Calls have rung out across the nation demanding gun control laws in a bid to curb violent crimes such as the recent series of mass shootings. Data, however, show that in states with higher percentages of households with at least one gun, crimes are not higher than in states with strict gun laws.
— Fox News: States with higher rate of gun ownership do not correlate with more gun murders, data show
While this particular report is very good at balancing numbers John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of More Guns, Less Crime points out that this report has the same failings as the anti-gun statistics. It is the problem of comparing two dissimilar locations with different CCW restrictions.
It is the same problem of comparing the UK to the US. The US is huge as compared to the UK. If you compare the UK to a single state of comparable area or comparable population you can get very different results, depending on which and where. England has a population of 56 million as of 2018, California has a population of 39 million. Comparing England to California is more reasonable than comparing England to these United States.
In addition, these United States have a much more heterogeneous mixture than many European countries. Until the recent influx of refugees most Scandinavian countries were very homogeneous. That is a statement of cultures, not of colors.
Lott’s prefered method of comparison is not to compare two different locations. It is just to easy to cherry pick to get the results you want. Instead he prefers to look at a single place as the laws change.
In addition he and most honest researchers look into controlling outside factors. Consider the situation where a state passes constitutional carry and at the same time decides on a catch and release policy for violent criminals. Or decides to release 100s of criminals from prison in order to keep them safe from a virus.
Which of those factors drives the rate of violence? Is it that there is suddenly more violent criminals on the streets? Is that there is suddenly no punishment for violent crime? Or is it that ordinary people can suddenly defend themselves?
At some point I’ll try and find the statistics on average number of crimes a violent criminal commits before they are incarcerated.
Right now Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh is on my less liked list. On the Bruen decision he wrote his own concurring opinion. In it he gave the left the anchors to hang gun control on. There are 80 pages in the opinion, most by Thomas. Amy said “We didn’t clarify this and we should have.” Alito said “The judges in disent aren’t practicing law, they’re practicing emotional blackmail.” And Kavanaugh…
First, the Court’s decision does not prohibit States from imposing licensing requirements for carrying a handgun for self-defense. In particular, the Court’s decision does not affect the existing licensing regimes—known as “shall-issue” regimes—that are employed in 43 States.
…or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
Adding to Thomas’s:
Consider, for example, Heller’s discussion of “longstanding” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” 554 U. S., at 626. Although the historical record yields relatively few 18th- and 19th-century “sensitive places” where weapons were altogether prohibited—e.g., legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses—we are also aware of no disputes regarding the lawfulness of such prohibitions. See D. Kopel & J. Greenlee, The “Sensitive Places” Doctrine, 13 Charleston L. Rev. 205, 229–236, 244–247 (2018); see also Brief for Independent Institute as Amicus Curiae 11–17. We therefore can assume it settled that these locations were “sensitive places” where arms carrying could be prohibited consistent with the Second Amendment. And courts can use analogies to those historical regulations of “sensitive places” to determine that modern regulations prohibiting the carry of firearms in new and analogous sensitive places are constitutionally permissible.
From this we knew what was going to happen. The second amendment infringers were going to paper cut the right to its death.
And being cheaters they have to cheat.
According to Minority Leader Willam A. Barclay of the New York State Assembly office, the bill that the Governor wants them to vote on has not been given to them as of 1600 on June 30th. They have no idea when they will have a copy of the text of the bill. There is nothing filed at this point.
It sounds more and more like the S.A.F.E. act. It will be passed at midnight before anybody can actually comment on the bill. As normally a politician won’t accept comments on a bill for which there is no text.
First they are going to extend “sensitive” places to include government buildings, hospitals, schools, public transits, and places where children gather, bars. (My original source had more listed). The thing to note about these sorts of sensitive places is that there are likely to be a radius around them which is considered to be part of the sensitive location).
Thus it is likely that “public transport” will mean buses, subways, trains, as well as bus stations, train stations, subway stations, and bus stops. Consider a simple 100ft limit. This means that every bus stop in NYC now has a 100ft no-go zone around it. It might mean that as a bus moves through the streets it also has a 100ft radius. You are driving down the street, minding your own business and drive pass a playground and suddenly you are breaking the law. It could mean that all of central park is a no-go zone.
Without stepping over the line of making all of NYC a sensitive place, it could make it so that there are so many no-go zones that it is impossible to go anywhere without intruding into one of these places.
In addition they are looking at including 15 hours of in-person range time. One version I read had it “Must pass the same training in firearms as law enforcement.” Given that certified instructors are not cheap this will be expensive. In talking to one range owner it will cost you two boxes of ammo plus $100 for an hour of range time with him as an instructor. It looks to me as if the cost for 15 hours of training will run well over $500, not counting ammo.
Side note, I don’t like talking to NYC people. They have an entirely different way of talking to people which starts with not answering the question asked, assuming you are a dolt and then telling you what you have to do. This owner includes instructions on how to clean your gun. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was sitting next to more firepower than anybody outside of criminals and Law Enforcement has in NYC. I.e. I have more than one firearm.
The biggest difference is that NY State is going to declare all private businesses as gun free zones without an explicit concealed carry permitted here signage. In reasonable states an owner can post a No Guns sign. In most states the signage is very explicit as to size, shape and visibility. This is so some nasty can’t put a post-it note up with a hand drawn “no guns allowed” and then bust a legal gun owner that didn’t see the sign.
In some states, such as mine, a No Guns Allowed is not prohibitive. You can still carry in those locations. The business can ask you to leave if they see the firearm but it isn’t a real issue. I’ve yet to see a no guns sign outside of hospitals and clinics. Which is sometimes funny when I forget I’m carrying and they ask me to take my coat off so they can take my blood pressure.
The good news is that most state level second amendment organizations as well as the FPC and other national organizations have a number of lawsuits teed up for these actions. The 9th circuit remanding cases based on Bruen is a good sign. I’m hoping that we’ll see the lower courts just hammering these laws so that we don’t even have to wait for a circuit court to hear the case.
The district court’s judgment is vacated, and this case is remanded to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. ____(2022).
This case is about Ventura County closing gun shops, ammunition shops and firing ranges during the panic. Plaintiffs claimed a violation of their Second Amendment rights.
It also looks like Jones v. Bonta is being remanded as well. This is the California assault weapons ban. I can’t find this on the courts webpage but it seems to have been mentioned in a couple of different trustworth places.
It looks like there are a number of lawsuits that are dropping now that Bruen has been decided. We are living in interesting times.
You can tell the size of the bubble by the word games people play. In the state of Hawaii it is nearly impossible to get a CCW and it is illegal to open carry unless hunting.
A recent 9th circuit court case found that this was constitutional after the same 9th circuit found that another law was constitutional only because a state offered one of open or concealed carry.
The gist of the cases was the infringing law was constitutional because the state allowed concealed carry via a may issue process. Banning all open carry was acceptable. Hawaii was shown to have an effectively no issue because of how difficult it was to get permits to carry a firearm.
Hawaii is also one of the states that requires an ordinary citizen to get government permission before exercising their second amendment guarantees.
Bruen was about may issue with regard to concealed carry. The opinion mentioned but was not answering open carry issues.
According to Hawaii News Now, Bruen was about open carry. Interesting.
They are so limited in their thinking about the open door to their cage that they haven’t figured out how Bruen is going to effect their gun laws.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on a separate lawsuit by a Big Island resident George Young Jr. that seeks to overturn Hawaii’s restrictions on concealed weapons removing that exceptional case rule from the statute.
…
Even if Young is successful, they will still face an uphill battle to fundamentally change how Hawaii regulates firearms across the state.
If that rule is struck down, state lawmakers say they’re already working on legislation that would shore up Hawaii’s gun laws, including rules that would make anyone applying for an open or concealed carry permit to go through the same firearms training that HPD officers go through.
— Hawaii News Now: Fate of Hawaii’s gun laws still unclear following Supreme Court’s open carry ruling
I have a suggestion for the law makers in the state of Hawaii, how about just follow the Constitution, follow the law.
We live in a world where perceptions are more powerful than reality, more powerful than facts, more powerful than what we know to be true.
As an example, we have a perception of how the war in Ukraine is going. We have no idea of the reality. One authority I trust pointed out that while there were lots and lots of videos of Russian tanks being hit we had very few BDAs for those hits. And he pointed out that in some cases the tank just drove away, unharmed.
We just don’t know. What I do know is that Ukraine has won the perception war. I perceive them as winning most encounters and the Russians doing poorly. Ukraine won the social media war.
There was a time when everybody knew that guns were tools. You had them because you hunted. You had them because daddy brought it back from the war. You had them because you wanted protection.
Then the war on guns started. I don’t know if it was a bunch of goody-two-shoes doing what they thought was right. I don’t know if it was a couple of politicians that found a cause they could run on. I don’t know if it was nefarious groups, working in dark backrooms in the dead of night to destroy my country.
Maybe it was all of the above.
Regardless, the assault on guns began. We saw the open salvo in the 1930s. Prohibition created a huge blackmarket with no sectioned law enforcement. I.e. the cops would not pursue and punish criminals that robbed people, some themselves criminals, selling alcohol. This lead to vigilantism, order by private security forces. In other words, the gangs hired “enforcement” to retaliate or rob or destroy their competitors.
This is the way of the blackmarket. In some foreign blackmarkets the owners of the market place provide security in exchange for the vendors paying for the privilege to vend. Heck, we see that at things like Ren Faires. There will be security provided by the faire that makes sure that people aren’t robbing patrons, vendors or performers. Security will hold ne’er-do-wells until they can be turned over to actual law enforcement.
Prohibition brought huge amounts of money into the underground economy with a running battle between gangs, law enforcement, and citizens.
When it was the case that you could make 50 gallons of bathtub gin by soaking juniper berries with denatured (poisoned) alcohol. That 50 gals could be sold for more profit than doing a week of hard labor. And letting that alcohol, berries and water sit in a large jar for a few weeks isn’t really working.
This meant that the enforcement of the blackmarket became extremely violent. Some of it was behind the scenes. When rival gangs destroyed a warehouse or hijacked a load, the citizen buyer didn’t notice. Unless they didn’t get their booze. Unfortunately, some of that did spill out into the streets, into the papers.
When it spilled into the papers the bleeding lead. The stories were told, not of criminal gangs murdering each other, but of exciting and scary gun battles with Tommy Guns.
Nobody but bad guys ever used Tommy Guns. This was true only because most people with guns didn’t want to dump hundreds of rounds down range in a pray and spray method. Once it was obvious that Tommy Guns were scary, the assault weapon of their day, they started using Tommy Guns. Also used were BARs. Excessive fire power was the name of the game.
Out of this was born the perception that machine guns were to dangerous for normal people and so they should be limited to the elite/rich, the government, and criminals. The NFA of 1934 was born. Out of the NFA we had to other items that were demonized until they to were perceived as to evil for normal people. The sawed off shotgun and the silencer.
Originally the NFA was going to apply to pistols but not rifles. This brought into existence an entirely new classification of firearms, the short barreled rifle. This was to keep people from having a pistol with a stock added to it from claiming it was a rifle.
In the end pistols were not part of the NFA. But short barreled rifles stayed.
The perception was that the government had dones something about those evil evil criminals by making them double criminals for having NFA weapons. Perception was king.
The reality was that having an unregistered machine gun, SBS, SBR or suppressor was no big deal. If you were caught with an NFA item without the tax stamp you were told you had to register it and pay your tax. This was the state of the law for many many years.
This was the situation until 1963. The perception was that the government had solved the gun issue by the creation of the NFA. It didn’t matter that anybody could still buy NFA items, they just had to pay the transfer tax. In the meantime SCOTUS had heard the Miller case. Nobody testified on behalf of Miller, the government lied, and SCOTUS found the NFA to be constitutional, because shotguns were not used by the military or militia.
In 1963 JFK was assassinated. Guns were back in the news. While some communist asshole had shot the president, the media also played up how easy it was for him to get a gun.
The US Postal Service just delivered it to him. Ad for surplus rifles from 1961
The papers played up how horrible it was that somebody was able to purchase a sniper rifle via mail order, the Internet of the day. Up in arms they demanded that the government “do something” about the evil guns.
The result was the 1964 GCA. This is the legislation that created Federal Firearm License(FFL). These were the only people that were allowed to buy, sell, import, or manufacture firearms. It was the law that mandated serial numbers and other markings. It brought an end to the mail order sales of firearms.
Well sort of… What happened was that those people that actually wanted to buy and sell guns without having pay a third party for a transfer just got their own FFL. It was relatively safe as it didn’t grant the same sort of right to inspect as today’s FFL does. With an FFL of your own you could still mail order directly. More importantly it created the first definition of prohibited person.
Perceptions were that the government had saved us from the evil gun. No longer would people be able to just mail order a gun and go shooting people and bad people couldn’t buy guns any more.
In 1974 Handgun Control, Inc came into existence. Their stated goal was to ban all handguns. They advocated for this, not making much headway at the federal level but getting more and more state gun control bans in place. They maintained their focus on handguns through this period of time.
In 1982 the abuses of the ATF had gotten the attention of congress and in particular the Senate subcommittee on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
The_Right_to_Keep_and_Bear_Arms Report of the subcommittee on the constitution of the committee on the judiciary united states senate ninety-seventh congress second session.
The report went on to say that 75% of all ATF prosecutions “were aimed at ordinary citizens who had neither criminal intent nor knowledge, but were enticed by agents into unknowing technical violations.” The GCA plus NFA and malicious ATF agents meant that a person could be prosecuted for giving out information on how an NFA item was created. So answering an undercover ATF agents question about the difference(s) between an AR-15 and an M-16 could get you arrested and thrown in prison.
The bill as originally proposed did much to curb the ATF crap. It is where we got the ability to transport firearms through gun unfriendly states. There are states in the north east where you can’t travel to other parts of the country without passing through New York. Since New York has bans on certain classes of firearms you can be found in violation of state laws. The Firearm Owners Protection Act addressed these problems.
As always, Democrats have to cheat. Rep William Hughes, D-NJ tried to sink the bill by adding a “poison pill”. In this case the amendment would ban the sale of newly manufactured machine guns to normal people. The bill passed with the Hughes amendment. As of May of 1985 it became illegal to manufacture machine guns for your own use or to purchase a machine gun manufactured after May of 1985.
The perception was that the country as a whole was no safer, because no more evil machine guns were making their way into the hands of ordinary citizens. The Elites/rich, law enforcement, the government, and criminals continued to buy whatever machine guns they wanted.
Perception was that the government had done something, for the safety of the people.
In 1981 some asshole attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. This is part of the reason for the attention on gun rights in 1985.
During the assassination attempt, James Brady, the White House press secretary for Reagan was shot in the head. Up until he suffered traumatic brain injury Brady was a staunch Republican. Once he was no longer able to speak and do for himself his spouse turned him into a Democrat advocating for gun control.
Handgun Control, Inc. teamed up with the Brady people and pushed for the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
We now have that change in perception. It is no longer “violence” it is “handgun violence”, as if violence with a gun is somehow worse than other sorts of violence. Somehow getting beaten to death with a baseball bat is less violent than being murdered with a handgun.
The Brady Act changed the definition of a prohibited person and created the requirement of a background check prior to taking possession of a firearm. The infamous Form-4473. The original law was intended to create a defacto waiting period. The waiting period being defined as “when the government gets around to granting permission.” The NRA decided the bill was going to pass and changed their effort to get the “instant” in the background check. This resulted in limiting the amount of time that a person could be forced to wait.
Once the NICS system was up and running we got to the point where we can get approval, in most cases, while waiting at the FFL. If more research is required, the government only has three days to make their final decision. If it takes longer than that and they do decide to deny, the government has to go recover the firearm from the purchaser, it is not the FFL’s responsibility.
The Brady Bill went into effect in 1994.
The perception was that the government had done something and no more crazy people would get guns.
The media then pivoted to a new scary thing, the evil rifle. Well it turns out that there weren’t any evil rifles. So they made up a new term, “Assault Rifle.” An assault rifle, as a made up term, was perfect. It meant exactly what the person hearing or saying it meant it to mean, no more, no less. Even if nobody actually knew what it meant.
This helped push the Assault Weapons Ban. It banned a number of rifles by name and still more by feature. Thus my AR-15 pattern rifle of this time period does not have a flash hider. I didn’t even understand that when I originally purchased it.
In 1999, in the middle of the AWB, some assholes went on a murder spree at Columbine High School. Proving that no gun control law has ever stopped somebody with evil in their heart.
At this point the perception went into Black Gun Evil.
At a time when the number of deaths by rifle was and still is under 500/year, the AR-15 is now considered the deadliest of weapons. The media has continued to push this fiction. No matter how many times it is shown that this is not the case, the media continues to paint the AR-15 as the weapon of choice of mass murders.
Which leads us to the dumbest things said on the view in the last week.
Behar read the comments made by Huckabee Sanders while celebrating her win in the Arkansas primary, where she is running for governor. Sanders said, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.”
Whoopi Goldberg was left nearly speechless, simply saying, “That is really, you know…” and shaking her head while the hosts and audience were all shocked.
Sunny Hostin added, “I heard that and that was crazy.” Behar went even further blasting Sanders saying, “How stupid is she? Come on.”
The facts are that children in classrooms are extremely safe from shooters. We invest huge amounts of time and money into hardening schools. When there is a failure, it makes the news in big ways and the perception grows of how deadly the AR-15 is.
There seems to be an average of around 55 violent deaths at schools per year. That includes students, staff and other school-associated people. It includes violent deaths by any means. There are 49.4 million K-12 students in the US. Or 0.11 deaths per 100,000 students.
From MarketWatch comes a story reporting on how the streets are going to run red with blood, now that Bruen says that just any old person can have a CCW.
A new study finds concealed-carry laws lead to a boost in gun crime by between 29% and 32%, mostly by triggering a surge in gun theft.
The study comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down New York’s attempt to limit the ability to carry a gun outside their homes. That ruling was seen as particularly significant as other states have sought to restrict concealed-carry permits.
Oh, it isn’t people being shot. It is guns being stolen.
They study looked at 47 cities from 1979 through 2019. They then compare, via differential timing, crime.
It seems that the problem is that those CCW holders are having their guns taken. Opps, it doesn’t say that. It just says that more guns are stolen in states where CCW is allowed. Well in cities in states where CCW is allowed.
It is likely that what happened is that there were indeed more guns available to be stolen. This increases the number of times that guns are stolen. It is also likely that people were more willing to report stolen guns once it was legal for them to actually have them.
It is my opinion that part of it is the sensative places issue. If you are trying to follow the law and you are coming to a place where carry is prohibited, you have to do something with your firearm. It is unfortunately true that too many guns are left loose in locked cars. Waiting to be taken.
The article strongly suggests that the person that was just ripped off, having had hundreds of dollars worth of gun(s) taken from him should be sent to jail for “negligent gun practices” which includes leaving firearms in cars.
All in all it is an interesting read. Give them the click and read it yourself. Maybe you can parse it better than I.
Over the course of the last few years there have been more and more calls to remove or lower standards. The reason most often given is that the results of standards is not equitable.
The math goes something like this. If you have a 1000 people/institutions being tested and the break down of that population is 597 Pink, 186 Blue, 126 Cyan, 59 Green and 32 purple and you give a standardized test that is suppose to select the 100 best you would expect to get 60 Pink, 19 Blue, 13 Cyan, 6 Green and 2 purple.
If that standardized test instead gives you 65 Pink, 16 Blue, 5 Cyan, 9 Green and 2 purple something is wrong.
This is the problem. What happens if the Pink group consistently scores better than expected and the Green group as well. Regardless of the sample size or when the sample is picked in less random ways. What does it mean when the sample is skewed to have more Cyan and less Pink and still the Pink dominate those being chosen as best?
What does it mean?
In one sample, of nearly 400, there were 35 Pink, 364 Cyan, 1 purple. When standards were used to select “best” 29 Pink, 1 Cyan were picked as “best”.
Is the test biased to the Pink group?
Well the answer is often times “yes, it is biased.” But not based on color. It is based on objective measurements. It turns out that different groups value different things at different levels. Because of this differentiation different groups perform better when objectively measured.
Standards must be evaluated to see if they have a bias. If a test is asking about history and it focuses on the civil war students that live in the south are more likely to do better than people in the north. If on the other hand it focuses on the revolutionary war, people in the north are more likely to do better. Because of this, having tests with an unbalanced focus can result in unbalanced, biased, results.
What we know is that certain groups score better on standardized tests and when judged by objective standards. A standard that requires a certain number of pull ups in a given time, humping a certain amount of weight a specific distance or height will show a bias towards males over females.
Does this mean that females can’t meet those requirements? No, it doesn’t.
One of my younger friends was over along with his wife. His wife was in the US Army and was talking up how well they had done in PE and how much they could lift. This women was strong. She was in great shape. She is showing me her bicep development and is telling me to squeeze it to see just how strong she was.
I did. I’m old. I’m fat. I’m out of shape. I did squeeze. And she was on her knees squealing in pain. My hand grip is a little more than she expected. I knew this. So the first squeeze was gentle. She demanded that I actually squeeze. Nobody had ever actually done that to her. I’m an ass. I know this too. I showed her that there was a difference.
She was by and far the most physically fit and strong woman I’ve ever met. She was the best in her unit, all females. She looked down at the “soft bodies” of the other women in her unit that didn’t even try to meet male standards. She still wasn’t as strong as an old man. (Ok, sneaky old man, I do know where all those pressure points are.)
Unfortunately, bias is sometimes required. If what you are looking for is the best students you are going to be looking for students with good scores in standardized tests as well as good grades. If one group doesn’t perform as well as another group they are not going to be represented within the selected group at the same rate as in the applicants or population at large.
Consider Nobel prizes, Israel has 12(13?), Egypt which is larger in size and population has 4, Turkey 2, Iraq 1, Iran 1, Palestine 1, Yemen 1. 12 v. 10? Why? Is there discrimination based on religion for Nobel prizes? Or is there a cultural difference?
Source: Nobel Prize Winners By Country Wikipedia claims Isreal has 13, WorldAtlas says 12.
Should Israel have been denied Nobel prizes until the Muslim countries have received their “fair share” of Nobel prizes?
This has moved into education in a huge way. I’ve watched our local gifted and talented program be destroyed. It doesn’t exist any longer as it wasn’t fair. Having all those smart kids, all from the same cultural group be pulled out of class harmed those that didn’t meet the standards. They modified the standards three or four times and kept ending up with the same group of smart kids. Until they removed standards and it was “who wants to join this club?”
We saw it when magnet schools stopped using standardized criteria and suddenly had students that were just not as good.
Now we have this from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Philadelphia school board Thursday night began a process to pull the charters of three schools it cited for academic, operational, and financial flaws.
…
They accused the district of using an unfair evaluation process that had resulted in the closures of a disproportionate number of Black-led charters — both Laboratory and Southwest Leadership Academy have Black leaders — and board members of ignoring the needs of Black communities.
— Philly board moves to close 3 charters amid allegations of bias against Black-led schools
Once again, standards are under attack as being racist. We didn’t get equality of outcome so the standards used must be biased.
This totally ignores the possibility that it could be something else. Especially as there are operational and financial flaws listed.
How come the other charter schools can meet the standards but these schools can’t?
We don’t know, it is just easier to scream “RACIST!” and leave it at that.
Joe climbed into a B-17 flying fortress. He moved to the bombardiers position and went through his part of preflight.
The signal is given and the airplane starts to taxi. Soon it is in position for roll out and take off. Joe tenses as he starts another flight over enemy territory.
His air craft joins up with others and soon the sky is filled with 100s of aircraft. Soon they are over the channel and shortly thereafter they pass over the coast heading towards Germany. Huge contrails tell the enemy exactly where they are. 88mm AA open up and soon have the altitude. Bombers are flying into flack and flack is hitting different bombers.
Planes are exploding or damaged to the point they can no longer fly.
JOe clutches his hands tightly, wishing he could wipe the sweat from his palms. His gear stops him. It is cold at altitude and yet he sweats and wishes he was as brave as the other men in the plane with him
The flack comes closer, but they push on. They have over an hour to go before they reach the target yet the Germans are throwing everything at them. He prays that they will make it home again.
There is a sound of a huge explosion and the plane seems to stop for a second in midair. Joe feels something hit him on the back and turns to see what is left of his friend sitting in the navigators position, his chest missing, splattered over Joe and the cabin.
The left engine is out. The co-pilot orders everybody to bail out. Joe can’t get to his exit without pushing his friends body out first. He watches it tumble downwards, he counts chutes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… His friend makes eight and he is about to go up when he sees a body falling, no chute. That’s 9. Joe forces himself out of the dying aircraft.
The wind whips past, tearing at him. He opens his chute and floats towards the ground. It is quiet while above him the ugly black explosions continues. More of his friends dying. More aircraft falling from the sky.
The ground rushes up to meet him and he lands. There is a terrible pain as he hits. His right hip is shattered. He passes out.
He wakes as he is carried into the hospital. Not a POW camp or a POW hospital. The faces looking down at him speak in German.
Joe is one of the lucky ones. He lives. A German found him and instead of turning him in to the army, he got Joe to the hospital. WHere the POW camp would have cut his leg off and Joe would have likely died, the doctors operate and save the leg. They have to fuse the hip.
At the end of the war, Joe is returned to America. He becomes a high school teacher and coach. He gets into local politics and is elected to mayor. He writes a book.
He interviewed ever survivor that he could find. His book is full of the heroes of that day. And he names them. All of them did so much more than Joe.
Joe was a hero. He was my great uncle. He never considered himself a hero. Heroes were what those other people did. He spoke to me only once of that day. And when his tears filled his eyes his sister in law stopped him. My mother stopped me for asking and listening.
Joe, the hero, never finished his own story. Another veteran that knew that the horrors of war were not for the gentle folk that stayed behind.
I grieved for my uncle Joe that day. I grieve for him today as I write this.
The gist of NYSR&B v. Bruen was that the requirement to show good cause in order to get a CCW permit was unconstitutional.
Of course this lead to weeping and rending of clothing as the left bemoans the streets of NY, MA, NJ, MD, HI, and CA are now going to run red with blood as minor disagreements turn into gun battles.
This never happens. This is the same predictions that we heard in Florida when they became a “Shall Issue” state. It is the same story of impending woe that we heard when any state went “Shall Issue” or even “May Issue” from “No Issue” and again when states went to constitutional carry.
Everytime we get more of our gun rights back, the left screams that the children are going to die and the streets will run red with blood. They wait for the lunatic to kill and then pounce. We watch as the work through dozens of “mass shootings” and “random gun violence” until they get one that sticks.
The left firmly believes that any law or decision that goes their way is set in stone from that point forward and that any law or decision they disapprove of can be fought. “We are going to keep holding votes on the proposal until it passes!” followed by “It is the law! You can’t disagree with it!”
Since they lost the “good cause” provisions of their may issue scheme they are now moving forward with a requirement of “good moral character”. Another euphemism for “may issue.” Who judges good moral character? The government.
Examples given include being arrested. This means that if there is a domestic dispute and the cops arrest both parties or arrest the wrong person and then release that person with out charges, OR if the person goes to court where they are found not guilty, they are still prohibited from getting government permission to exercise their rights.
Another term that is being used is “suitability”. Which means whatever the grantor wants it to mean. I expect we’ll see dozens of cases over the next few years where people apply and are denied based on moral or suitability grounds.
As I said to my Senators “Why do you have ‘work around’ the second amendment? Why can’t you just follow what it says?”
