On April 12, 2022, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill 319, Constitutional carry, into law. Constitutional carry in Georgia goes into effect immediately. Georgia is now the 25th Constitutional carry state, and the Peach State becomes the fourth state to join that group in 2022. Half of the country now recognizes the right of a law-abiding adult who is legally allowed to carry a concealed firearm to do so without first having to obtain government permission. This ensures that citizens have the right to self-defense without government red tape or delays, or having to suffer the whims of local authorities who “shall not” have the stroke to ban you from exercising your right to self defense.
Gov. Kemp also signed House Bill 218, to grant universal recognition to concealed carry permits held by non-Georgia residents, issued by any other state. It also directs the Georgia Attorney General to enter into formal reciprocity agreements with any state that requires a formal agreement to recognize a Georgia Weapons Carry License. This reform recognizes that Georgia residents traveling to other states, and visitors to Georgia, should not be left defenseless simply by crossing a state line.
At a signing ceremony the next day, joined by First Lady Marty Kemp and two of his daughters, Governor Kemp made a few interesting comments I thought you might enjoy.
“I’m excited to be here today. SB 319 and HB 218 help build a safer, stronger Georgia. Here at Gable [Sporting Goods] is where [wife] Marty and I bought [daughter] Lucy her first firearm — a Glock 43X 9mm, which she is carrying today!
“We did that, not only because we strongly believe in the Second Amendment, but we also want Lucy and both her sisters to be able to defend themselves. As the parents of three daughters, there’s nothing Marty and I care more about than making sure Jarrett, Lucy, and Amy Porter are safe. With Jarrett a recent graduate and Lucy and Amy Porter still in college, that isn’t as easy as it used to be.
“SB 319 makes sure that law-abiding Georgians, including our daughters and your family, too, can protect themselves without having to ask permission from state government. The Constitution of the United States gives us that right — not the government. And HB 218 ensures that individuals who are licensed to carry a weapon in another state are also authorized to do so here in Georgia.”
So far this year four states — Alabama, Ohio, Indiana, and Georgia — have passed Constitutional carry or permitless-carry laws. Alabama’s (22nd) law will go into effect on January 1, 2023. Ohio’s law will go [went] into effect on June 12, 2022. Indiana’s will go into effect on July 1, 2022. Perhaps Louisiana, Florida, or Nebraska will become the 26th state to adopt Constitutional carry, and perhaps before the end of 2022.
This article was published by Gun Tests and is reproduced with permission from the author.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-25 15:01:002022-06-25 15:01:00Halfway There
Thursday on Twitter, unhinged political performance artist and perennial loser Keith Olbermann responded to the Supreme Court’s pro-Second Amendment ruling by — predictably — calling for the high court to be dissolved.
After SCOTUS struck down New York’s proper cause requirement for concealed carry, Olbermann flipped out and tweeted, “It has become necessary to dissolve the Supreme Court of the United States. The first step is for a state the ‘court’ has now forced guns upon, to ignore this ruling. Great. You’re a court? Why and how do think you can enforce your rulings?”
He followed up with this idiotic challenge: “Hey SCOTUS, send the SCOTUS army here to enforce your ruling, you House of Lords radicals pretending to be a court.”
Earlier this month Olbermann, who can’t keep a job even in the leftist media because he’s such a clown, tweeted his embarrassingly ignorant claim that the Second Amendment does not protect a right to “own” guns: “Shove your ‘responsible gun owners’ crap up your ass. The 2nd Amendment does not include the word ‘own.’ There is no right.”
Um, yes there is a right, but don’t let the facts get in the way of your juvenile ranting, Keith.
In February 2011, it was announced that Olbermann would work for Current TV, a public-affairs channel co-founded by Al Gore. Olbermann made his Current TV debut on June 20, 2011. His program there — like his previous show at MSNBC — was called Countdown With Keith Olbermann.
Near the end of March 2012, Current TV terminated its increasingly acrimonious relationship with Olbermann and replaced his program with Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer. In response to the firing, Olbermann promptly filed a lawsuit against Current TV, seeking somewhere between $50 million and $70 million.
In July 2013, Olbermann was hired to host a one-hour nightly sports program (debuting August 26) on ESPN-2.
On February 24, 2015, ESPN suspended Olbermann for controversial remarks he made on Twitter, where he derided students who were participating in Penn State University’s annual dance marathon — called “Thon” — which raised money for pediatric cancer research and care. In his various tweets, Olbermann referred to PSU students as “pitiful,” mocked one of his critics as a “goober,” and called another man “stupid.” Olbermann later issued an apology on Twitter, but ESPN decided to suspend him for one week.
In July 2015, ESPN elected not to extend Olbermann’s contract — which was scheduled to expire at the end of that month — after he refused to move his program from its Times Square studio to the network’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut…
Do Psychiatric Meds and War Games Lead to Mass Shootings?
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that the availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
97.8% of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that the availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.
An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date1 and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,2 and psychreg.org in late January 2021,3 noted:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …
Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.
Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.
Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,4 97.8% of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …
This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.
Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.
As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”
The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants
Thoughts, emotions, and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but a mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.
The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.
Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.
In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.
In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400%,5, and by 2010, 11% of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.6
In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.7 In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999 when it jumped to five.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between the rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?
Another jump took place in 2012 when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.8
How can we possibly ignore the connection between the rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence, and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.
For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school, and went back to bed.
Sometime later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates, hostage, at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.9
The Risks Are Clear
The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:10
“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.
In one review11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8% of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.
The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:13
Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times
Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed
In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:14
Sadness
Anxiety
Feeling hopeless
Feeling worthless
Feeling helpless
Feeling ’empty’
Feeling guilty
Irritable
Fatigue
Lack of energy
Loss of interest in hobbies
Slow talking and moving
Restlessness
Trouble concentrating
Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
Thoughts of death or suicide
The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,15 only 38.4% actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3% of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:16
“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.
Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”
What Role Might War Games Play?
Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice? As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.17While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:18
Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning
In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.
Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.
On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.19 When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.
Even now, the U.S. insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”20
Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?
As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.
There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can, should try, and make an effort to effect much-needed change locally and in their own home.
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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There are some seriously unbalanced liberals running loose out there. They’re losing their minds over the Supreme Court’s gun ruling, among other things.
Most states allow people to carry guns outside the home but, to hear these libs tell it, the Supreme Court’s ruling is ushering in Armageddon. TV talking head Keith Olbermann said the Supreme Court should be abolished. Libs in the Twitterverse said the Court’s goal is to create chaos and crime to usher in authoritarian government. Sounds like liberal projection to me, given how libs love Antifa riots, burning cities, and want every criminal to go free. Joy Reid accused the Court of wanting to “repeal the 20th century” because it actually paid attention to the Constitution. By the way, Joy, the 20th century ended 22 years ago. Elie Mystal said the Supreme Court just granted a “right to shoot people.” Uh-huh. Actor Rob Perlman said the Court’s decision is for whites only. That’s crazy. There was a whole book written about how Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were all packing heat – for self-protection, the exact rationale the Court employed yesterday. New York Governor Kathy Hochul trotted out the tired old argument the Second Amendment only applies to muskets. That’s like saying free speech only applies to quill pens. The Founders were well aware technology would advance. That’s why they put patent protections in the Constitution, to promote scientific progress. That Hochul would make such a stupid argument that can be demolished in two seconds shows you just how unhinged she is.
Let’s look at some other issues that have upended liberals’ mental equilibrium, lately.
A Democrat chief of staff on Capitol Hill hates Marjorie Taylor Greene so much he vandalized her office, not realizing he was being caught on camera the entire time. Oops.
In another case of Liberal Derangement Syndrome making people overlook the obvious, a climate protester tried to smear cream cake on the Mona Lisa, but it’s behind glass. Nice try.
Unbalanced Squad member Jamaal Bowman honestly believes civil war will break out in this country if Republicans are elected in November. I’d go, but I don’t think people should be allowed to carry guns outside the home.
Hillary Clinton said Trump supporters are a “clear and present danger to American democracy.” That would include me. This from a delusional woman who started the Trump/Russia collusion hoax and still thinks she won the 2016 election. Calling Dr. Freud.
Speaking of mental illness, a totally bonkers woman made a video after paying $98 to fill up her gas tank blaming Biden’s inflation on the religious right. I’d ask you to see if you can follow that logic, but there isn’t any.
Antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi is worried about his daughter who likes playing with a white doll. He suspects her mind has already been taken over – colonized – by white supremacy. The guy has a million bucks. You’d think he could afford to buy his daughter a black doll, if that’s what he wants her to play with.
Buried in all this hilarity is a serious point: civil discourse in this country is suffering because liberals and Democrats are making themselves sick in the head, believing all kinds of nonsense. I implore you, come back to reality. I miss our long serious talks about the direction of the country, but you don’t seem to be capable of that, at the moment.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-24 20:52:052022-06-24 20:52:05Gun Ruling Knocks Libs Off Their Rocker
The Supreme Court’s infamous 2007 decision DC vs Heller recognized that the Second Amendment established a right to bear arms in self-defense. But in the years since, the high court has hardly taken any gun rights cases further fleshing out this precedent—leaving loopholes states have exploited to restrict citizens’ right to self-defense.
No more.
In a seismic 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court just struck down a New York scheme that heavily restricted citizens’ right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.
The New York policy in question was its “may issue” approach to concealed carry permit applications, which allow citizens to carry a concealed pistol on their person for self-defense. Many states have a permitting process—others have “constitutional carry”—but New York’s was particularly extreme. Not only did it require a basic background check and gun safety certification like many states do, it allowed government officials to deny the application unless the applicant could “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”
That’s right: It made a mockery of our rights and treated them as a privilege, only granting permits to celebrities or people who had explicitly been threatened. Living in a high-crime area or generally wanting to exercise your right to defend yourself wasn’t good enough. This was essentially a way the state worked around the Second Amendment to heavily limit our ability to bear arms.
Thankfully, Justice Clarence Thomas just took a flamethrower to this subjective, unjust system. The court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen strikes down the New York scheme and affirms that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home” without needing to accommodate the subjective whims of some bureaucrat.
“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” Justice Thomas writes. “That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”
“New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” the majority opinion concludes.
This is a big win for liberty.
The right to life is an inherent human right, and the right to defend your own life from would-be violence is inherent to that right. This is exactly what the Second Amendment was meant to enshrine. It’s great that the Supreme Court is at long last standing up for our inherent right to self-defense—and standing against petty bureaucrats who would leave us at their mercy.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-24 07:51:312022-06-24 07:51:31The Supreme Court Stands Up For the Right to Self-Defense
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand
Indeed, at a time when red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much for police to be given the green light to enter a home without a warrant in order to seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.
Frankly, a person wouldn’t even need to own a gun to be subjected to such a home invasion.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws allowing the police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. If Congress succeeds in passing the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order, which would nationalize red flag laws, that number will grow.
As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
In the wake of yet another round of mass shootings, these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.
While in theory, it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
We’ve been down this road before.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations, and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, and demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority: to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.
It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.
Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.
So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?
According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”
Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash-bang grenades, and carried out a no-knock raid on the household.
According to the county report, the no-knock raid was justified “due to Lemp being ‘anti-government,’ ‘anti-police,’ currently in possession of body armor, and an active member of the Three Percenters,” a far-right paramilitary group that discussed government resistance.
This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
You will be tracked by the government’s pre-crime, surveillance network wherever you go.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
Combine red flag laws with the government’s surveillance networks and its plan to establish an agency that will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home, and you’ll understand why some might view gun control legislation with trepidation.
No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted, and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, and the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.
No matter how well-intentioned, red flag gun laws will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
The highly choreographed January 6 Select Committee that is being performed on primetime TV over the next several weeks can only be described as political and partisan trash. It is not about truth or acting in the interests of American citizens. It is about the 2024 election – clear as day.
Please click here to inform our elected leaders how you feel about the partisan travesty unfolding in the U.S. House of Representatives.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-23 04:00:002022-06-23 04:00:00Red Flagged Nation: Gun Confiscation Laws Put a Target on the Back of Every American
It is time to act to stop school shootings. We have created a draft letter that readers can send to all U.S. Senators to pass laws to stop school shootings. We have title it The Stop It Now law.
What we have noticed is that politicians have a do something mentality when it comes to school shootings. But their do something legislation focuses on the weapon of choice of the killer and not the killer himself.
The Stop It Now law focuses on the killer and only the killer or potential killer or killers.
PROPOSED LETTER TO YOUR SENATORS
Dear Senator ___________________
I ask that you pass before Tuesday, November 8, 2022 a law to prevent violent criminals from attacking our most innocent and vulnerable, the children in our schools. We have seen too many children killed or maimed and criminals not getting tried rapidly and charged in a way that sends a clear signal that this type of attack will not be tolerated by you and your fellow Senators and members of Congress.
It’s past time to take action.
I suggest calling this new legislation The Stop It Now Act.
The Stop It Now Act would:
Make it a federal crime to plan to enter any school at any level with the intent to do harm to either students or teachers.
If a person, or persons, does enter any school at any level with the intent to do harm to either students or teachers then that person, or persons, would be charged with a federal crime and if convicted with each count being a life sentence in a federal prison.
If any person or persons does enter any school at any level and that person or persons harms or kills either a student or teacher then that person or persons are charged with a federal crime and if convicted are then executed by a means currently used to execute others, e.g. terrorists.
That those who aid or abet a person or persons in carrying out an attack on any school with the knowledge that the person they aided had the intent to harm or kill a student or teacher be prosecuted under provisions 1 and 2 above.
Repeal any and all “Gun Free Zones” federal legislation. Allow each state to decide how to best protect their students and teachers from those who wish to do harm to students and teachers at all levels.
I ask that you and your staff work across party lines to pass such legislation and have it signed by the president before Tuesday, November 8, 2022.
Sincerely,
Signed
If you wish to alter this email please feel free to do so to add your thoughts and concerns. If you wish please cc us at drswier@gmail.com.
Below are the email addresses of the members of the the U.S. Senate, their staff and their campaign headquarters.
Just copy and past the list into the TO box of your email or if you just wish to contact your two senators just select their names.
NOTE: We also ask that you send a copy of the email to your member of congress.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-22 17:53:092022-06-22 17:53:09TAKE ACTION: Ask U.S. Senators To Pass ‘The Stop It Now Act’ & Make School Shootings a Federal Crime!
The below tweet remined us of these lyrics to a song by Stealer Wheel, “Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to the right.” It seems like déjà vu all over again.
Senate Republicans are undermining an almost certain Red Wave in November by selling out on guns and amnesty for illegals. Only a stupid party would allow this to happen. They need to be stopped.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. On Tuesday, June 21st, 2022 the Biden Approval Index History shows that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance. Fifty-nine percent (59%) disapprove. The latest figures include 19% who Strongly Approve of the job Biden is doing and 49% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -30.
QUESTION: Why are Senate republicans caving on gun rights and giving illegal aliens amnesty?
ANSWER: They aren’t big “R” republicans.
President Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California offered what he called the 11th Commandment. The 11th Commandment reads: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.
Well, it seems that the time is now to violate Reagans’ 11th Commandment.
We have learned over time that politicians who claim to be a republican once elected don’t vote like a big “R” Republican. The Florida News Report editorial board got this message and showed how little “r’s” say one thing then do the exactly the opposite when introducing or voting on legislation.
Florida News Report editorial board explains that the real election day is the mid-term primaries. The Editorial Board noted,
Republican voters only get one shot at purging the Republican Party of RINOs each election year and that date comes early – the August Primary election.
But most Republican voters don’t participate…. the Republican voter turnout is only around 30%. It is on August 23rd Republican voters decide the direction of the party when they choose between:
A RINO Establishment candidate who doesn’t adhere to the Republican Party Platform
OR
A Republican constitutional conservative candidate who embraces the Republican Party Platform
Do you have some Republican friends you can influence to actually go vote on August 23rd?
Do it.
Do it like your life depends on it. Because it does. When elected Republicans pass Democrat policies, your rights are immediately reduced. From gun rights to Covid restrictions, this is no joke.
August 23rd is your Election Day.
It’s the primaries stupid! Get out and vote for a “BIG Rs” on August 23rd!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-22 17:53:082022-06-22 17:53:08Senate Republicans caving on gun control & amnesty for illegals to a party with a -30 Presidential Approval Index rating!
The Biden-Harris administration is sympathetic Democratic governors to pass more gun control legislation with the apparent belief that if more states pass restrictive anti-gun bills, it will be easier for the administration to push for similar legislation at the federal level.
The White House has already contacted governors in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and Delaware. The bills they have come up with are similar in concept and some even use similar language. The legislation usually includes 21+ age restrictions for firearm purchasers, Red Flag bills as well as “assault weapon” and standard-capacity magazine bans.
Nowhere have gun owners been hit harder than in Biden’s home state of Delaware, where a bill that would prohibit magazines capable of holding more than 17 rounds and a bill that would outlaw most semi-auto rifles are awaiting Gov. John Carney’s signature, after flying through the Democrat-controlled General Assembly.
“Every center-fire rifle that’s magazine fed will be banned,” said John Sigler, who is past president of the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, past president of the National Rifle Association, and a current NRA Board member.
Delaware is a small state. Sigler has known Biden for decades.
“All of this is being driven by the White House,” Sigler said. “Joe has been a gun banner forever – back to when he was running the Senate Judiciary Committee. My first dealings with him involved ‘Saturday Night Specials’ and ‘Cop Killer’ bullets. This is exactly what those of us here in Delaware feared when he announced he was running for president.”
HB 450 will become law the moment Gov. Carney signs it, which he is expected to do. It will ban 63 firearms by name, as well as any semi-auto rifle with a detachable magazine, any shotgun with a telescoping or folding stock or a revolving cylinder, any pistol with a detachable magazine outside the grip or a threaded barrel, and all pistols and rifles with fixed magazines capable of hold more than 17 rounds.
HB 450 states that gun owners cannot sell, offer for sale, transfer, purchase, receive or possess one of the banned firearms after the effective date – except you can keep what you had on or before the effective date. By prohibiting sales, the bill takes away the firearm’s value.
SS 1 for SB 6 bans magazines capable of holding more than 17 rounds. It, too, awaits Gov. Carney’s signature, which he has promised to do.
There is no grandfather clause in this bill. Anyone who owns a magazine capable of holding more than 17 rounds must surrender it to police for a “buy back” or risk misdemeanor charges for the first offense and felony charges the second time they’re caught with a 17+ magazine.
At first, the bill said the state would pay the owner $10 per magazine, but they only allocated $45,000 for the “buy back.” Now, the bill has been amended to offer the owner “current market value” for their property, which the legislature did not define. It has still only allocated $45,000 taxpayer dollars.
“Our membership is stepping up to the plate, and people we’ve never heard of are contributing,” Sigler said. “We are preparing right now and we will see what transpires, but we will litigate. We promised to sue and we are going to carry out our promise.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-22 15:48:002022-06-22 15:48:00Biden Pressuring Dem Governors for More Gun Control
“Our Founding Fathers didn’t give us the Second Amendment for duck hunting or simply for self-protection in a country that at the time had a vast and yet unknown frontier. They bestowed it upon us so that we could protect our precious nation from devolving into tyranny as so many others have done.”
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns; that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.”
The quote was from Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China. Mao’s first act after gaining complete control of China in 1949 was to take away all guns from the population. It was a policy he began in 1935 as he took over each rural province. Anyone found with a gun post-confiscation was executed.
An estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with—by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine.
Mao killed more people than either Stalin or Hitler during World War II. And it all began after he took away the guns.
Dictators throughout much of history have disarmed their populations before they began their mass killings. Examples abound beyond Mao: Hitler took guns from the Jews in November of 1938, and Kristallnacht and the Holocaust followed; and then there was Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to name but a few.
Cuba and Gun Control
Everybody ought to have a gun, Castro maintained—until he took over Cuba in 1959. At a rally in Havana before he assumed power, he explained: “This is how democracy works: It gives rifles to farmers, to students, to women, to Negroes, to the poor, and to every citizen who is ready to defend a just cause.”
Weapons ranging from Czech submachine guns to Belgian FN automatic rifles were handed out to 50,000 soldiers, 400,000 militiamen, 100,000 members of the factory-guarding popular defense force, and to many men, women, and children in Cuba’s 1 million-strong “neighborhood vigilance committees.”
Immediately after assuming power in 1959, Castro changed his position, following Mao’s rule that guns should not be in the hands of the people.
For three weeks after the Castro government was formed, Radio Havana warned, “All citizens must turn in their combat weapons. Civilians must take arms to police stations, soldiers to military headquarters.”
Radio Havana’s explanation was somewhat contradictory: The guns were in bad shape anyway and the “struggle against our enemies requires a rigorous control of all combat weapons.”
There was an urgency about the new policy that suggested serious concern. Failure to turn in military weapons by Sept. 1, 1959, warned Radio Havana, would be punished not by criminal courts but by the dreaded Revolutionary Tribunals—those kangaroo courts that sentenced thousands of Cubans to death after Castro took over.
Venezuela and Gun Control
Venezuela is now paying the price for allowing Chavez to implement the Mao rule when he came to power in 2012.
The shocking nature of an economic collapse that led Venezuela from being one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest has been well documented.
One aspect of the Venezuelan crisis that does not receive much coverage is the country’s gun control regime. All guns were outlawed when Chavez came to power, and harsh penalties were imposed on violators. The Venezuelan Armed Forces have exclusive power to control, register, and potentially confiscate firearms.
Many citizens now regret the repressive gun control legislation the Venezuelan government implemented in 2012. Naturally, this regret is warranted. The Venezuelan government is among the most tyrannical in the world, with a proven track record of violating basic civil liberties such as free speech, debasing its national currency, confiscating private property, and creating economic controls that destroy the country’s productivity.
Elections have proven to be useless, as they’ve been mired with corruption and charges of government tampering. For many, taking up arms is the only option left for the country to shake off its tyrannical government. But the Venezuelan government has prevented such an uprising with its draconian gun control.
These life-and-death lessons of history are lost on too many Americans. Our Founding Fathers didn’t give us the Second Amendment for duck hunting or simply for self-protection in a country that at the time had a vast and yet unknown frontier. They bestowed it upon us so that we could protect our precious nation from devolving into tyranny as so many others have done.
Politicians who respect the American ideal don’t try to diminish the Second Amendment or blame it for other ills of society that they have failed to solve, but rather embrace it as part of the legacy of rights that helps keep America free.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-21 16:51:262022-06-21 16:51:26VIDEO: After the Guns Were Confiscated, the Killing Fields Began
Booing is not enough. We must BOOT Cornyn and every treacherous RINO. The party has betrayed us again and again.
US Sen John Cornyn gets viciously booed during much of his speech here at the Republican Party of Texas Convention. Here’s his closing remarks and the cascade of boos. pic.twitter.com/m2Hua9WdrV
Republican Sen. John Cornyn was booed by constituents in his home state at the Texas GOP convention on Friday for his role in leading negotiations with Democrats on federal gun restriction legislation.
From the moment Cornyn, one of 11 Republican senators including Senate Minority Mitch McConnell who have agreed to surrender to Democrats’ demands to impede the sale and purchase of guns, set foot on the GOP stage in Houston, he was met with hostile boos and jeers denouncing his support for a “bipartisan” bill that will likely include sweeping and constitutionally questionable measures such as problematic red flag laws.
During his speech littered with heckling, Cornyn once again found it difficult to praise the legislation created by Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy and instead opted to list off all of the proposals that he worked to exclude from the legislation.
“Democrats pushed for an assault weapons ban, I said no,” Cornyn said. “They tried to get a new three-week mandatory waiting period for all gun purchases, I said no. Universal background checks, magazine bans, licensing requirements, the list goes on and on and on. And I said no, no, 1,000 times no.”
Cornyn’s claims that he “will not under any circumstances support new restrictions for law-abiding citizens” were promptly rejected by the hostile crowd in the Lone Star State who repeatedly chanted “no red flags” and “don’t take our guns.”
The Federalist tried to reach Cornyn by calling his D.C. office, but the voicemail box was full. His communications director did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Cornyn took fire earlier this week from the Republican Party of Texas’ Platform Committee which unanimously approved a resolution rebuking Cornyn and every other Republican who voiced support for “the Gang of 20 Gun Control bill.”
In the past, Cornyn has bragged about his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association but the Republican resolution stated that raising the gun purchasing age, instituting red flag laws, and mandating waiting periods “is a violation of the Second Amendment and our God given rights.”
After facing backlash from his party and his state, Cornyn recently signaled a hesitancy to sign the gun restriction legislation due to concerns over the “boyfriend loophole,” a provision that expands current law to ban boyfriends and girlfriends convicted of domestic violence from obtaining a gun, and a provision that could withhold funds from states that don’t pass red flag laws.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-20 14:52:022022-06-20 14:52:02WATCH: Sen. John Cornyn Booed By ENTIRE CROWD At Texas GOP Convention Over Surrender To Democrats On Guns
It’s a mistake to view today’s Democrats as fellow Americans who share the same values and goals but have different ideas of how to get there.
This past week, a group of ten Republican senators, led by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, met with the ten Democrat senators, led by Sen. Chris Murphy, in a bipartisan committee to write new federal gun control legislation. According to The Independent, “the legislation will include an expansion of background checks for people under age 21 to include a search of juvenile justice registries, as well as a federal grant program that will encourage states to pass red flag laws, which allow family members or law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily restrict certain persons from owning firearms.”
While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is hailing this as a great example of compromise and placating the “do something!” crowd, this is rather a shameless concession that will make Americans less safe, less free, and less represented while emboldening today’s toxic Democrats to wreck the country even further.
Obviously, the proposed bill is meant to be a response to the mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. Democrats want to disarm potential psychos by placing more barriers to owning and using a gun, and Republicans want more intervention with individuals who suffer from mental health problems. On the surface, their bill seems e a win-win: fewer guns and fewer crazy people.
Except that these two incidents have almost nothing to do with guns or psychopaths, and everything to do with the profound dysfunction of American law enforcement. There were plenty of “red flags” with both shooters that warranted earlier intervention and immediate action, but nothing happened.
In Buffalo, there were already red flag laws, and no one bothered to enforce them. And in the Uvalde shooting, police officers actively impeded any kind of intervention while the shooter was shooting people, mostly children, for at least an hour.
So this new legislation would only empower and enrich incompetent police officers and punish and disable law-abiding Americans. Instead of deterring these monsters with armed civilians, the government will deter those civilians from becoming armed in the first place. Added to this is the costly and politicized bureaucracy to enforce these regulations on people who have done nothing wrong.
On a deeper level, it must be reiterated that these types of regulations are an unconstitutional violation of civil liberties. The Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to use firearms to defend themselves — according to Justin Trudeau, Canadians have no such right.
Like the right to free speech, the right to due process, or the right to be treated equally, the Second Amendment empowers individuals against all forms of tyranny, whether that be from the state, the corporate elite, the mob, criminal organizations, or any other oppressor. Take it away, and Americans have one less tool to protect their freedom, their property, and their lives.
For people who don’t own firearms, this may be too abstract. Therefore, as a good analogy, they can consider restrictions on their right to own and drive a car (which, by the way, kills thousands more Americans each year than firearms). At that moment, all people would be forced to depend on the government’s approval to drive a car of the government’s own choosing or rely on government-run mass transit.
Perhaps some may be fine with this, living in an urban area where they have a semi-functional bus and subway system and few places to go unless they are rich, leftist, and own a fleet of Teslas. However, the great majority of people would resent being restricted in this way, and object that their right to automobility (which isn’t an amendment but probably should be) was being infringed.
In response, those who oppose such freedoms could always claim that there are fewer traffic accidents, and the United States is finally starting to resemble the rest of the developed world. The matter would finally rest there, and the government would put another freedom on the chopping block.
As it is with driving a car of one’s choice, so it is with protecting oneself with a gun of one’s choice. So many social reforms may fall under the heading of “safety,” but they inevitably translate to more government control. This is the Democrats’ whole agenda. Whether it’s gun restrictions, diversity quotas, ending economic security in the name of climate change or eliminating poverty, all of it amounts to the government having more control and making Americans less independent and self-sufficient.
All of this is why Republicans need to stop meeting their political opponents halfway. G. K. Chesterton’s criticism made more than a century ago is still quite apt: “Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen, it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.” With this new bill, McConnell and the rest of the ilk are celebrating yet another half-loaf while their constituents already suffer from malnutrition.
The time for negotiation and “crossing the aisle” is over, and has been for a long time. Democrats have figured this out and continue to push their failed policies with impunity. Republican leadership continues to play political patty cake while their country goes up in flames. The American people are on their own right now. And it’s times like these where an individual’s freedoms matter most, particularly the freedom to defend oneself.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-20 12:04:002022-06-20 12:04:00This Is The Wrong Time To Compromise With Democrats On Gun Rights Or Anything Else
The new rule is pretty egregious, but the owner makes one good point.
An animal shelter in California recently announced they will no longer be doing business with anyone who is against gun control. The organization, called Shelter Hope Pet Shop, is located in Thousand Oaks and owned by Kim Sill.
The shelter has a standard list of questions they ask potential adopters to make sure they will be able to take care of their new pet. For example, they ask about the home the pet will be living in, and they make sure the potential owner is at least 25 and can provide a current driver’s license.
However, as of May 31, a new question has been added to that list: “Where do you stand on gun control?” There is a right and wrong answer here. If you are pro gun control, they will continue to work with you. If you are against gun control, however, you will promptly be shown the door.
“We do not support those who believe that the 2nd amendment gives them the right to buy assault weapons,” said Sill in an email announcing the change. “If your beliefs are not in line with ours, we will not adopt a pet to you.”
Sill explains in no uncertain terms just how serious she is about this.
“If you lie about being [an] NRA supporter, make no mistake, we will sue you for fraud. If you believe that it is our responsibility to protect ourselves in public places and arm ourselves with a gun–do not come to us to adopt a dog. We have a choice of who we work with. Shelter Hope chooses to work with only like-minded humans.”
“If you are pro guns and believe that no background check is necessary, then do not come to us to adopt,” she continues. “We will grill you before you even get an appointment and visit our rescue. If we ask you ‘do you care about children being gunned down in our schools?’ If you hesitate, because your core belief is that you believe teachers need to carry firearms, then you will not get approved to adopt from us. If you foster for us and believe in guns, please bring our dogs and/or cats back, or we will arrange to have them picked up.”
In an interview with NBC News, Sill mentioned that some of her Republican donors have already threatened to cut off funds if she doesn’t remove the pro-gun-control requirement.
“I say, fine, keep your money,” she said. “If I go out of business, as a result, I go out of business. But I have to do something. And this is the only thing I can do to make the point that mass killings by people armed with guns have to stop.”
The NRA weighed in on the move on Thursday. “Having this asinine political litmus test comes at the expense of needy and homeless dogs and cats,” said NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter.
The Right to Discriminate
While Sill’s position is certainly contentious and probably ill-advised, there’s one thing she gets absolutely right. “We have a choice of who we work with.”
Like it or not, she has a point. As the owner of the organization, it’s ultimately her right to decide who she wants to be associated with. The government has no business telling her she must serve everyone equally. Now, there are consequences for discriminating against people based on their political views, but she seems perfectly happy to accept those consequences.
The point is, this isn’t really about gun control. This is about freedom of association. Regardless of where you stand on the gun control issue, people like Sill should be allowed to pick and choose who they do business with. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like there are any laws prohibiting Sill’s actions at the moment. But that doesn’t mean freedom of association is alive and well.
The reality is, while freedom of association gets a lot of lip service, there are many circumstances where it is not upheld. Anti-discrimination laws are the prime example. It sounds nice to have a society where it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc., but these laws are actually an infringement on people’s rights. What anti-discrimination laws mean in practice is that you aren’t allowed to choose who you do business with. In other words, you have no freedom of association.
The classic example of this is the gay wedding cake controversy. Should a Christian baker be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Absolutely not. Like everyone else, they should have the right to discriminate. Now, that doesn’t mean that their actions are necessarily moral or virtuous. It just means that the government shouldn’t be dictating how they run their business.
The same holds true for schools, or any other institution for that matter. Whether it’s on racial or other grounds, forced segregation is clearly wrong. But forced integration is also wrong. The problem in both cases is force. It’s not a question of segregation vs. integration, it’s a question of force vs. freedom. Organizations should have the right to discriminate against anyone for any reason, not because discrimination is always moral, but because that’s the only way to consistently uphold freedom of association.
Again, this is not to endorse racism, misogyny, or any of the other despicable worldviews that might lead someone to discriminate in this way. Tolerating something is very different from endorsing it, and our ability to live in a free society depends on our ability to grasp that distinction.
Sill’s decision to discriminate against those who believe in gun rights is pretty egregious. But if we want other people to respect our right to decide who we associate with, it’s only fair that we extend the same tolerance to them, even when we vehemently disagree with their choices.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
AUTHOR
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-18 23:53:102022-06-18 23:53:10“We Will Grill You.” California Pet Shop Announces They Won’t Give You a Pet Unless You Support Gun Control
In reality, Biden is confusing terms and distorting data to paint a picture that is opposed to the facts. Such facts include but are not limited to the following:
The number of people killed in mass shootings didn’t decline even after the 1986 federal ban on automatic guns, which are more capable of mass murder than the guns Biden wants to ban.
The terms “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines” are misleading and refer to common weapons used by citizens for hunting and home defense.
Before, during, and after the 1994 law cited by Biden, the portion of the U.S. population killed in mass shootings barely budged, and the slight changes are better explained by other factors.
Automatic Firearms Have Been Banned Since 1986
U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Eddie Hedgepeth looks through the scope of his 5.56mm M4 Carbine. Credit: U.S. Department of Defense
Eight years before the “assault weapons” ban referenced by Biden, Congress passed and President Reagan signed a 1986 law that made it unlawful for civilians to “transfer or possess a machinegun.” Under federal law, the term “machinegun” means “any weapon” that can fire “more than one shot” with “a single function of the trigger.” Thus, the ban includes all types of automatic firearms, including machine guns, submachine guns, and assault rifles. These are the types of guns commonly used by armed forces.
The 1986 ban, which is still in effect, has an exception for guns legally owned before the law was enacted, but because automatic firearms have been heavily regulated since 1934, less than 4 million are currently owned by civilians. The relative rarity and strict regulation of these weapons are highlighted by a 2016 U.S. Department of Justice studythat found “no evidence that” any owner of an automatic gun was convicted of using one to commit a crime from 2006 through 2014.
The primary purpose of the 1986 law was to reduce mass shooting deaths by limiting the availability of weapons with rapid rates of fire. As explained in the book Military Technology, “A machine gunner’s weapon fired hundreds of bullets each minute. He could point the weapon in the general direction of his enemy and fire. Even poorly-trained shooters could hit their targets. Automatic weapons made war a far more deadly business.”
Nevertheless, the portion of the U.S. population killed in mass shootings (defined in academic literature as those in which four or more people are killed), didn’t decline in the wake of the law:
Semi-Automatic “Assault Weapons” Were Banned From 1994–2004
Less than a decade after banning automatic weapons, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a 1994 law that made it illegal to “manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon.” These guns often look like military firearms and share some characteristics with them (like detachable magazines and pistol grips), but they lack their defining feature: the ability to fire multiple bullets with a single trigger pull.
For that reason and the fact that these guns are used for hunting and home defense, firearm specialists typically don’t call them “assault weapons” but describe them as:
“modern sporting rifles,”
by their make/model (like “AR-15”), or
with functional descriptors like “semi-automatic rifle.”
Nevertheless, the politicians who sponsored the 1994 law labeled these semi-automatic guns “assault weapons.” This term sounds very similar to “assault rifles,” which happen to be the most common firearms used by soldiers and terrorists.
The lawmakers’ decision to use those easily confused terms accords with a 1988 booklet written by Josh Sugarmann, the founder of a prominent gun control organization called the Violence Policy Center. In it, he wrote about the “new topic” of “assault weapons” and laid out this strategy for banning them:
The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.
Many journalists have advanced this agenda by using the term “assault weapons” to describe a broad range of semi-automatic guns. These include the most commonly sold rifles in America, more than 19.8 million of which are now in circulation.
Numerous journalists and politicians have also conflated “assault weapons” with “assault rifles” by applying both of these terms to semi-automatic guns. This is chronicled in the nation’s leading authority on journalism lingo, the Associated Press Stylebook. A decade ago, the 2011 Stylebook distinguished between “assault weapons” and “assault rifles” as follows:
assault weapon: A semi-automatic firearm similar in appearance to a fully automatic firearm or military weapon. Not synonymous with assault rifle, which can be used in fully automatic mode.
This splitting of verbal hairs between semi-automatic “assault weapons” and military “assault rifles” led journalists to misuse these terms, but instead of fixing this confusion, the 2015 Stylebook made it worse. It did this by combining both terms into a single definition while stating that they “are often used interchangeably,” but “some” journalists “make the distinction that assault rifle is a military weapon….”
The use of similar and even identical terms to describe materially different weapons violates a basic principle of honest reporting stressed in journalism guidebooks: “use jargon only when necessary and define it carefully.”
Like the 1986 ban on automatic weapons, the 1994 ban on semi-automatic “assault weapons” had an exception for guns legally owned prior to the law’s enactment. Unlike the 1986 ban, however, the 1994 ban was not permanent. That’s because lawmakers included a provision that sunset the ban in 10 years as a compromise to secure enough votes to pass it and to provide time to “investigate and study” its “impact, if any, on violent and drug trafficking crime.”
The law required the U.S. Attorney General to conduct and publish such a study within 30 months of the ban’s enactment, and the study concluded that “the public safety benefits of the 1994 ban have not yet been demonstrated.” A similar study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice was published in 2004, the year the law was due to expire. It found that the ban had:
no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury, as we might have expected had the ban reduced crimes with both AWs [assault weapons] and LCMs [large-capacity magazines].
On the other hand, the authors of the study noted that the effects of the law “are still unfolding and may not be fully felt for several years into the future,” and so it is “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun violence.”
When the ban expired in 2004, various members of Congress sponsored bills to renew it, but none of them passed.
“High Capacity” Magazines Were Banned From 1994–2004
Left: 17-Round magazine for handgun. Credit: Magpul. Right: 30-Round magazine for rifle. Credit: istock/zim286
The same 1994 law which banned many semi-automatic guns until 2004 also banned “large capacity ammunition feeding devices” for the same period. The most common of these devices are detachable magazines (or “mags” for short), which hold and feed ammunition into the vast bulk of semi-automatic guns.
The politicians who wrote the law applied the term “high capacity” to mags that hold more than 10 rounds, even though these are standard on many popular handguns and rifles. For example, the stock magazine for a Glock 19, one of the best-selling handguns in the world, holds 15 rounds.
In fact, mags that hold more than 10 rounds are so common that more than 150 million of them are currently in circulation in the United States.
As a general rule, mags with more capacity are a tactical advantage because they allow the shooter to fire more bullets without reloading. However, a trained gunman can swap out a mag in one second. This allows mass shooters to effectively bypass the capacity restriction by bringing multiple mags to an attack. In contrast, it is not practical for the many millions of citizens who legally carry concealed firearms to keep a stockpile of mags on their waist.
Another tradeoff on mag size is that larger ones are bulkier, which can make weapons less concealable and harder to maneuver. Also, very large mags tend to jam, like the 100-round magazine used by the perpetrator of the 2012 “Dark Knight” movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado.
What Happened in the Wake of the 1994 Law?
The 1994–2004 ban on certain semi-automatic guns and 10+ round mags correlates with a slight decline in the portion of the U.S. population killed in mass shootings, but the association is weak, and there is no clear pattern:
Furthermore, the ban did not begin until the last 3.5 months of 1994, and:
production of these weapons in 1994 was more than twice that of a typical year because people rushed to buy them before the ban took effect.
a 2002 paper in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that the rush to buy these guns “produced the unintended consequence of making AWs more accessible” through at least mid-1996.
the portion of people killed in mass shootings was lower in 1996 than in six of the eight years that followed while the ban was in effect.
Most importantly, Biden’s statement suffers from the sophomoric myth that association proves causation. Students are taught to avoid this fallacy in high school, but reporters, commentators, and even scholars often embrace it. In the words of an academic textbook about analyzing data:
Association is not the same as causation. This issue is a persistent problem in empirical analysis in the social sciences. Often the investigator will plot two variables and use the tight relationship obtained to draw absolutely ridiculous or completely erroneous conclusions. Because we so often confuse association and causation, it is extremely easy to be convinced that a tight relationship between two variables means that one is causing the other. This is simply not true.
The reason why this is not true is because many other factors can affect events like mass shootings, and there is frequently no objective way to isolate and quantify the effects of a single factor. With regard to the 1994 ban, just a few of the many factors that could have been at play during this era include the following:
The very same 1994 law that enacted the firearm and magazine restrictions also contained a massive array of measures to reduce violent crime, including incentives for states to increase “the percentage of convicted violent offenders sentenced to prison” and increase “the average prison time which will be served in prison by convicted violent offenders.” This is significant because the vast bulk of murders are committed by people with long rap sheets.
Wall-to-wall media coverage of mass shootings—which began with the Columbine school massacre of 1999—has since motivated many copycat killers seeking fame. Notably, the infamous Columbine mass murder occurred in the midst of the 1994–2004 ban.
Less than 1% of all murders in the U.S. occur in mass shootings, and the overall murder rate fell by 39% during the years of the ban. Thus, the slight decline in mass shootings may be a consequence of the much larger decline in all murders. This is why the 2004 DOJ-funded study concluded that “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”
Using the childish logic of Biden, one would be forced to conclude that the right-to-carry law enacted by Florida in 1987 is responsible for the massive drop in murder rates that occurred in its wake:
The chart above shows what a strong association looks like, but even still, one cannot draw definitive conclusions from it because a multitude of other factors could be at play.
Biden’s & PolitiFact’s Phony Data
As proven by the data above, Biden’s claim that “mass shootings tripled” after the 1994–2004 ban has no basis in reality. However, a PolitiFact article by Jon Greenberg alleges it is “mostly true.”
PolitiFact attempts to support this claim by citing a paper published in 2019 by the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. The details of this study are hidden behind a $60 paywall, but there, the authors reveal that their count of mass shootings is “restricted to incidents reported by all three” of the following sources: “Mother Jones Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and Stanford University.”
Using that methodology—which relies on the absurd notion that all three of their sources have complete data stretching back for decades—the study presents the following chart that shows zero mass shooting deaths in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2004:
In other words, the paper ignores numerous people killed in mass shootings during the period of the ban, pretending as if these events and many others never took place:
The 1995 Corpus Christi, TX workplace shooting, where a gunman murdered five people.
The 1996 Fort Lauderdale, FL workplace shooting, where a gunman murdered five of his former coworkers.
The 1997 Orange, CA workplace shooting, where a gunman murdered four people.
The 2001 Melrose Park, IL workplace shooting, where a gunman murdered four people.
The 2002 Rutledge, AL farm shooting, where a gunman murdered six members of his girlfriend’s family.
Further illustrating the inanity of this study, Dr. Louis Klarevas of Columbia University, a Ph.D. who specializes in mass-casualty violence, skewered the paper for having “a large number of misclassifications.”
Yet, PolitiFact treats this deceitful data as if it were fact, and healthcare professionals are invited to be brainwashed by it because the paper is “Accredited for Continuing Medical Education.”
Summary
In his speech, Biden declared that his gun control strategy is part of “my Unity Agenda,” but he betrayed this claim in the same speech by making a partisan plea for votes while attacking Republicans. If “Congress fails” to implement his agenda, said Biden, “I believe the majority of you will act to turn your outrage into making this issue central to your vote.”
Contrary to Biden’s claim that his agenda would save lives:
there is no association between the number of people killed in mass shootings and the 1986 ban on automatic guns.
there is a weak association between the number of people killed in mass shootings and the 1994–2004 ban on certain semi-automatic guns and 10+ round mags.
the weak association is easily attributable to other factors.
the “mass shootings tripled” statistic is patently false.
bans on magazines that hold 10+ rounds give mass murderers a tactical advantage over law-abiding citizens who carry guns to protect themselves and others.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-18 04:00:002022-06-18 04:00:00There’s No Objective Evidence the Federal “Assault Weapons” Ban Saved Lives
Seems to me this recent May 17th, 2021 SCOTUS ruling in Caniglia v. Strom et al. could help in declaring Risk Protection Orders unconstitutional. I’ve often stated they not only violate the 5th and 14th Amendments requiring Due Process but the 4th Amendment involving home invasion as well. Watch:
NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co.,200 U. S. 321, 337.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus Caniglia v. Strom et al.
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the first circuit
No. 20–157. Argued March 24, 2021—Decided May 17, 2021
During an argument with his wife, petitioner Edward Caniglia placed a handgun on the dining room table and asked his wife to “shoot [him] and get it over with.” His wife instead left the home and spent the night at a hotel. The next morning, she was unable to reach her husband by phone, so she called the police to request a welfare check. The responding officers accompanied Caniglia’s wife to the home, where they encountered Caniglia on the porch. The officers called an ambulance based on the belief that Caniglia posed a risk to himself or others. Caniglia agreed to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation on the condition that the officers not confiscate his firearms. But once Caniglia left, the officers located and seized his weapons. Caniglia sued, claiming that the officers had entered his home and seized him and his firearms without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The District Court granted summary judgment to the officers. The First Circuit affirmed, extrapolating from the Court’s decision in Cady v. Dombrowski,413 U. S. 433, a theory that the officers’ removal of Caniglia and his firearms from his home was justified by a “community caretaking exception” to the warrant requirement.
Held: Neither the holding nor logic of Cady justifies such warrantless searches and seizures in the home. Cady held that a warrantless search of an impounded vehicle for an unsecured firearm did not violate the Fourth Amendment. In reaching this conclusion, the Court noted that the officers who patrol the “public highways” are often called to discharge noncriminal “community caretaking functions,” such as responding to disabled vehicles or investigating accidents. 413 U. S., at 441. But searches of vehicles and homes are constitutionally different, as the Cady opinion repeatedly stressed. Id., at 439, 440–442. The very core of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee is the right of a person to retreat into his or her home and “there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.” Florida v. Jardines, 569 U. S. 1, 6. A recognition of the existence of “community caretaking” tasks, like rendering aid to motorists in disabled vehicles, is not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere. Pp. 3–4.
Thomas, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court. Roberts, C. J., filed a concurring opinion, in which Breyer, J., joined. Alito, J., and Kavanaugh, J., filed concurring opinions.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-17 22:51:502022-06-17 22:51:50VIDEO: Why Red Flag Laws are a Violation of the 4th, 5th and 14th Amendments
If the legacy media had their way, your front door would explode and seconds later you’d be hip-deep in armed gun-grabbers delivering high-caliber butt-strokes to your noggin until you surrendered the combination to your gun safe. That is the level of anti-gun bias today’s legacy media uses whenever they report on anything related to guns or the Second Amendment. Their recent stories on developments in the Senate are no exception to this rule.
“The Senate has finally reached an agreement on guns,” a CBS news actor breathlessly announced Monday morning. Except the Senate hasn’t reached any agreement. Ten Republican Senators have agreed in theory to back a gun-control framework, which is lightyears away from agreeing to support an actual gun-control bill.
Once again, the legacy media is way ahead of the actual story. Once again, they are reporting what they want to happen, instead of what actually happened. Rather than reporting the truth, today’s media consistently pushes its own agenda, which in this case is their belief we need more gun control.
To be clear, a bipartisan group of 20 Senators – 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats – led by Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), announced yesterday their support for a proposal, which is not a bill.
According to a press release from Murphy’s office, the proposal is “a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country.”
“Families are scared, and it is our duty to come together and get something done that will help restore their sense of safety and security in their communities,” Murphy said in the statement. “Our plan increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons. Most importantly, our plan saves lives while also protecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense proposal into law.”
You can read the full text of Murph’s proposal, as well as which Senators have announced their support, here.
Is this development concerning to those of us who value our God-given constitutional rights? Yes, it certainly is. However, we do not yet know what provisions of the proposal will be included in the bill, or even if there will be an actual bipartisan bill.
The National Rifle Association said as much in a statement released Sunday night:
“As is our policy, the NRA does not take positions on “frameworks”. We will make our position known when the full text of the bill is available for review. The NRA will continue to oppose any effort to insert gun control policies, initiatives that override constitutional due process protections, and efforts to deprive law-abiding citizens of their fundamental right to protect themselves and their loved ones into this or any other legislation.”
While some of the concepts contained in the Senators’ proposal are likely unconstitutional, it is a proposal, not legislation, at least not yet. We need to monitor developments closely and keep in contact with our elected representatives. While the gun banners are celebrating wildly while the cameras roll, do not fall victim to the media’s spin. That friends, is exactly what they want. They survive solely on clicks and ratings. Do not feed the media beast.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-06-17 10:58:002022-06-17 10:58:00The Media Has Reached an Agreement on Guns, Not the Senate
Do Psychiatric Meds and War Games Lead to Mass Shootings?
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
97.8% of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.
An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date1 and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,2 and psychreg.org in late January 2021,3 noted:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …
Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.
Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.
Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,4 97.8% of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …
This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.
Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.
As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”
The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants
Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.
The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.
Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.
In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.
In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400%,5 and by 2010, 11% of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.6
In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.7 In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?
Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.8
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.
For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.
Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.9
The Risks Are Clear
The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:10
“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.
In one review11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8% of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.
The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:13
Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times
Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed
In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:14
Sadness
Anxiety
Feeling hopeless
Feeling worthless
Feeling helpless
Feeling ’empty’
Feeling guilty
Irritable
Fatigue
Lack of energy
Loss of interest in hobbies
Slow talking and moving
Restlessness
Trouble concentrating
Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
Thoughts of death or suicide
The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,15 only 38.4% actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3% of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:16
“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.
Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”
What Role Might War Games Play?
Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.17 While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:18
Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning
In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.
Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.
On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.19 When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.
Even now, the U.S. insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”20
Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?
As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.
There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-16 10:52:242022-06-16 10:52:2497.8% of Mass Shootings Are Linked to This
“Biden’s America is becoming a mirror image of Trudeau’s Canada when it comes to gun control.” ― Dr. Richard M. Swier, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.)
“To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.” ― Adolf Hitler
A gaggle of Republican Senators have just agreed with Democratic counterparts that the something they are prepared to do in response to recent mass shootings is adopt a national ‘Red Flag’ law. As a result, in the name of preventing deplorable, but random, acts of “gun violence,” every American could be one anonymous denunciation away from having their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms eliminated.
This legislation is scheduled to be passed by July 4th, 2022. If it does then American independence is lost.
Listen to Gaffney’s statement.
Royal A. Brown III, an expert on Florida’s Red Flag law, wrote this about Republican senators joining in the efforts by Biden and Democrats to pass a national Red Flag law,
Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Pat Toomey (R-PA), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) attended the initial discussions that started on Thursday. As governor of Florida, Scott implemented red flag laws and raised the age to own a rifle to 21 after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
On June 12th, 2022 U.S. Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Cory Booker (D- N.J.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Angus King (I-Maine), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) issued the following statement:
Today, we are announcing a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country. Families are scared, and it is our duty to come together and get something done that will help restore their sense of safety and security in their communities. Our plan increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons. Most importantly, our plan saves lives while also protecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense proposal into law.
Royal A. Brown III also warns let’s also not forget the following facts:
The ex parte Risk Protection Order (RPO) is issued without notice to the respondent and can occur 24 x 7. This is a violation of the 4th Amendment.
The “hearing” at which the respondent is present does not take place until 2 weeks after the seizure (this is not Due Process under the 5th and 14th amendments).
This process does not recognize the principle of law that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
The rules of evidence do not involve “beyond reasonable doubt” but rather “reasonable suspicion” that the respondent may be a threat.
Florida’s law calls for the respondent to be immediately entered into the state and federal criminal data bases (even though the RPO is supposedly a civil and not a criminal process, e.g. no crime has been committed). There is no provisions to remove the respondent found innocent from these lists.
An RPO can be issued up to a year after reporting a person as a threat.
If a respondent is found to be not a threat there are no provisions for prompt return of his/her firearms, ammo, permit nor that this property be returned in the same condition as when seized.
Since June 2018 when this law went into effect in Floirda of the over 5,000 RPOs issued, approximately 13% or 650 of those accused respondents have been found not to be a threat at the after the fact hearing – this is far too many and demonstrates 3 possibilities – the accusers lied and/or the law enforcement sending the petition to Judges did not conduct a through investigation and/or the Judges rubber stamp these petitions. Not one of the false accusers have been charged with the 3rd degree misdemeanor called for in the law.
This law also facilitates the muting of 1st Amendment law of freedom of speech as people become fearful of stating anything that could be misconstrued as a threat.
Furthermore, this law can easily be misused as a weapon against political opponents.
“So it is definitely obvious that the Biden administration is targeting Federal Firearms Licensees because they are the link between manufacturers and people being able to access their Second Amendment rights,” he said.
Clyde, a federal firearms licensee who owns a store in his Athens district called “Clyde Armory,” said that “the motto of my company is we enable individual participation in the preservation of liberty” by giving people access to guns.
I took an oath as a young Army officer when I was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in 1967 to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. That oath doesn’t expire until I do. I and millions of others have taken that same oath. We the people will abide by it.
The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
We fully agree. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy or girl with a gun.
On Monday, July 4th, 2022 Americans will be celebrating Independence Day. If this Red Flag law passes the U.S. Senate it may be the last day of our independence and/or the first day of the second American Revolution.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-15 08:52:112022-06-15 08:52:11JULY 4TH TREASON: Gaggle of 11 Republicans Join Biden To Gut the Second Amendment
Federal firearms dealers are getting their licenses revoked or not renewed by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms at a much greater rate since President Biden first came to office, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) said Wednesday.
“So it is definitely obvious that the Biden administration is targeting Federal Firearms Licensees because they are the link between manufacturers and people being able to access their Second Amendment rights,” he said.
Clyde, a federal firearms licensee who owns a store in his Athens district called “Clyde Armory,” said that “the motto of my company is we enable individual participation in the preservation of liberty” by giving people access to guns.
“They enable individual participation in the preservation of liberty, because that’s the only way a person, other than making one themselves, can get a firearm in his hands through a manufacturer is through a Federal Firearms Licensee,” he said. “So if you cut out the Federal Firearms Licensees, then you have denied the American citizens their right to keep in bear arms through not being able to buy a gun. So it’s a problem.”
According to Alan Gottlieb at the Second Amendment Foundation, his organization gets many calls from FFL’s every week telling his group the same story.
“Not so much just a revocation [of an FFl license], but also a fine and just being harassed. There’s a lot more of that going on under the Biden restriction than ever before,” Gottlieb said. “The last time anybody really did anything like that was under Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton figured less guns would be sold if there were less FFL dealers to start with, and so he went out to shrink the number of FFL’s.”
The National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Affairs says that Mr. Biden’s administration is running “Clinton playbook again – operating a ‘zero tolerance’ policy that is shuttering FFLs over trivial violations. This sort of schizophrenic policy-making could give the impression that this ‘strategy’ has been motivated by anti-gun politics rather than concerns about violent crime.”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-15 08:52:102022-06-15 08:52:10ATF is revoking firearm licenses ‘at a rate of about 500% greater’ under Biden
A Leftist – possessing weapons and zip ties on his way to commit an assassination – was recently arrested outside the home of a Conservative Supreme Court Justice. Outside of some brief initial coverage, the attempted assassination faded from the headlines FAST.
Locally – A Leftist Antifa and anti-2nd Amendment Thug vandalized our Sarasota GOP HQ in the middle of the night (photos below). No coverage by the local media.
Isn’t it strange that when Democrats are the victims it seems to marinade in the press, while Conservatives get little to no coverage?
Future suggestion: When we are attacked, we will make it clear to the press that we are identifying as Liberal Democrats during the attack. I suspect that will help us receive some fair media coverage.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-14 19:51:402022-06-14 19:51:40TAKE ACTION: Sarasota, Florida GOP HQ Vandalized! Hate Has No Home Here!
