Fox News:

Backed by the National Rifle Association, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican leader is introducing legislation that would reward states for sending more information about residents with serious mental problems to the federal background check system for firearms purchasers.

[ … ]

Jennifer Baker, spokeswoman for NRA legislative affairs, said the bill took “meaningful steps toward fixing the system and making our communities safer.”

By law, federally licensed gun dealers must conduct background checks on firearms purchasers.

Among those barred from buying guns are people legally determined to be “mentally defective” and those who have been committed to mental institutions. But states are not required to send those records to the background check system, which is run by the FBI, and its database is spotty.

Cornyn’s bill would increase grants under the government’s main law enforcement program by up to 5 percent for states that send the federal system at least 90 percent of their records on people with serious mental problems. States providing less data could see their grants from a broad range of justice programs penalized by the same amounts, at the attorney general’s discretion.

This asshole has tried this before.  But I don’t believe for one moment – I am not even tempted for a nanosecond to believe that maybe, maybe, just perhaps there is some way  – that this will have any effect on crime whatsoever.  And when is the last time you witnessed empowerment of the federal government with anything have good consequences or result in greater recognition of rights?

We’ve discussed how mental health (however that happens to be defined at the moment) has no correlation at all to violent behavior, and how mental health professionals simply cannot use their pseudoscience to be a predictor of violent behavior.  We’ve shown this again, and again, and again, and again.

Furthermore, I’ve warned former military never to engage the services of so-called mental health professionals.  You’ll never get your gun ownership rights recognized again.  As for those who believe in the so-called mental health “sciences,” you may as well believe in voodoo and bow down and worship totem poles or cut your wrists like the prophets of Baal for a god who isn’t there.  The mental health “sciences” is the refuge of collectivists and scoundrels.

Recall Menckenlite’s comment:

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Crime happens because of evil, not “mental health” issues.  As for Cornyn, you see what voting GOP has done for you, just in case you had any last thoughts about voting your way out of this mess.  As for the NRA, does it surprise anyone that they support this bastard of a bill?

The New Yorker:

Earlier this year, the International Business Times ran this bewildering headline: “El Salvador to Become Deadliest Peace-Time Country in the World.” It’s an odd turn of phrase; something about it doesn’t quite scan. Perhaps, given the context of life in El Salvador, it’s best to reëxamine what we mean when we say “peacetime.” Consider this: since the collapse, early last year, of the truce between local gangs and the government, the murder rate has risen by a staggering fifty-two per cent. Or this: El Salvador, with a population of a little over 6.3 million, registered more than six hundred murders in May, the most since the end of the civil war. (For comparison: despite its reputation for violence, Chicago, with a little under half the population of El Salvador, had forty-eight murders that same month.) Or this: more than thirty-five police officers have been killed so far in 2015. Everyone has been touched, directly or indirectly, by the chaos, and Salvadorans of every social class have learned to cope with the constant sense of insecurity. One friend likened returning home from abroad to being splashed with boiling water—and he wasn’t referring to the heat. If this is peacetime, one shudders to think what a war would look like.

I was in San Salvador two weeks ago, when El Faro, a local online newspaper, published an explosive investigation into a killing at a farm just a few hours from the capital. The article was entitled “Police Massacre in San Blas,” and it re-creates, through eyewitness testimony, the examination of forensic and ballistic reports, and private social-media postings by police who were present, the events of March 26th of this year, when eight alleged members of the gang Mara Salvatrucha were killed at a coffee plantation.

[ … ]

I met with one of the authors of the story, Óscar Martínez, the night before it went live on the Web site. Óscar is best known in the United States for “The Beast,” his 2013 chronicle of life on the harrowing migrant trail through Mexico. He’s always a bit manic, but that night, Óscar seemed unusually jittery, even anxious. He and his co-authors were all preparing to leave the country the following morning, for their own safety. This extraordinary measure says a lot about the kind of backlash that El Faro was expecting. As the violence has increased, the debate about what exactly should be done about it has become even more poisonous. Thus far, President Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s populist response has been to disown the truce that held for the better part of two years, and instead confront the gangs directly. No politician wants to be seen as soft on the gangs, which are rightly seen as a scourge. The public, for the most part, supports this strategy. For El Faro to criticize the police is to risk being seen as defenders of the gangs that everyone despises. Óscar had already received death threats for an earlier story about police misconduct.

[ … ]

One young woman, soft-spoken, exceedingly polite, detailed her life in a gang-ridden neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. It was one terrifying encounter after another, each delivering the same dispiriting lesson: she was helpless in the face of the gangs and their malevolent power. She had done everything she could to avoid them, and still they found ways to control her life. Her father was forced to pay extortion money to one of the gangs—she wouldn’t say which one. By the end of our conversation, she was almost weeping with fury. “I’m a Christian,” she told me, “but those people aren’t my brothers. I would burn them all.”

Fill in the blanks and read the rest at The New Yorker.  Caught between brutal gangs and just as brutal police.  And coming to a neighborhood near you, through open borders courtesy of the Democrats and the GOP.  But hey.  All of that cheap labor is the bomb.

I wouldn’t worry about purchasing guns and ammunition.  The police will serve and protect you.

NYT:

The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.

The driver was unarmed.

Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. Lewinski, the psychology professor, explained that the officer had no choice but to act.

“In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?”

“In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. Lewinski replied.

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.

He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.

[ … ]

Many policing experts are for hire, but Dr. Lewinski is unique in that he conducts his own research, trains officers and internal investigators, and testifies at trial. In the protests that have followed police shootings, demonstrators have often asked why officers are so rarely punished for shootings that seem unwarranted. Dr. Lewinski is part of the answer.

Dr. Lewinski said he was not trying to explain away every shooting. But when he testifies, it is almost always in defense of police shootings. Officers are his target audience — he publishes a newsletter on police use of force that he says has nearly one million subscribers — and his research was devised for them. “The science is based on trying to keep officers safe,” he said.

[ … ]

A former Minnesota State professor, he says his testimony and training are based on hard science, but his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas.

Hmm … let me see.  He got his doctorate from a diploma mill (you do the research), engages in pseudoscience (which has as its stated outcome keeping cops “safe”), trains cops, always testifies in their defense, and by virtue of the fact that he is the one being called as an “expert” witness, becomes the one who is called to testify as an “expert” witness in future cases, a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Yea.  You know what else might become a self-fulfilling prophesy?  People knowing that police are going to discharge weapons as a matter of first recourse, and then act accordingly.

Examiner:

A study of the growing Hispanic immigrant population declares that the country is on the verge of the “Latinization of the United States,” a “browning of America” that by 2050 will be 29 percent Latino — and politically influential.

Published in the authoritative journal “Ethnicities,” the immigration analysis by two California experts noted that while big states such as California and Florida are home to most Hispanics, there has been a recent growth surge exceeding 300 percent of mostly Mexicans to Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Arkansas.

[ … ]

“By the sheer force of numbers, the kinds of adults that Latino students become will dramatically shape the future history of this country, as the former white majority becomes a minority population, at least in terms of number,” said the study provided to Secrets. It sits behind a paywall.

“Latinos have become more than an electoral voting bloc, emerging as strategic actors in major processes of democratic social transformation,” they added.

Gosh.  I sure am glad that this doesn’t effect SNAP payments, taxes, medical care, social security, emergency room protocol, or especially gun rights.  The government is in charge, so I’m sure everything will be okay.

Why won’t Scott Walker say Obama is a Christian?  Um, well, you know, because he’s not.  He’s a Marxist  A man cannot serve two masters.

David Codrea:

No.  Your move.

More David:

A Washington DC “Democrat media consulting firm” affiliated with Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (and a host of anti-gun politicians) is offering Oregon gun dealers $1,500 to allow them to film an on-location “public service announcement,” Oregon Firearms Federation announced Friday. The filmmakers need a gun store as a backdrop for an actor to tell viewers how “easy” it is to comply with form requirements …

Uh huh.  They’d better not.

Mike Vanderboegh:

… and twist old Chris Christie’s 2nd Amendment titty.

Now that’s something we’d all like to see.  By the way, I’m not sure I could name a single person with whom I went to High School.  Honestly.

Recall I said that the DoD should have a policy of allowing Marines to arm themselves?  Recall I described the current MARADMIN concerning the ownership and use of personal weapons, onerous in all of its requirements?  Well, one Navy officer did arm himself, shot at the attacker, and now will be charged with discharging a firearm on federal property.

Because they would rather he have perished in the attack.  Because they are control freaks and pussies in the superlative degree.