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Sometimes I just hear so much new information from the podcasts I listen to every day, I just don’t have time to blog about all of them, but I still want to document what I learned and my thoughts on it.

GHOST GUNS

Ghost guns, a term I never heard before, talks about making unregistered guns at home. I watched a video where a guy explained how you can legally buy all but one part needed to build an “AK-47” rifle from on-line suppliers. He then showed the one part that was not legal to buy, and then showed how someone with a basic machine shop could potentially just make the part, or thousands of them. He personally did a bad job machining the piece, but he also tried making it with a 3D printer. The designs of which are all on-line, legally. He took all of the pieces to a gunsmith shop. The gunsmith said his machined piece would not work (due to his lack of skill, not that it could never be done), but the 3D piece would. He assembled all the components, walked out to the firing range, and began shooting his fully working semi-automatic gun. I was impressed. He then turned the gun over to the police as it is not legal for him to own that gun, and he did just document himself on the internet making it.

MASS SHOOTINGS

They also talked about the University of Texas mass shooting in 1966 where a shooter went into a clock tower on campus and started picking off people on the campus. That is until professors went out to their cars, unloaded their hunting rifles from their trunks, and provided suppressing fire on the shooter in the clock tower until the police could go up the stairs and get him. How many lives did those professors save that would have been lost without the second amendment? People that want to commit crimes don’t care about laws. Murder, rape, suicide, robbery, arson and even speeding are all completely illegal – and yet they all happen every day anyway.

Good people don’t need laws to tell them how to behave, and criminals ignore them.

The second amendment is not for hunting or even for home defense. It is for arming the citizens against their government in the event the government declines into tyranny which history had taught the founders, governments are wont to do. I can’t think of any country that “slid” from tyranny into freedom, with politicians bending over backwards to reduce the power of the state, retract laws and regulations, and return all powers back to the people. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

That is what the second amendment is for.

HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING RANGES

I was born in the early 70’s and I guess this was just before my time. But I heard today from people who used to do it, that it was common for High Schools throughout the U.S. to have shooting ranges. I assume not unlike metal and woodworking shop. They said you could check-out a gun, like a library book, walk onto the range, and practice shooting. They also said you could walk into a hardware store and walk out with a gun. They were making the point that Americans had access to more guns in the past, and millions of guns are in America today, and yet despite all of the guns and easy access to guns (way easier in the past), America never became a gun shooting, lawless Wild West nation.

And I would argue, where we have seen guns banned or heavily controlled, we see more cars used as weapons, mowing down people in the street, and more use of bombs and poisonous gasses, acid attacks, knife attacks….people that do harm will do harm, a gun is only one means to do it. But if they take away guns, you strip the good citizen from the only real means he/she has to protect themselves.

And, lastly, I think we should be careful for what we wish for. If we ban guns, then bombs will become more common. Bombs…which can be made by the dozen from household ingredients (the Ashville airport bomb was made using stuff from REI, Wal-Mart and Lowes). They can be hidden anywhere, detonated from thousands of miles away when conditions are perfect to do so, compared to a gun where we have a chance to catch the perpetrator, there is a target that can be stopped, and while the shooter may want to engage at “x” time of day in “z” location for maximum effect, both of those variables may be high risk to the shooter and so he has to choose less suitable conditions.

LIBS & GUNS

The bulk of “gun deaths” as they like to call them, so they can conflate lots of statistics into one scary number, are suicides. Some 60%-70% of gun deaths are suicide. In England, where guns are banned, hanging has replaced guns in their suicide numbers. Hanging and asphyxiation are now the most common methods, at 60% of suicides in England.

The argument here, and I think it’s a good one, is that it is easier for Liberals to target an object, than a behavior. As if banning guns would ban suicides, or homicides (and consequently self-defense which they don’t seem to care about anyway). And if we want to talk about why suicides or homicides are so high, then we have to talk about black-on-black crime, inner city drugs, the legal system imprisoning millions of blacks for non-violent crimes, PTSD due to never-ending wars and the widespread use of antidepressants in our society overall.

We’d have to talk about why Chicago (Chi-raq) has been controlled by Democrats for 80 years and is one of the most violent cities in America. In fact, in Forbes list of the most violent cities in America, the top ten includes (in order):

Detroit

St. Louis

Oakland

Memphis

Birmingham

Atlanta

Baltimore

Stockton

Cleveland

Buffalo

All ten cities are Democrat controlled. ALL TEN.

So, from a Democrat point of view, it is much safer for them to maintain the narrative that guns are bad, and the cause of so much of what ails us, to draw attention away from bad Democrat (and Republican) policies, the welfare state, the warfare state, crushing labor laws that increase unemployment in inner-city areas, drug use, single motherhood, perpetual imprisonment with records on background checks for non-violent offenses that prevent them from rehabilitating back into society and getting jobs, and the horrific state of government provided education. This list of social dysfunctions is significantly harder to address and resolve, than just writing some words on a piece of paper that ban guns and pretending that will fix it all.

RUSSIAN URANIUM

I didn’t know this but in 2009 the FBI had discovered that Hillary Clinton’s Foundation had received significant donations from participants in Russia that needed State Department approval to buy up uranium production inside the U.S., up to 20% of production (and apparently a trucking company that transports it). And we know that Russia sells uranium to states like Iran. Why is the media obsessed now with an as yet unproven connection between Trump and Russia colluding to throw the last election? To be honest, even if that last statement were true, I think Hillary selling uranium rights to Russia (which we know sells it to Iran, and maybe North Korea which is threatening to send a rocket into California to create a “cloud of fire”) is a bigger threat to me than Trump hacking an election.

But it’s become pretty clear that there are laws for “them” and laws for “us” and they are worlds apart.

Categories: 2016 Election, Big Brother, Big Government, fascism, Government Tyranny, Guns, Headlines, Individual Rights, Liberal Media, News Media Bias, Social Decline, Statism, Welfare State