just ARs.
The same report showed 600 deaths from personal weapons (hands, fist, feet, etc.).
1476 deaths from knives and cutting instruments.
The report can be found here.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls //

Public Citizen Blue State Deplorable
an hour ago
Lets not even try to compare the number of deaths and disabling injuries caused by drunk drivers with the firearms deaths.
I'm sure in the minds of the Bent Left the firearms deaths are Orders Of Magnitude greater, when in fact the opposite is the true picture. //

Robert A Hahn
2 hours ago
She's dumber than she looks. After getting ratioed to Hell and back, as outlined above, she came back with this doozy:

"In 1992, AR-15s composed 21 of every 100 guns made in the US. By 2020 almost 1 in 5 guns made were AR-15s."

Gretchen the Math Whiz. //

cupera1 Raoul Bilbao
4 hours ago
From 2019

• Twenty-eight people are killed every year by lightning.
• Roughly 2,167 Americans die annually from constipation.
• On average, 951 people are killed by their lawnmowers while another 4,193 are killed by farm tractors and other agricultural equipment.
• Murderous toasters kill 45 people per year.
• Eleven teenagers die every day while texting and driving.
• An estimated 40 people die every year while skateboarding.
• Roughly 10,206 are accidentally strangled to death while they sleep, and for those who survive the night, another 10,386 will die every year falling out of bed.
• As per the FBI, rifles of every variation — including but not limited to the scary AR-15 — killed 215 Americans in 2019. But another 1,533 were killed by knives, and 651 people were beaten to death by hands, fists, feet, etc.
• In 2015, 5,051 people choked to death while eating.
• Americans average 62 deaths per year by bees, wasps, and hornets.

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