No, not that one about the birds and the bees, the one about firearm safety.

In the best of all worlds, every child would be exposed to gun safety from a very early age with refresher courses throughout their years. If adults have to have mandatory yearly classes on how to handle classified materials, then it makes sense that children will need refresher courses as well.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with firearms training for children starts with Eddie Eagle style instructions.

• Stop!
• Don’t Touch!
• Run Away
• Tell A Grown-up

Besides instructions on what to do if your child finds a gun, I also teach the four safety rules.

1. Treat every firearm as loaded until you have personally verified that it is unloaded
2. Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy, even if you have personally verified that it is unloaded
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
4. Always identify your target, and what is beyond it

This is what I taught my children.

There was one other rule, if they ever wanted to see or handle one of my firearms I would stop what I was doing and bring the firearm to them. And we would then safely examine that firearm.

This last is designed to remove the curiosity part of firearms. If a firearm is something that is hidden in your sock drawer, you can darn well be sure that your kids have already found it. If it is a “secret” and “dirty” then it is the case that they will want to play with it.

Remove the temptation by giving them good instructions and guidance and then be willing to make removing their curiosity a priority for yourself.

When I got my pistol safe I had 2 of my own children living with me and 3 step children. I gathered all five of them and showed them the box. I then put a $50 bill in the box and put the box on the coffee table. I told them that if they could get the box open without damaging the pistol safe in the next 48 hours that the $50 would be theirs. They failed and I got to keep the money.

It also meant that they had no interest in trying to open the pistol safe, if they wanted to see anything in it, all they had to do is ask. And all they would be was frustrated if they just tried to open the safe.

While my children were younger and while my grandchild visited, all of my firearms were keep under lock and key. Since my youngest children are “old enough” and my grandchild doesn’t visit very often, like once every couple of years, I no longer have that always locked requirement.

This means that I can have some firearms out of the safes and displayed.

And then something weird happened, my son brought his girlfriend over.

And this lead to The Talk

I’m not particularly concerned about my son over at her house. He is anti-alcohol and anti-drugs, and firearm safe. Her parents are watchful so I really don’t have a concern.

On the other hand, she is now coming over here and I just put up a display stand for an Mrs. Pink, the AR-15 in our bedroom. Son and GF are put in our bedroom as it is downstairs where we can keep an eye on them for those pesky teenage hormone issues.

But that means she is in the same room as a rifle that is displayed.

So I took the two of them to the table and gave her The Talk. We went over the four firearm safety rules. We went over them until she could repeat them correctly.

I demonstrated that you can drop the magazine from a firearm and it is still loaded.

That first rule is so very difficult for most people. “Treat every gun as if it is loaded…” is hard. They “know” that it is unloaded. They just observed you unload it. You just showed them the empty chamber. Of course it is unloaded.

I broke my son of that by making my pistol go bang three times after he told me it was unloaded.

Once when he assumed I had brought it to the range unloaded, when it was hot.

The second was when I dropped the magazine and showed him all the cartridges in the mag.

The third was after the first two and I had shown him how to verify that a semi-automatic pistol was unloaded. I dropped the slide, asked him if it was loaded, he said it was unloaded. I pointed it down range and pulled the trigger to a bang.

I had cheated, thank you Lazarus Long, I had palmed a round into the chamber after he had verified that it was empty.

From that day forward he has always treated a firearm as being loaded.

It’s an awkward conversation, but you have to talk to other parents about guns, experts say is an okay article from CNN.

The problem is that it has just enough “off” that it makes it a hard read, and it has that leftist “I know better than you” attitude in it.

The author got her story from talking to Johanna Thomas, a member of Moms Demand. So you can expect it to go sideways from the start.

The first thing that Johanna does is to assume that she has the right to demand to know if the house her kid is visiting is gun free. This is because she has not trained her child to be safe around firearms. If her kid was trustworthy, then there wouldn’t be any issues as her kid isn’t going to pick up a firearm that they find.

Of course they have to have the irresponsible gun owner “The girls mother told [Johanna] that the family didn’t have any [guns] in the home but did have one in the car that was kept under a seat”.

Now I have had to put a firearm under the seat a couple of times. When there was nobody else in the vehicle, the vehicle was going to be locked and I had to go into a government mandated legal gun free zone. I know people that commonly place their carry weapon under the seat when they have to go into places that are gun unfriendly.

I don’t know any responsible gun owner that just leaves their gun rattling around loose under their seat.

I won’t give Everytown the link but they have a program that they call “S.M.A.R.T.”

• Secure all guns in your home and vehicles
• Model responsible behavior around guns
• Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes
• Recognize the role of guns in suicide
• Tell your peers to be S.M.A.R.T

As always, the leftist has decided it is YOUR responsibility to keep her children safe. My firearms are secured. I believe that Everytown would have a cow because I don’t have all of my firearms disabled with ammunition in a separate secure storage container.

I do model responsible behavior around firearms.

And the only times I ask about other people’s firearms is in the context of “what cool guns can we shoot?”

The S.M.A.R.T. program is all about intruding into the lives of others and subtle painting all gun owners as dangerous.

Of course there has to be scare numbers “In a five year period leading up to 2021, there were 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18”. Hmm, that’s 414 unintentional shootings per year, on average. According to the CDC there were 53,220 deaths caused by conditions originating in the perinatal period, 27,734 accidental deaths, 8,526 assault(homicides), 8,472 suicides, 7,714 by malignant neoplasms, 3,585 by heart disease, 2,024 by influenza and pneumonia, 1,395 by Septicemia, 1,393 by cerebrovascular diseases, 1,156 by chronic lower respiratory diseases, 824 by in situ neoplasms.

And finally we have 765 by unintentional gun shoot. Note that the “unintentional gun shoot” is reported out of Everytown, not from the CDC.

All of this means that there are many many more issues that lead to childhood deaths and injuries other than “unsecured firearms”.

The problem really is that every such unintentional death by gun of a child is horrific. As it is almost always preventable.

One of the common themes going through the gun rights infringement community is to treat firearm related violence as a health issue. We find many direct allegations of this. From people claiming we have an epidemic of “gun[related]-violence” to having the CDC study it as a health issue.

Language also plays a part in it.

Talking about gun safety when it comes to your kids and community doesn’t need to be a political issue, said Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. It may feel uncomfortable, but the focus can stay on minimizing the risk of exposure.

Somehow there is a gun right infringement group at Johns Hopkins, a world renowned medical school, labeled “Bloomberg School of Public Health”. They talk about “minimizing the risk of exposure.” I’m very sorry, but I’ve never seen anybody die because they were “exposed” to a gun.

Then she goes and blows my mind by saying this:

“We can protect kids, we can reduce a lot of gun violence, just by normalizing the conversation around firearms,” Thomas said.

Then I realized that “normalizing the conversation around firearms” means her people getting to lecture us about how we should store our firearms. For them, guns should always be stored in a locked safe and unloaded. By that they mean with no loaded magazines as well.

As an aside, the State of Maryland considers a magazine with one round in it to be a “loaded firearm”.

Johanna then gives some manipulative language to use to get other parents to divulge if they have firearms. She makes it clear that the only way she thinks it is safe to store a firearm is in a locked safe, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate safe.

Yeah, just what you want to do when you hear an animal in your house (or on your porch), go to the rifle safe, unlock the safe, pull out the rifle, close and lock the safe, go to the ammo safe, unlock it. Take out a box of ammo, put rounds in to the magazine, ready your firearm and proceed.

No, I think I’ll use different methods.

Listen to J.Kb. talk about actually securing firearms. He has written a number of very good articles. Upto and including anchoring a job box to the floor of the garage and then storing firearms in that.

Of course we get to the final line:

In order for my child to come to your house, do you have a way you can secure those firearms that would be unloaded and locked in a safe?

“Do it my way or I will destroy your child’s friendship with my child.”

Hagar was asked to write about the duty to retreat and why so many on the left feel it should be a requirement. Her answer was something like “2 to center of mass” She does not believe in the duty to retreat and it is not a topic she engages in when with her more leftist friends. They find her opinion on self defense to be “right wingnut extremist”.

In the 90’s there was a story in the Maryland press. A young man and was going to jail for murder. The press played it up as a “good job” by the jury.

The facts of the case were:

• Young man was over at his girlfriend’s apartment
• Girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend showed up at the apartment
• Ex was told to leave
• Ex starts banging on the door trying to get in.
• Girlfriend calls 911
• Boyfriend announces that he is armed
• Ex breaks down the door and starts to enter
• Girlfriend and boyfriend retreat into the bedroom
• Ex breaks down that door
• Girlfriend is on the call to 911 the entire time.
• Boyfriend points gun at Ex and warns him to leave.
• Ex advances on them
• Boyfriend fires multiple rounds (but not too many)
• Ex gets “reach room temperature” achievement
• Police arrive.
• Police arrest boyfriend for murder

At trial the prosecution and defense get all of the above into evidence. The defense gets the additional information that they were in a second floor apartment (10 to 12 feet from bedroom window to the ground).

The prosecution argued that the couple had a duty to retreat because the drop from the bedroom window wasn’t that much, they could have escaped.

With jury instructions, the boyfriend was found guilty of first degree murder.

Maryland has no castle doctrine. In Maryland there is always a duty to retreat.

Most states have some sort of duty to retreat, with exceptions.

You have a duty to retreat in all cases. If you can retreat you must make every attempt to retreat as judged by Monday night quarterbacks. Maryland for example.

You have a duty to retreat if you can do so safely. With safety is in the eye of the prosecutor.

You have a duty to retreat everywhere except your own home when you have nowhere else to retreat within your home.

You have a duty to retreat everywhere except your own home.

You have a duty to retreat outside of your home except where you can not do it safely.

You have a duty to retreat except when you are legally allowed to be where you are doing what you are doing. “Stand your ground” type laws.

The leftist mindset on duty to retreat can be exemplified by opinions of the left after 9/11. The opinion pieces constantly harped on the fact that Bush did not order the 2nd, 3rd and 4th hijacked planes shot down. If he had just shot down those 3 planes he would have saved so many thousands of people.

When it was pointed out to them that if he had done that, the left would be screaming for his head as a murder because he couldn’t be sure those hijacked planes were really going to fly into other buildings.

It is the same mindset we hear from the left when the scream about a rape victim murdering her rapist. According to the left, the rape victim should have called the cops, the cops would have then arrested the rapist, and the rapist would have had a trial before a jury of his peers and if he was found guilty by the jury, then and only then could punishment be handed out. But not the death sentence.

Here is the thing that they don’t get, a jury has a very few tasks. Their primary task is to evaluate the evidence presented and decide on the facts of the case. Was a crime committed? Was this the person(s) that committed the crime within the definitions of the crime.

In order to reach those conclusions, the jury evaluates each piece of evidence to see if that evidence is believable and actually implicate the suspect. There isn’t much more a jury does.

When some animal has his cock in a woman and she is able to blow him away, there is no jury required. That is the person committing the crime. They are in fact committing a crime.

There is no need to ask the Jury, “is this the person that raped her?” That fact is easily determined at that instant.

In order to understand this mindset, you need to remember that to the left, the government is the answer. You are never as good at making a decision as the government.

They have this mindset because so many of those that are not NPCs truly believe in what passes for a heart that they know better than others. That their opinion is better than yours, in every case.

If a wild animal is attacking my child I’m going to shoot it dead. I don’t have to have the government give me permission, the animal is attacking my child. That makes it dangerous. That is the end of the discussion.

The left operates from the point that “you could be mistaken”

Worse, the left feels that there are excuses that mitigate the actions of dangerous animals.

In the novel, play and movie “Les Misérables” the “hero” is in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He excuses himself because he was hungry.

In San Francisco, heck in all of California, stealing less than $1000 worth of goods at one time is not a crime, because people were “shoplifting” in order to feed themselves and their poor hungry children. Would you really want a baby to go without diapers?

This is normal for them. When somebody does something wrong or evil, there is always a cause and that cause is never their own bad actions.

If a woman is being raped then the animal that is doing it that she shot and killed must have been driven to it. Did she bring it on herself? Was she being a tease? Always and forever it is victim blaming. If only she had not stopped to get cash out of the ATM he would still be alive. She didn’t have to shoot him.

When a young man was chased be a mentally deranged man that attempted to take his rifle from him. That young man shoot and killed that mentally deranged man. That child was found guilty in the court of leftist opinion. If he hadn’t been there two men would still be alive today. It is his fault.

If he hadn’t decided to play soldier and bring his assault weapon to a peaceful protest, those men would still be alive. He was looking to kill somebody when he brought a gun to a protest.

And because that young man fired those shoots, two men died, a third almost lost his life, and a forth man had his arm destroyed.

When everything is said and done, the left looks on an armed person as a person that has decided that they have the right to be judge, jury and executioner, all in one. They feel that you are not wise enough to make that determination. They feel that only the government should be allowed to make the decision and only the government should have the right to met out punishment.

You are the Jury as an armed person. You are making a judgement call. You are determining if there is cause for you to use deadly force. You are the Judge. You are deciding if the situation is within the legal boundaries that allow you to use deadly force. And you are the executioner. If you fire that shot you are either a good executioner or a poor one, but you have made the decision to kill another living animal.

If you haven’t looked into your soul and found peace within for making that decision, you might want to rethink carrying a firearm for self-defense.

Be well out there. Be safe.

At this time there are dozens of lawsuits in play by many different players fighting for our Second Amendment guaranteed rights. These are cases being run by some of the best lawyers in the country. Some of those lawyers are admitted to the Supreme Court bar.

Legal costs add up in a hurry.

My wife did a stupid a few years ago, a traffic violation. Nobody was hurt. It had nothing to do with being impaired while driving. It was a moment of inattention followed with some serious brain not engaged stupid.

She was guilty, she wanted to plead guilty. We still got a lawyer involved. For a simple traffic case with nobody trying to do anything and not arguing, just negotiating for the least punishment, it cost us over $3000. That was for a good local lawyer.

Right now the Oregon Firearms Federation as a suit field in the district court. The case is being argued by Attorney John Kaempf. His rates to the OFF are $500/hour for attorneys’ work and $250/hour for paralegals’ work. This appears to be at some sort of discount as other lawyers in the area are charging more.

At this point OFF has racked up more than $126,000 in legal fees. They have already paid $60,000 of that but have not been able to pay the December bill.

This case is going to cost a boat load of money to fight. OFF doesn’t seem to have the money right now. It would be shitty if the case failed for lack of representation.

Now the GOA and FPC have cases against Measure 114 happening as well. Those cases are racking up legal fees rapidly too.

Take a moment to consider joining or making a donation to any of the groups that are fighting in court for all of us.

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And the full story on the legal issues that OFF is currently having.

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This could not have happened to a more deserving man. Unfortunately, the armorer is also being charged.

They are up for 2 counts of involuntary manslaughter at 18 months for each count and an special circumstances of it involving a gun for 5 years. This means that they could each be facing up to 13 years in prison.

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For years I’ve been having breakfast conversations with my lady. I would bring her news from my feeds and my point of view. As a trusted source she had no problems engaging people in her feeds with the information, facts and opinions I gave her in the morning.

On one particular morning I told her about something I had heard. She forwarded it to her feeds and got slammed. What I had told her was factually incorrect. I had not checked my sources, I had not bothered to verify what I had heard. It was one of those “too good to be true” stories and it turned out it wasn’t.

I damaged my reputation with my lady with that one clumsy action.

To this day, if I have not personally verified something I will tell her that I have not verified it myself. If I have verified it and said as much she will trust my representation, but if I have not specifically verified the information she will before she uses it.

I am an opinionated S.O.B. I tried to ground my opinions in facts and figures. I don’t always succeed.

When I started to write here I took it upon myself to make sure that I very carefully delineated my opinion from actual facts. This has caused me to do deeper dives into content than I had originally intended. Most of my articles take hours to write. I’ve had some take 8 to 10 hours including all the research.

To that end I’ve attempted to make sure that I quote my sources and that I provide references.

So we need to talk about references or sources. There are three types of sources we deal with, primary sources, secondary sources and first hand sources.

If I report that I observed a particular thing, that is a first hand or first person source. I am reporting what I saw or heard. For example: I observed that nobody in my area had any issues with people destroying Trump yard signs. The local police didn’t do anything. The local media didn’t report it. When there were two or three BLM signs vandalized the police investigated, the police issued a statement and the local media published multiple articles regarding the evil of the right-wing.

Now if you repeat that story “AWA wrote an article about how destruction of Trump yard signs was treated differently from the destruction of BLM yard signs.” That is a true statement. People can reference my article and draw their own conclusions.

On the other hand, if you were to write your own article based on the information I provided you would be using a secondary source.

In order to help with this, I attempt to provide references to my primary sources. These would be links to local media, links to police announcements, links to images of destroyed Trump signs. Now I won’t do that because I really don’t want to say what “local” means.

Over the years of watching 2A videos and reading 2A articles I noticed that they often showed a document or the talked about a document but they never put links to the documents.

The reason for this is likely simple, PACER. PACER is Public Access to Court Electronic Records. The idea is that all documents that are filed in court are recorded in PACER for the public to access… at $0.10 per page.

While no one document will cost more than $3.00 there is a heck of a lot of documents that get filed. You would have to pay for all of them. In addition there is a price for doing searches. “Anytime a search is performed you are charged a fee based on the number of pages generated in the search, even if the search displays “no matches found.” There is no maximum fee for these searches.” So if you get a huge set of search results, you better save it as there is going to be a bill associated with it.

In addition, transcripts are charged at $0.10 per page. With the formatting on transcripts this can be pretty big.

The Second Circuit maintains its docket in the Case Management/Electronic Case-Filing (CM/ECF) system for all appeals filed on or after January 1, 2010. Anyone wishing to view docket entries and electronically filed documents for an appeal with a docket number starting with “10” or higher can access the docket by logging in the Second Circuit’s CM/ECF database linked with PACER.

It is the same for district courts as well. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, keeps their documents open and available and free.

What this means is that if somebody pulls a legal document from PACER they can’t just post a link to it and worse, PACER claims to own all of the documents they have, so sharing it is also forbidden.

This often times leads to extended searching in order to find primary sources for court documents. And the actual words of some of these documents make a difference.

For example, in my article about As the Narrative Turns – “Gun reform” Episode 32768 has a mention of the Supreme Court ruling for New York State in regards to the CCIA. In reading the actual opinion published by the Supreme Court you quickly find that it isn’t a victory for anybody.

Alito clearly says that the case is being left with the second circuit court to allow them to work through in the normal course of a court. He also tells the plaintiffs to reapply to the Supreme Court if the second circuit doesn’t give them the reasons for the current stay or if the second circuit doesn’t give them an expedited hearing on any appeal filed with them. Finally, the opinion mentions a number of district court cases by name regarding the CCIA. All of which is polite talk from the Supreme Court to the second to get their act squared away.

The words make a difference.

One problem with some of these documents is that I don’t have clean electronic copies of the primary references. The Gun Control Act of 1968 exists in PDF form on the net. It is a sequence of images of the act. In order to provide you with quotes from the Act I had to transcribe it by hand.

Regardless, references are important and you should all strive to use primary sources. Watch for weasel worded quotes. Anytime you find a quote with ellipses (…) you should ask yourself what was left out. We’ve seen many cases where the author of an article uses ellipses to cut out words that change the entire meaning of the quote.

That is one of the reasons my block quotes get so big. I want to provide you with complete context, or nearly so.

Finally, be careful of circular confirmation or single source items.

A circular confirmation is when multiple articles all report the same base set of facts. It seems like those are the actual facts. But the different articles often times reference back to each other. It isn’t that the NYT has independently confirmed fact B, it is that they read in the Washington Post that B was a fact. The Washington Post hasn’t independently confirmed fact B, it is that they read in the NYT that B was a fact.

Finally there is the single source problem. This is when multiple articles reference a single source. Then more articles reference the first set of articles. In a short period of time everyone is reporting the same set of facts. Unfortunately, all of the sources for that set of facts leads back to a single source, which may or may not be trustworthy.

When you write about a subject, you are adding the weight of your reputation to the that subject. Get your facts right before you begin. I really don’t want to admit the number of times I’ve deleted paragraphs from an article because my research showed that I was wrong about the base facts.

Finally, pay attention to your sources. There are people out there that want to make you and I look bad. They do that by creating content and attributing it to respected sources. Or pretending to be that respected source. If somebody tells you that Ben Shapiro said something that doesn’t match what you expect to hear from him, demand the proof.

I use to watch Glenn Beck, I was often told that he said horrible things. All I needed to do was to search youtube and the proof would be there. I did. What I found was a few dozen videos of Glenn Beck saying bad things. The total time he spent saying those “bad things” was around 5 to 10 minutes. So for a man with 1000s of hours of live broadcasts to have only 5 to 10 minutes of things that sound bad, out of context, that’s doing pretty good.

So check. If it doesn’t sound right, it likely isn’t.

And remember, there are people that will fake things just to mess with you.

You only need to look at the language used in order to understand what the infringers want. There use to be The Temperance Movement. It started in the early 1800’s and advocated for people to stop overindulging in alcohol consumption.

Most of these Temperance Movement members were female. Often they became members because they were dealing with alcoholic husbands and fathers. Alcoholism was generational. With one generation teaching the next to be “hard drinking men”.

At the same time recovering alcoholics were creating their own temperance groups. The difference being that they wanted total abstinence. It was a huge issue.

But the language was of “temperance”. That was the name of the groups. As one pundit put it recently, “It is right there in the name.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, these groups had morphed into demanding a complete prohibition on alcohol at both state and federal levels. Many members were violent, destroying bars and saloons. Destroying alcohol whenever they found it.

They believed in violent action to get their way.

The “Temperance Movement” soon demanded and got a complete ban on alcohol within the United States with a constitutional amendment.

In 1974, Mark Borinsky founded the National Council to Control Handguns. Its original mission statement is not easy to find. The general target at that time was for cheap, inexpensive guns, sometimes referred to as “Saturday Night Specials”. I.e. the target was those that had limited means to purchase higher quality firearms.

Just a few months earlier the Committee for Handgun Control, Inc. was founded. This group put members in other infringement groups to work for a common message. The message was “handguns are bad. Nobody but a criminal needs a handgun.” They advocated for licensing handgun owners, restricting certain handgun types, and creating a nation wide handgun owner and gun registry.

They wanted every handgun registered and every owner of a handgun registered as well.

They even went so far as to get the US Consumer Products Safety Division to define handgun ammunition as a hazardous substance and ban its sale. This required an act of Congress to kick the CPSD back into their place.

Congress was pressured into passing several laws banning “Saturday Night Specials” but they were unable to move any legislation forward on handguns in general.

The CFHC became renamed themselves as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). Reportedly because the NCCH was not advocating for strong enough gun control laws.

The National Council to Control Handguns become Handgun Control, Inc. in 1980.

The language was very clear, they wanted to ban all handguns.

After the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan Handgun Control, Inc. worked to get more gun control passed.

They were joined by Sarah Brady and using the image of James Brady got the Brady Bill passed, this established NICS and all of the rest of that mess.

In 2001 they rebranded again as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The messaging is clear at this point. They were no longer talking about “handgun control” or “gun control”, they were talking about “stopping gun violence”. Where the formal definition was “gun-related violence”. This is the same word game that the climate extremist use when they talk about lowering carbon emissions which are actually defined as carbon dioxide emissions.

Talking about stopping all those nasty companies from spewing black ugly carbon into the air sounds so much better than talking about a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that plants need to survive. Talking about stopping gun violence by restricting access to guns sounds much better than talking about stopping gun related violence by restricting access to guns.

Today the infringers talk about “Stopping Gun Violence”, “Introducing common sense gun safety regulations”, “Advocating for gun responsibility”, and general “gun safety”. They never step up and admit that they are attempting to ban all firearms from the people of the United States.

Even though more than a few have let that slip, as in “Hell Yes we are coming to take your AR-15s” from the presidential wannabe. Or Pelosie’s “If I had had the votes I would have take them all.” when she got the first federal AWB passed.

In order to push the narrative, the term used for “more gun control laws” is “gun [law] reform”. That sounds so much better than “gun bans”.

This language shows what we know. The laws, as written, are in favor of the right to keep and bear arms. They need more laws to infringe on that right. That’s why they need reform.

We, the people, don’t need gun laws reformed, we need them removed because they are in violation of the Contstitution.

The Guardian holds up the CCIA of New York State, the “Kill Carry” bill of NJ, the AWB of Illinois as examples of state level victories in gun reform.

In recent years, the US has seen a flurry of activity at the state level to combat gun violence, which the American Public Health Associations has classified as an epidemic. According to the Gun Violence Archive, guns claimed the lives of more than 44,000 Americans in 2022, including 24,000 who died by suicide. Gun safety groups say passing new laws like the Illinois assault weapons ban will become even more crucial in the coming months to address this issue: with Republicans now in control of the House of Representatives, the prospects for enacting additional federal gun legislation in the near future appear bleak.

At least they were honest enough to include actual suicide numbers. More people died of suicide by firearm than all other gun related deaths. Remember that gun related deaths includes all justified homicides as well.

That armed robber, moving towards room temperature, is considered a victim of “gun violence” by the gun rights infringers.

They fail to point out that any statistic from the Gun Violence Archive is bogus. The reason is that GVA uses media reporting to determine instances of gun-related violence. This equivalent of one “unnamed source near the investigation” leaking to four different media outlets the same story. And then all four of them report the story is true because they had “independently verified the story” Even though they all used exactly the same source.

As always, they never ever stop. Having gotten the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed, one group had this to say:

“That’s just the beginning, and we’re just scratching the surface there,” said Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for the gun safety group March For Our Lives. “That’s not the end all, be all, but it was really exciting to see that progress.”

They continue to use “gun safety advocates’ demands for more action at the federal level” rather than the older “Gun control extremists demand…”

Everytown brags about the number of infringing laws that were passed by the states.

Still, Yahya agreed that reform at the state level has become “even more important with the Republican control of the House”. In the past year, states have already enacted a number of new gun laws championed by groups like March For Our Lives. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, at least 51 new laws aimed at reducing gun violence were passed in 2022, while dozens of bills backed by the gun lobby were defeated.

If they can’t win at the federal level, they attack at the state level, if they are losing at the state level, they attack on the federal level. The only consistent function is they always want more.

And again, notice that anything we, as gun owners, advocate for is “back by the gun lobby” rather than any suggestion of a grassroots advocacy.

Of course they can lie by misdirection:

Last June, the conservative-leaning supreme court struck down a New York law that placed strict regulations on carrying a firearm in public. In response to the court’s ruling, New York legislators enacted a new law that included an extensive list of sensitive places where guns would be prohibited – such as schools, medical facilities and government buildings. The new policy is now facing legal challenges, although the supreme court ruled Wednesday that the law can remain in effect for the time being.

The Supreme Court didn’t rule on anything. They decided not to hear the request for an emergency action. Very different.

Just because they don’t hear a case doesn’t mean they have think the situation is correct, as it sits.

Gun safety advocates highlight New York’s legislative response to the supreme court’s ruling as a key example of how states can proactively address gun violence, even as federal legislation remains stalled.

Yep, they love those F’ You’s that the states are throwing towards the Supreme Court.

“This year, we’ll be doubling down on our efforts to go statehouse by statehouse to continue to pass life-saving laws,” said Monisha Henley, managing director of state government affairs at Everytown. “That is happening no matter what’s going on in DC.”

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I asked my wife for a recommendation for today. She mentioned “Grand Old Flag” and I really wanted to put it here. Unfortunately all of the YouTube videos (and videos searches in general) kept popping up kids versions. Not what I wanted.

But in the midst of all that chaff there was a kernel.

My flag means so much to me.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
And to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I’ve said these words all my life. I stand up when the flag goes past. I take my hat off and put my hand over my heart.

It isn’t the colorful fabric moving slowly up the street, carried by veterans or Boy Scouts, or the High School Marching Band, that pull on my emotions.

It is what that flag represents to me. It is a nation founded on natural rights. A nation with equality for all. A nation where there is justice for all, equally.

It is a country where the rule of law is always the goal.

There are times when I hate the people in power for the disrespect they show my country and myself.

There are times when I see somebody being disrespectful of the flag, because they know it shows disrespect for my country.

“My country, right or wrong.” and “I disagree with you but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” are phrases I grew up with.

I cried when I saw people burning the flag of my country. Of hating it so much. Of hating everything that I love about my country.

And this expresses it:

Words have meaning “House Democrats introduce measure to lower voting age to 16”

Hmmm, so not a bill. Just a measure.

The bill, House Resolution 16, would establish that “the right of citizens of the United States, who are sixteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”

So which is it? Is it a “bill” or is it a “resolution”? This doesn’t make any sense.

The policy would repeal the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which establishes the national voting age as 18. 

What? This policy would repeal an amendment to the Constitution? Did they miss every Schoolhouse Rock episode?

Pelosi, of course, supports lowering the voting age to 16 so this isn’t just random new representative submitting this thin.

“I think it’s really important to capture kids when they’re in high school when they’re interested in all of this when they’re learning about government to be able to vote,” she told the Daily Caller in 2019.

Yep, it is important to capture kids that are still in the whine for mommy or daddy to give them things. For kids that still haven’t figured out what to do with their lives to vote.

But remember, 18 is to young to buy a pistol because they aren’t mature enough.

So that’s the end of the hyperbole. The article was written by somebody that didn’t actually pay attention to what was said and is trying to get an emotional response.

What was done was a “Joint Resolution” was introduced in the House of Representatives calling for an amendment to the constitution of the United States. It is short, unusually so:

1. The twenty-sixth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
2. The right of citizens of the United States, who are sixteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
3. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The resolution clearly states that for this to happen the amendment needs to be ratified by 3/4 of the states before it becomes valid.

This is just pandering to the Democrat base. It is not really going anywhere. It is a good sound bite and nothing more.

House Democrats introduce measure to lower voting age to 16
H.J.RES. 16

H/T to Dive Medic

TL;DR; I’m a home owner. I had to replace the sump pump after my basement flooded. It was cold yucky and things went wrong before the went right.

I’m very lucky. We own our home. I grew up in a family that moved from place to place but my parents always owned, where ever they lived.

When I left University I dreamed of owning my own home. After a few years I bought my first home. And lost it when I got divorced and all of my income went to lawyers, child support and living in a shit place to stay near my children.

I blame it on the divorce, but it was my fault.

Years later my wife and I worked with another couple and we bought a beautiful farm. House, barn, detached garage. 125 acres with about 100 of that in forest. It was my dream home.

When the other couple decided that I had to go we were bought out for pennies on the dollar. Seems that all the money that we were contributing went to “household expenses” while all of the, significantly less, money that they brought in went to paying down the principal on the mortgage. So according to the books they had all the equity.

We bought this house. I love our house. It needs work. It always needs work.

We bought it from the bank at about half the assessed value just as the housing bubble burst. One of the first things we had to do was replace the hot water heater and furnace and much of the copper piping.

Luckily for us, most of the copper was in exposed areas so easy to get to and replace. For those areas that were not accessible the pipes passed pressure tests. They were good.

Seems that when the bank took ownership of the house the first thing they did was turn off the water and power.

They didn’t winterize the house. This caused the water to freeze and burst pipes.

While our house sits on the top of a hill, when it was built they built it with a sump pump design. This means that water is routed around the foundation to a single opening in the foundation. From there the water flows in to the sump from which it is then pumped out of the sump.

When the bank turned off the power, they turned of the power to the sump pump.

About a month later a neighbor called the realtor and told them water was coming out of the basement windows.

The water lines in our basement are at the bottom of the windows. The basement flooded.

The bank took care of the sump and getting the water out and making sure it didn’t flood again.

But that pump was old. And when we moved in it failed. We would check for water and I’d go get that pump running.

It would run fine for a year or so until the wife would move the discharge pipe because it was in the way or knock something into the sump and not fish it out.

Last summer it died and I replaced it.

The new pump was cheap. Amazon purchase. I got it installed and it was amazing. Kept the basement dry. Noisy as hell though.

It was cheap chinesium. It didn’t like to pump water to begin with, but always did in the end. Sometimes it wouldn’t shut off. But it worked. I was happier.

But because it wasn’t right I bought a much better replacement pump.

Friday was a not fun night.

My lady and daughter were reporting a “burning plastic smell” which they could not identify. They checked every outlet in the house and couldn’t find anything.

I through they checked the basement as well.

It was date night so I took wife out for some very good Indian food.

When we got home the smell was obvious. I started checking upstairs and sent the kids to check if they could find the smell in the basement.

Smells are sometimes and issue in our house. It is a rural type area and we have had more than a few mice die and we find out when they start to smell and we have to find and remove the rotting bodies.

So the kids head down to the basement. Access is via a set of outside storm doors. I hear them open the door and start laughing.

Daughter comes up and tells me there is water in the basement.

Which is my cue.

I take of my socks. Put on my shoes and head out and down to the basement. I roll up my pants legs to over my knees and walk down the steps into the basement and water.

Somewhere between 8 and 12 inches of very very cold water. This is water from melted snow that has flowed off the roof and yard and into the basement through that damn opening.

I make my way through the floating storage boxes to the sump. I get there and plunge my hand into that icy water, find the float and wiggle it.

The pump turns on. A few minutes later it sounds like it is ejecting water.

It took about an hour or two to drain the basement but then the pump didn’t turn off.

Back I went. Pulled the pump up to check it.

The float will not dip far enough to turn off the sump nor is it coming up enough to turn on the sump pump.

The float is attached to the pump by a plastic tube that carries the wires to the float valve. In the float valve there are two contact points, one on the bottom and one on the top. When the float is hanging down it makes contact with a solid click and the pump stops. If the float is high enough the the contact swings/rolls/moves to contact the switch at the top which turns on the pump. Easy stuff.

You adjust when the pump turns off or on by adjusting the length of the arm attached to the float.

When we installed the pump it was warm. Everything worked wonderfully.

But that plastic tube becomes stiff when the temperature goes down. Like sitting in a sump filled with snow runoff.

When it is stiff, it doesn’t move up and down so the sump doesn’t turn on or off.

This was the root cause.

I stayed down there to make sure it turned back on. It didn’t want to. I did the magic to make it work. Made plans to replace it today.

Once the sump was empty I wiggled the pump and it turned off. I went upstairs to get ready for the night, knowing that I would awake up to a flooded basement, again.

Well I didn’t. The pump turned on but refused to turn off. I decided I would rather the damn thing burn itself out over night than to come down to a flooded basement.

So today’s fun was the replacement of that pump.

First thing is that NONE of the fittings from the old pump(s) fit. In addition, I had to disconnect two barb fittings. And they would not come apart.

The issue was that the black plastic pipe doesn’t deform worth shit when it is cold. Which it was.

I ended up cutting the pipe to get everything out. Then once I had all the fittings apart I could figure out what I needed.

And while I’m doing this, the sump is filling.

Off to the hardware store. They have all the parts I need plus they are willing to sell me a four foot length of 1″ black plastic piping to replace the piping I cut. I didn’t have to buy an entire roll. Thank goodness.

I get some water to boiling and by dunking the pipe end into the boiling water I made it soft enough to push in the barb. Things are going better.

Back into the basement to get things put together with the new pump.

And the fittings don’t match. So I take the copper riser pipe and its nasty crusty pipe out to the shop where I can use some serious persuasion. I get the fittings off the pipe. I go to put the new fittings back on and realize that the iron coupler needs some work.

I put it in the lathe and get it cleaned up to reuse.

Back to the basement to put everything together.

And my son has misunderstood his task. He’s pulled the exhaust pipe out of the wall, including breaking the bracketts holding it inplace.

GRRRRRRRR.

And he hasn’t accomplished what I actually needed him to do.

He is retasked and daughter and I start putting the new pump in place. Water is out of the sump and about 1″ deep at the sump. Most of the basement is still damp from the night before but not yet flooded.

We get everything done but son is still not done. Send daughter up to check on him. He’s messed it up. He decided that he couldn’t get the elbow into the pot of boiling water. So instead he just poured the boiling water over the elbow and onto the ground. Which half did the job but now he doesn’t have any more boiling water.

Daughter takes care of that by getting more boiling water and showing him that he can pour the water over the elbow into another pot and back again until the pipe is soft enough to take apart.

So after 30 minutes of letting him work the problem with his sisters assistance, They finally bring the piping back to me.

Water is now about 1.5 inches deep at the sump. I quickly get my pipes into the boiling water that daughter has brought down. With the black pipe soft I’m able to get the elbow in place. All of the hose clamps have been snugged down and the pump goes into the sump.

I plug it in.

No sounds. I can almost feel a slight hum from under my feets.

I send son out to check for water coming out the exhaust pipe.

He reports back that there is water flowing well.

The new pump is faster and very quiet. It just works. The difference between a $79 cheap but it works and a $300 cast iron 15 year plus warranty pump.

Basement is drying. Daughter took care of the few items that were water damaged. Been here, done this. We are slow learners but we do. Everything that is stored in the basement is in Rubbermaid bins that are water tight.

I’ve heard/felt the pump do its thing a couple of times. It is right under my offce.

Oh, yes, we have water sensors in the basement.

My wife didn’t know what they were so moved them up and out of the way so they wouldn’t get wet if the basement started to flood again.