We know many things about the attack at Benghazi, much more than the administration wishes we did.  First of all, my military readers knew within 24 hours that this was the result of a well-planned, well-coordinated combined-arms attack with the use of crew served weapons (e.g., see DirtyMick’s comments), not the result of some ridiculous YouTube video.

We also know that weapons were being moved through Libya to Syrian insurgents, those whom we now know as ISIS.  We know that this was illegal, immoral and ill-advised, and was being funded by the U.S. government.  I also said three years ago that I didn’t believe administration claims that no assets were available for response to the battle.

Finally, I completely disemboweled the administration’s excuse that we don’t deploy troops into battle without good, real-time intelligence.  We do that all of the time.  Nothing this administration has said has been honest.  Now we come to find out, due to the hard work of Judicial Watch, that I was right.

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 pm local time – 3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC.  The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning – 6 p.m. ET.

Leon Panetta knows more than he has said, and what he has said has been primarily prevarication and obfuscation.  The same is true of David Petraeus, and General Ham, who knows things very important for us to know, hasn’t spoken on this.  We will all find out what assets were available, who told them to stand down, and who chose to leave good men to perish in Libya that fateful night.

We will know the truth one day.  All of it.  God knows it now, and He will hold you accountable, whether I am in a position to do that or not.

Finally, I am willing to bet that everything I say and have said about Benghazi will be proven accurate and correct.  I have said “As to what I suspect – but cannot yet prove – the movement of weapons to terrorists was becoming hard to hide, and the whole operation had ripened to the point of rottenness.  Stevens had to be moved out and told to shut up about what he knew.  Even if the administration didn’t plan the military operation to take down the consulate at Benghazi, they nevertheless used it to hide their tracks.”

Somebody prove me wrong.

Chicago Tribune:

Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend.

The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State’s Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.

A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.

The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records.  Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said.  No other injuries were reported.

Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend.

The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State’s Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.

A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.

The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records.  Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said.  No other injuries were reported.

Now, go to Google News and search on Logan Square for any other reporting of this event.  There is none.  America has been saturated with reporting on gun violence and this administration’s call for more gun control, but nothing on the prevention of another mass shooting by a concealed carrier.

It doesn’t fit the narrative, does it?  And yet, he didn’t wait for the police (who would have been too late to do anything about it anyway), he didn’t run for cover, he didn’t go wild and shoot up the entire area and kill innocents, but instead he apparently ran towards the sound and laid his own safety aside for that of others.

Who could ask for anything more out of concealed carriers?

Reader and commenter Menckenlite concerning guns and mental health.

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.

Oftentimes my readers can say things better than can I.  The above quote is a perfect example.  Obama now wants guns from these 47,000 people.

Leaving the federal government in charge of anything is the surest way to screw it up.  I’m sure it is indeed a problem for the air marshals.  But the biggest issue for me isn’t related to errors and screwups, as prolific as they may be with the *.gov.  Another thing this conversation suffers from is confusion of the terrorist watch list with the no-fly list.  They are not at all the same thing.  Obama wants you to be confused, he revels in it, he will use it to his advantage.

If a terrorist is inside America, deport him.  If a terrorist is trying to get in, bar him.  Close the borders immediately and completely, and the issue of ne’er-do-wells perpetrating crimes and terror via our border will go away.  But since we won’t close the borders, we aren’t serious about this problem, at least not yet.

In the mean time, Obama doesn’t really want 47,000 people to turn in their guns.  He doesn’t care in the least about errors and screwups.  He wants so-called anti-government types on the list, or in other words, people who believe in God, people who believe in the constitution, people who believe in their right to bear arms, and people who think the *.gov is too intrusive and the executive branch too powerful.

And therein lies the problem.  Under Obama’s schema, the executive can put anyone on the list for literally any reason.  I sometimes disagree with Volokh, but in this case I think he nailed it.

… we don’t deny constitutional rights based just on suspicion? If you think you can prove someone is a terrorist, lock him up. If you have probable cause to think he’s a terrorist, and think you can develop proof beyond a reasonable doubt, arrest him. Even if you have only suspicion, follow him, ask people about him, and so on. But if you don’t have enough to prosecute or even arrest someone, you can’t take away his constitutional rights, even if you suspect he’s a terrorist (or if you suspect he’s a drug dealer or a gang member or whatever else).

This is the nexus between mental health and terrorism.  Unfortunately for those who suffer from mental health issues, they are misunderstood and badly characterized, in large measure because everything that occurs due to the existence of evil in the world is falsely ascribed to mental health.

The nexus has to do with the how the progressives treat them.  The commonality is an end run around due process, and the progressives no more regret that for believers in the constitution than they do for those who suffer from mental health maladies.  In fact, the progressives would likely see everyone cast into the same boat – those who suffer from mental health maladies, a category including all conservatives or libertarians.

Don’t fall for the rhetoric.  It’s a smoke screen, a ruse.  Obama and his ilk don’t really care about terrorism in the way you do.  They want to take your guns.  Isn’t it telling and ironic that while collectivists want to ban people from buying guns by executive fiat, Donald Trump is open to the idea.  Or was I being redundant by saying “collectivists” and Donald Trump?”

“He makes my feet like hinds’ feet, and sets me upon my high places.  He trains my hands for battle, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.  Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation, and thy right hand upholds me; and Thy gentleness makes me great,” Psalm 18:33-36.

The New York Times has published a call for gun control in the wake of the Islamist actions in San Bernardino.  An excerpt follows.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

The Washington Post has a pitiful, confused and yet halting agreement with the editorial, as if the writer, in terrible fear for her life, doesn’t know what else to do.

Then, there are those matters that are beyond practical political reach. Suffering, death, danger and maltreatment aside, a policy solution to these problems simply has no real path, no viability at all.

And in this moment, it would seem that any and all policy related to guns would belong in that third group. Gun control — or any discussion of a coordinated effort to stem the tide of gun deaths that set this country apart from almost every other industrialized nation — is going nowhere. It’s a reality we acknowledge regularly on this very blog, most recently on Saturday morning, the day the New York Times saw fit to devote its first front-page editorial in 95 years to gun control.

There are numerous reactions to this editorial, most of them edging towards the “this means war” sentiment.  I want to take a different approach to this call for more gun control, and all of those like it across America.

It’s tempting to take the approach of commenter Mike Bishop at WRSA, who says “The Manhattanites have about as much relevance in my personal, local, life, as a rookery of penguins.”  Mike is right, and such gun control will never obtain, but it goes much deeper than relevance.

There is a war between light and darkness, and it has been advancing since the very beginning.  Statism and Islam are different facets of the same stone (there are other facets), and they are merely the societal manifestations of the struggle between light and darkness.  The war occurs individually and corporately, and while men see the consequences and effects of the war, and get brief glimpses into the deeper things, in large measure we don’t truly see the battle in the heavens.

Angels and demons are warring in the heavenly places, and there is war within the souls of men.  God isn’t barely victorious, nor does be barely win.  Nay, He sits and the heavens and scoffs at the rulers of the world.  It will all end as He has said it will.

“For I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not yet been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’,” Isaiah 46:9-10.

As for individual men, there are those who are lost.  The New York Times editorial board is lost.  No, not collectively, but individually, each and every one of them.  The war is over in their soul, or better, it never occurred.  There are those men who have been given a taste, and who know the truth, but who suppress it in unrighteousness.  They will never find peace or rest, not now and not in eternity.

But there are those who would be lost if left to their own devices, who know their sins, but who have been awakened by the sovereign hand of Almighty God, who reaches down in His kind providence and bestows His love on them.  They are saved by grace and through faith, not of their works, lest they should boast.

For this last category, God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world … He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself … according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,” Eph 1:4,5,11.

If the former believes that upon death their bodies cool to ambient temperature and then get planted or burned, and that’s the end, they are merely observers to the great war, not even pawns.  They are worse than irrelevant.  They see the effects, but cannot effect change.  For those of us who believe, there are no volunteers to this war.

We were created for it, and we were drafted to this army.  Our volunteering occurred simultaneously with our being called, and upon being called, we had no other choice.  The sheep know their master’s voice, and only follow Him.

Oh, to be sure, I won’t give up my weapons, not a single one of them, and I will defend myself and my family as we are threatened, whether by the state or other actors.  I will do so because I have been taught by my master that I must do so.  But it goes deeper than a few guns.

I know that the New York Times editorial board, for all their bluster, isn’t relevant to this war because they don’t even know there is one.  Looking for peace, they may as well slash their wrists and bleed before Baal for fire to come down from heaven as to look to the state for a solution to evil.

I have been called with a heavenly calling, like all of His people, not of themselves, but of His great mercy and from before the foundation of the world, to fight this great war.  The war is present everywhere and all of the time, whether visibly and by implements of fighting, or in our souls for our devotion and affection of the divine.

It has become commonplace to charge people carrying weapons with cowardice.

PARIS—For most of the last two centuries, Europeans have been puzzling over their American cousins’ totemic obsession with guns and their passion for concealed weapons. And back in the decades before the American Civil War, several British visitors to American shores thought they’d discerned an important connection: people who owned slaves or lived among them wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile, but often shot each other, too.

In 1842, the novelist Charles Dickens, on a book tour of the United States, saw a link between the sheer savagery of slave ownership and what he called the cowardly practice of carrying pistols or daggers or both. The author of Oliver Twist listened with a mixture of horror and contempt as Americans defended their utterly indefensible “rights” to tote guns and carry Bowie knives, right along with their “right” to own other human beings who could be shackled, whipped, raped, and mutilated at will.

Charging us with sin is the devil’s game, and in my corner as defender is the Son of God who has paid the price, past, present and future.  I’ll just let Him handle it.  I am unaffected by the game.  Since I am a warrior in the great war of all time, how can any man say that I am a coward?

Coward if left to his own devices, sinner, and even worthless worm.  But saint by the shed blood of the lamb, warrior in the great war, at battle ever since being called, at battle until the end of my life, servant of the most high king.  My days are in His hands.  I will live all of the days to which I have been ordained, and will not perish until it is time that I meet my savior and master.  Who can understand this except those who have been called?

“You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day,” Psalm 91:5.

David Codrea on the Maryland Deputy Attorney General:

“My complete answer, off the record, is we should ban guns altogether, period,” he said. “If you want gun practice with a gun, you can go to the gun range and then you leave it there and you go home.”

He said, in his opinion, personal ownership of firearms should be limited to law enforcement and to individuals who pass licensing tests, pay a tax, have insurance and, as technology allows, have fingerprint trigger locks.

This isn’t substantially different from what we already knew about the gun controllers.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

Both this controller and the Deputy AG are willing to go some distance towards their goals in order to achieve long term full compliance with their view of the world.

Never trust a “gun controller” because of the second word in the phrase.  There is no limit to the control a controller wants to exercise in his quest to control you.

Read David Codrea’s piece on dismissal of the post-1986 machine gun ban challenge appealed.  A good candidate for comment of the week comes from Woody Woodward, who says:

Had the ATF been around in the early 1900’s Browning, Garand, and Williams would have been sitting in a federal prison and we would be speaking either Japanese or German today. ATF apparently adheres to the premise that, “The law is what we say it is, at any given time, and there’s nothing you can do about because we are a governmental agency.”

Bravo, Woody.  Bravo.  I’ve noted before that one side effect (unintended or otherwise?) of gun control laws is to weaken the ability of the U.S. to design, fabricate and service guns.  For example, when is the last time a U.S. manufacturer fielded an open bolt design for a light machine gun?  Who has the contract for SAWs for the USMC?

Via Mike Vanderboegh, Dave Workman:

Today is the one-year anniversary of the implementation of Washington state’s Initiative 594, a gun control and registration measure disguised as a “universal background check” that has – as demonstrated by headline after headline – been an absolute failure in crime prevention, according to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

In a blistering news release late yesterday, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, who helped spearhead the opposition to I-594 last year, noted, “Despite public records requests to agencies around the state, we can find no record of any enforcement of this new law in the year since it took effect. The only discernible impact of the law has been to inconvenience honest gun owners and add more red tape to gun shows.”

Oh go cry me a river, Dave.  I don’t remember all of that “opposition” Alan spearheaded.  In fact, I recall just the opposite.  In what world do you live?

Via Uncle, cops are just like you and me, only better.  Retired cops exempted from magazine ban.

From reader Mack, this:

The theodicy of federal government seeks to defend the goodness of government in the face of tragedy.Progressives tend to believe that government — if made to have sufficient size, scope, and proper management over the affairs of man — will fix or at least seriously mitigate the problem of evil in the world. Conservatives tend to believe that human nature is flawed and inclined toward bad things.

Mack comments that Molly sounds a lot like me.  Yup.

It’s probably common knowledge by now that the pathetic Ashton Carter forcibly opened all military billets to females over the objections of the U.S. Marine Corps.

I will have more to say later on this, but for right now you can visit my previous discussions on the subject.  It isn’t hard to figure this stuff out even without first or second hand knowledge of the physical differences between men and women.

In 1998, Karsten Braasch, at that time ranked 203rd in the world among men’s tennis players and a man who has never won a five-set match in his career, got drunk, beat both Williams sisters on the court, and did so while smoking a cigarette between matches.  Serena said, “It was very hard, I didn’t think it would be so hard,” she sighed after the game. “I hit shots which would have been winners on the WTA Tour, but he caught them easily”

Ashton Carter has said that even though all billets will be opened, there may be be equal representation by men and women among billets.  This is a misdirect, and I’ll explain later.  In the mean time, Carter said “Studies conducted by the services and SOCOM indicate that on average there are physical and other differences between men and women.”

Studies.  Right.  I could have saved them time and money by telling them this without studies … except for my previous life studies.

Washington Post:

Soon after news broke on Wednesday that a gunman had opened fire on a social service center in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 people and wounding 17 others, the liberal Daily Kos website published an opinion piece under the headline “Your opinion on gun control doesn’t matter.” It crystallized much of the anger and frustration that gun-control advocates were expressing on social media in the wake of another American mass shooting.

The piece takes interesting turns and undulations.  But in the end it has the feel and rhythm of another “everyone is so misunderstood” article, including (gasp) gun owners.  Gun owners, they claim, actually do support some gun control measures.

Here they cherry pick data that we have refuted, but suffice it to say [without rehearsing all of the information we’ve covered in the past] that the majority of gun owners don’t want to have to go to an FFL to transfer a weapon, regardless of what the authors claim.

And there may be a nexus between gun ownership and the understanding that we increasingly live in a society defined by Fabian socialism and government control.  But the authors need to spend a little more time around gun owners before writing prose that makes it sound like they can speak authoritatively on gun ownership.  A little more love, a little less government aggression, and a few more promises, and we won’t suddenly come together, agree to new gun control laws, and melt our guns into farming implements.

Man is fallen, he is predisposed to evil, governments only seek more control always, false religions seek to impose their will on other men, and saying “peace, peace,” when there is no peace, is not a recipe for brotherhood.

As for the disagreeable ones over at Kos, I would respond that if you bristle at the idea of gun rights, fine.  But what you are really saying is that while evil men hunt down the innocent in places of work, worship and play to kill them, what you really want to see is those innocent men perish rather than have access to a means of self defense.

You would rather see women hiding and cowering under desks than be able to live another day for their children, and you would rather see blood in the streets for the sake of government control than free men who won’t allow their families to be harmed.

The hatred of police that your hippie fathers and mothers cherished, has turned into a love of government control.  The love of guns owned and operated by the Black Panthers, The Weather Underground and others, turned into a hatred of anything that could threaten the power of the state – once your ilk was in charge.  What you once loved you now hate because it gives someone else that same freedom and power.  Admit it.  Go ahead and admit it.  Is that such an unreasonable thing to ask?

Kos is blaming republicans, but better still, others are blaming God.

As yet another mass shooting claimed the lives of 14 people Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., a familiar refrain echoed from the lips of politicians: Pray.

But for many fed up with the now seemingly routine shootings and the resulting inaction from each over how to stop another tragedy, pleas to God weren’t enough anymore.

That was the sentiment New York’s Daily News proclaimed on its cover Thursday. With the headline blaring, “God Isn’t Fixing This,” the tabloid highlighted the tweets of GOP politicians, each asking for prayer following the shooting at an office party at the Inland Regional Center.

“Prayers aren’t working,” the paper wrote. “White House hopefuls on the Democratic side of the aisle called for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting. … But after yet another mass shooting in America, GOP presidential contenders were conspicuously silent on the issue of gun control. Instead, the Republicans were preaching about prayer.”

This is just rich.  So it’s God’s fault because prayers aren’t working.  The comments at NPR are even better.  They range from frustration, to confusion, to atheistic ramblings about prayer to make-believe characters.

Look, having studied apologetics as I have, I would debate anyone on the existence of God, but it would be on my terms and by my rules.  Atheists don’t scare me one bit.  But trying to persuade someone in unbelief to jettison their lack of belief isn’t the point here.

The notion that we can break God’s holy laws, turn the nation into a melting pot of religious paganism, and turn to the state as the worshipers of Baal did to a statue, and then expect the one true and living God to perform for us like some sort of circus act when the nation utters what it perceives to be an incantation is so ludicrous that it’s amazing anyone believes it.

Bless your heart!  So you think God doesn’t hear your prayers?  Get used to it.  He only knows His sheep, and His sheep know His voice and follow Him.

Put the popcorn in the microwave, take it out and watch the show.  The liberals are eating each others’ livers out.  This should be fun.

David Codrea:

Like the saying goes, haters gonna hate. They’re going to rage, they’re going to lie, they’re going to accuse and they’re going to demand. The less temperate and tactical among them, that is, the self-control-challenged who go nuts if they can’t control everyone else, will say some furious, ridiculous and desperate things that will both show all their cards and their impotence.

That’s because they know, deep in their cowardly and covetous hearts, that the final card is held by gun owners who, in the final analysis, will not be scapegoated and will not comply with subversive edicts that do nothing but give all advantages to the evil. That’s because they know that ultimately, they’re stopped in their tracks by one simple, defiant response:

No. Your move.

And it will probably all come down to that.  And be it known that this “gun show loophole” Obama is talking about doesn’t exist.  He and we all know what he’s really after: person-to-person transfers.  Vendors at gun shows already go through Form 4473.  Obama wants universal background checks as a predecessor to gun registration.

And he won’t get it, because we won’t comply.