Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday that the Senate will “take a pause” and return to consideration of gun legislation at a later date.
But they are not stopping.
“Yesterday, President Obama said it was a shameful day for the Senate, and it probably was, I agree. But we should make no mistake: This debate is not over, in fact this fight is just beginning,” Reid said on the Senate floor Thursday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday said passage of tougher gun controls is “inevitable,” projecting optimism less than 24 hours after the Senate voted down legislation central to President Obama’s strategy to reduce gun violence.
“It’s a matter of time,” Pelosi said Thursday during a press briefing in the Capitol. “It might be inconceivable to the NRA that this might happen; it’s inevitable to us.”
The anti-rights leftist gun-grabber movement will always push for tyranny, and will not stop.
“Something must be done, because that’s what the American people expect and what they deserve,” she said. “We’re just not taking no for an answer.”
Pelosi and her anti-rights ilk will never give up, they will push to disarm us, and they do not stop. But she will be given no for an answer. When she refuses to take no for an answer and inflicts her whims upon us, she fully becomes a tyrant.
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Andrew Wilkow today noted that a simple example of how the Second Amendment works is a metaphor with a man as the government and a woman as the people. The woman is armed.
The man asks why the woman needs a gun, and says she shouldn’t have it. She says “I need it so you won’t rape me”. The man angrily assures her that he will not rape her. “Then you will never have a problem with my gun,” answers the woman.
WASHINGTON – For gun enthusiasts, the Slide Stock is an exciting add-on that enables shooters to unleash bursts of machine-gun-like fire from semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15.
…
But for gun control advocates, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., bumpfire devices (as they’re known generically) are a nightmare waiting to happen.
“With practice, a shooter can control his rate of fire from 400 to 800 rounds per minute,” Feinstein said on Wednesday, speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on guns. With such devices, she said, mass shooters gain “tremendous killing power” that can “tear young bodies apart.”
Andrew Wilkow today on SiriusXM made a solid point that access to the internet and a hardware store is actually a lot more dangerous than any firearm.
This is a much more dangerous guided munitions delivery system, used by terrorists foreign and domestic:
The Houston Chronicle notes that bump fire itself isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:
Gun enthusiasts offer rave reviews but warn bumpfire can be an expensive habit.
“Fun? Yes indeed, the Slide Fire Stock is uber fun,” said David Fortier, writing in Shotgun News last September. “It will put a smile on your face just as quick as it empties your wallet as you burn through copious amounts of ammunition.”
There’s a saying in the citizen gun community: “Full auto is a good way to turn money into noise.”
The Slide Fire stock takes advantage of bump firing, which, for those that skipped the original article, is basically letting recoil bounce the trigger into your finger over and over, simulating full-auto fire. It isn’t full auto fire, it’s still one pull of the trigger fring one bullet, just rapidly. It’s difficult to control (which the Slide Fire stock controls to some degree) and it’s basically wasting rounds. It’s a gimmick, but it could be hypothetically used by someone in a shooting competition, but the specific skill you need to develop with bump firing, even with the Slide Fire, would still be difficult. It’s not like a full-auto gun with a selector switch. Even people who shoot a lot have difficulty controlling it.
The Houston Chronicle makes this interesting note:
David Koresh, the Branch Davidian cult leader in Waco, told law enforcement authorities that he used Hellfire triggers on semi-automatic weapons, according to “No More Wacos,” a 1995 book by gun-rights advocate David Kopel. Koresh and his followers killed four ATF agents during a 1993 raid before setting their compound ablaze during an FBI assault. At least 74 people, including 25 children, died.
Although the technology has been around 40 years or more, bumpfire devices gained popularity in the wake of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which among other things outlawed civilian possession or transfer of machine guns not legally in circulation prior to the law’s signing date, May 19, 1986.
FOPA was passed to correct some earlier gun control laws that were harsh and uncontrollable. It was made so that if you lived in Vermont and wanted to drive to West Virginia, you could safely travel through New York without being arrested. If you are on a peaceable journey and traveling, you have a defense to prosecution (and really shouldn’t be arrested at all) for crossing through jurisdictions that make your rights into crimes.
The Hughes Amendment was part of FOPA, and banned machineguns except for those before 1986. That’s why real machineguns cost an arm and a leg. There are only so many of them legally in existence, and so those are the only ones that can be bought or sold. It’s an artificial market created by government. It’s fascinating from a supply & demand standpoint, as cheap mass-produced submachineguns that would’ve gone for a few hundred dollars (and the $200 ATF tax stamp and a pile of paperwork and background checks) will now fetch thousands of dollars (like this cheap Sten).
The Slide Fire takes advantage of semi-automatic actions that should be the most resistant to out-of-battery detonations (I’m personally not a fan of bump fire at all because of out-of-battery risks, even if they should be impossible with ARs).
But realistically, it doesn’t matter either way. It’s just another tool. Like Robert Heinlein said: “There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.“
Consider the V-Tac 1-5 drill. It’s a skill test drill in which a shooter will fire 1 round on the first target, 2 on the second, 3 on the third, then 4 on the second target again, then 5 rounds ending on the first target. I can do it in a little over 4 seconds. Travis Haley does it in 2.4.
That’s all done with semi-auto. We’ve already seen shotguns are more dangerous than rifles when comparing people with moderate skills. At high skill levels, it really doesn’t make a difference. It’s not the tool, it’s the man (or woman) using the tool.
Going after Slide Fire stocks is just as meaningless as going after semi-auto firearms with scary features or non-scary features, or going after certain sizes of buckshot, or going after rifles or pistols or anything else.
A good person with a gun – no matter what type of gun or what features – will harm no one and will protect people, even if only through deterrence. A good person disarmed will become a victim of harm and can protect no one. A bad person will never be disarmed, will always find a weapon, and will always harm people.
A SKIVING couple told last night how they claim £17,680 a year in benefits — and don’t even bother looking for work because it would leave them worse off.
Danny Creamer, 21, and Gina Allan, 18, spend each day watching their 47in flatscreen TV and smoking 40 cigarettes between them in their comfy two-bedroom flat.
It is all funded by the taxpayer, yet the couple say they deserve sympathy because they are “trapped”.
They even claim they are entitled to their generous handouts because their hard-working parents have been paying tax for years.
The couple, who have a four-month-old daughter Tullulah-Rose, say they can’t go out to work as they could not survive on less than their £1,473-a-month benefits.
The pair left school with no qualifications, and say there is no point looking for jobs because they will never be able to earn as much as they get in handouts.
Financially, they as individuals can see what’s in their best interest. It’s in their best interest to take from the taxpayer.
Gina admits: “We could easily get a job but why would we want to work — we would be worse off.”
They’re just a symptom. The disease is the governmental policies that enable and support them.
The blue is take-home wages after taxes, and the rest are handouts from various sources. There are greater rewards to less work. In Britain, it’s become so bad that there are greater rewards for no work at all.
The welfare-taker is just exploiting a system that’s set up for exploitation. It works the same in the US. The working stiff is busting her butt for 8-10 hours a day, while the welfare-taker is at home on his butt playing Xbox for 8-10 hours a day, then going out to party at night. He doesn’t have bills to worry about, as they’re all paid for by people who are working. She does have to worry about bills. He has an entire political party dedicated to telling him that he’s downtrodden and oppressed, and that only they, who give him free stuff, will help him. She’s got a choice between two parties – one that says they support her, but that takes her money and gives it to the welfare-taker, and the other that “compromises” because they don’t want to look like meanies… and so mostly does the same thing.
The welfare-taker (or zero-liability voter, as Andrew Wilkow likes to call them) is voting himself largesse from the public treasury, and one party wholly supports him – because they know they have his vote for as long as they give him plunder from other citizens. The working stiff has her tax money diverted from legitimate functions of government (national defense, post roads, etc.) and sent to the welfare-taker.
At some point, solely looking at the bottom line, it becomes clear that one is the winner – having their life provided for by the state, and one is the loser – being taxed by the state to provide for others they have no obligation to. In the long run, the system implodes. In the short term, the politician who provides welfare is the one who gets benefits – being able to demonize those who oppose welfare as “heartless”, directly giving handouts to people to pay for support, and they get the constant reassurance that their meddling is “necessary” because they are the only ones who can “save” the little people. It’s Munchausen by proxy on a massive scale. And it serves the interest of the politicians’ Curley Effect.
In the last few years, there’s been some discussion of how an increasingly progressive statist government can exercise massive authority over citizens. Something that comes up every so often, especially when discussing FDR and/or liberal fascists in general is the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Over this summer, I visited one of the remaining camp sites, which was a rather surreal experience. I called a few friends from the site of an American concentration camp and mentioned how wholly bizarre of a feeling it was to be standing where once around 11,000 people were imprisoned by their own government on suspicions based almost exclusively on ethnic background, deprived of rights and property solely because the government said so.
The Heart Mountain internment camp is located in northwestern Wyoming, and in 1942 would’ve been much more the middle of nowhere than it is now. It’s far, far off the beaten path, and now out of sight and out of mind for most people. And then there’s that saying about those who forget history…
Note that construction began in June 1942 and by August 1942 the first citizens were interned in the camp.
Try rereading that last sentence again.
It’s important to note that it is a concentration camp. It’s often referred to as an “internment” or “relocation” camp because the historical meaning of concentration camp has been almost completely dominated by those used by America’s enemies in WWII, and is considered interchangeable with death camp.
It is quite eerie how the structures that remain standing look very similar to those vastly more lethal camps on the other side of the planet, except these camps in the US are almost totally forgotten.
During the last week or so, SiriusXM Patriot Channel host Andrew Wilkow has been using internment of Japanese Americans as historical example of what a democracy that overrides the rules of a republic can do; of how a majority of 51% can be a tyranny of 51%. I’d been planning a post for a while, but hearing it mentioned a few times in the last week finally got me to dig up the pictures.
The Heart Mountain Foundation has a website and museum about the camp. They were closed when I got there, but it was a lot more haunting to walk around empty grounds of a camp as the sun was going down than it would’ve been to just visit a museum.
Children of the Revolution
China’s ‘princelings,’ the offspring of the communist party elite, are embracing the trappings of wealth and privilege—raising uncomfortable questions for their elders.
By JEREMY PAGE
One evening early this year, a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China’s top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo.
Bo Guagua, 23, was expected. He had a dinner appointment with a daughter of the then-ambassador, Jon Huntsman.
The car, though, was a surprise. The driver’s father, Bo Xilai, was in the midst of a controversial campaign to revive the spirit of Mao Zedong through mass renditions of old revolutionary anthems, known as “red singing.” He had ordered students and officials to work stints on farms to reconnect with the countryside. His son, meanwhile, was driving a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and as red as the Chinese flag, in a country where the average household income last year was about $3,300.
The episode, related by several people familiar with it, is symptomatic of a challenge facing the Chinese Communist Party as it tries to maintain its legitimacy in an increasingly diverse, well-informed and demanding society. The offspring of party leaders, often called “princelings,” are becoming more conspicuous, through both their expanding business interests and their evident appetite for luxury, at a time when public anger is rising over reports of official corruption and abuse of power.
State-controlled media portray China’s leaders as living by the austere Communist values they publicly espouse. But as scions of the political aristocracy carve out lucrative roles in business and embrace the trappings of wealth, their increasingly high profile is raising uncomfortable questions for a party that justifies its monopoly on power by pointing to its origins as a movement of workers and peasants.
SiriusXM conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow has a phrase that he uses that applies quite well here:
Socialism is for the people, not the socialist.
What it means is that the socialist who rules will live how he likes, enjoying the trappings of being the ruling class (since he is), and that the people will have their wealth redistributed. Of course the socialist will have to take the people’s money in order to finance his own way of life, and no cost is too high, as the socialist is there to serve the people – and the people would of course want the socialist to have anything he wishes at their expense, so he can keep providing them with the glorious utopia he promises.
Rife’s rearry rough at the top for those tasked with running sociarist workers’ paradises, no matter if they’re Chinese, American, or North Korean.
Conservative talk SiriusXM radio host Andrew Wilkow has a phrase he likes to use when referring to people who receive more from the government than they pay in: zero-liability voters. It applies to those 50-something percent of people who either don’t pay taxes, or who receive back what they paid, or receive tax money to begin with.
It makes a direct, simple point, that’s easy to understand, and illustrates the stark difference between the taxpayer and the (another Wilkow term here) recipient class – those who receive more from government than they pay in. As everyone should know, government has no money of its own. The woman screaming for “Obama money” doesn’t realize that government has no money – the government only has the money that it taxes from the citizen (or in the old days, that it got from taxes and tariffs on imports, which is also from the citizen).
I don’t think there truly is such thing as a “zero-liability voter”. That makes it seem as though they get off free for ultimately destructive actions – which they don’t. It also doesn’t quite represent the loss that voter is in for when the bill they’re running up comes due.
Every voter who is on welfare is subject to the dictates of government. Every voter who is on disability or social security or otherwise receiving from the government, whether or not they put in originally, is subject to the dictates of the government. In that manner to begin with, they have some interest. The normal point about the zero-liability voter is that their interest is solely in granting themselves more benefits at the expense of productive members of society. This is fairly well true, but the recipient who keeps asking for more and more is ultimately liable to the economy and to the markets. 51% can vote to confiscate the rest of the 49%’s wealth, but when there is no more, they are still ultimately liable. When economic ruin in Greece comes to bear, they ultimately pay for their recipient status.
The grasshopper can get welfare from the ant, but when winter comes and the ant can’t eat, no one can.
That’s a little bit long-term to look at for the average short-sighted welfare schlub. So functionally, the zero-liability voter still exists in the short term, except…
There are costs which have an effect on everyone. Gas is a simple example. If a welfare recipient votes for someone whose policies continue to increase costs of gasoline and diesel fuel, it increases the costs of everything moved by truck, boat, barge, or plane. Which is pretty much everything – unless you’re buying from the Amish.
Been spending most our lives living in an Amish Paradise...
If you’re a welfare recipient who’s getting $500/week, your $500 isn’t going to go as far when the products you buy, shipped by truck, go up 30%. You can vote yourself more money, but even that takes time – and in the meantime, poor decisions are hitting your fixed pocketbook. If you actually try to do something while you’re on welfare, like take care of your children, you’ll see your dollar not go as far – milk and diapers for your kids will go up, and your check will stay the same for a long while. Even if you’re buying everything at party stores – heck, especially if you’re from a locale where the only way to shop is buying things at party stores – your dollar won’t go as far.
The zero-liability voter is ultimately liable for their voting decisions. They aren’t just redistributing wealth from rich to themselves, they’re voting for a system that penalizes success. Rather quickly, that comes back to haunt them in the form of lack of goods and services. The government may keep issuing them $500/week to be on welfare, but if the government’s monetary policies have reduced that dollar to a tenth of its original value, or if the government’s redistribution schemes have hurt businesses so that cost of living is dramatically increased, that $500 doesn’t go as far.
Beyond this, the taxes that government puts on businesses are ultimately paid by the consumer. To give an example, the government charges a “gas guzzler” tax on cars that get below a certain MPG rating.
See that window sticker? The business isn’t paying that $1300 – the customer is.
See those gas prices today? The business isn’t paying the 18c federal tax and the state tax that may go up to 45c more. The customer is.
These are just visible examples (though tax isn’t listed on gas, so it’s obfuscated). The average welfare recipient probably doesn’t plan on buying a new car, nor do they often even own a car. But the expenses paid in taxes are still passed onto them.
If bread, milk, beer and eggs that the welfare recipient does buy are subject to higher taxes, their $500 doesn’t go as far. If the state raises property taxes to try to cover the entitlements they hand out to the recipient class, the laundromat, tattoo parlor, barber shop, or corner store is going to have to raise their prices. If the state outspends itself and has to call on the fedgov for help, the bailout the feds give comes from other states being taxed. The higher tax in Kansas causes the beef producer to raise his prices, which means higher beef prices in Michigan. The higher tax in Florida causes the orange grower to raise his prices, which means higher orange juice prices in Massachussetts. The higher tax in Texas means the oil producer has to raise his prices, which means the fuel used to ship everything to Wisconsin costs more.
Every time taxes are raised, the business owner simply passes the costs on to the consumer. Businesses are run by revenue that they get from sales of goods or services. They don’t just have huge piles of money laying around.
It doesn't work this way, people.
To give an example, Ford doesn’t just have a pile of money to make cars. They have factories – the means of production, and they buy parts, then they assemble the cars, then they sell them. The cars, the parts, and the contracts on sales are all part of their revenue stream. They need money to buy parts, they need money to pay workers to assemble the cars, and they get the money to do those two things with the sales of the cars. They will have some money laying around, but it’s there to finance future expansions of business, or there to pay bonuses to employees, or to act as a war chest for acquisitions or to weather tough financial times. It isn’t just magically there.
And even if or when they do have money sitting around, they don’t use it to pay taxes – they raise the costs of their end products to make you pay for them.
Ultimately, even that $500/week welfare schlub is paying for it with reduced quality of living since that $500 won’t go as far.
Now, does the zero-liability voter think this through? No. Does the zero-liability voter have, as Joe Biden would say “skin in the game”? No. Does the zero-liability voter care? Probably not. Even though the zero-liability voter isn’t held accountable for their actions, as is Wilkow’s point, will that zero-liability voter ultimately be held accountable by the laws of economics? Absolutely.
As is evidenced in Greece and Wisconsin, and as has been evidenced throughout history, no amount of protesting, burning people alive, or stomping around with Che t-shirts and copies of Das Kapital is going to bring back prosperity. (Or honey… Their blog was written by Keynesians who believe in sacrifice.)
To finish this off, Milton Friedman’s points on the Power of the Market – Welfare:
ShortTimer
JBH
