You’d think that at least her clerks would have prepared her better than this.

And here’s Justice Jackson: “And when, you know, ‘function’ is defined, it’s really not about the operation of the thing. It’s about what it can achieve, what it’s being used for. So I see Congress as putting function in this. The function of this trigger is to cause this kind of damage, 800 rounds a second or whatever.”

Not even the Navy’s Phalanx is capable of that rate of fire (4500 Rounds Per Minute).

Maybe there’s a quad gun that can approach that rate, but still, 4500 RPM × 4 = 18000, and 18000 RPM / 60 seconds per minutes = 300 RPM. So, I don’t know of anything that can accomplish 800 rounds per second.

Can you imagine trying to hold a gun on target at that rate of fire?

But hey, I want one!

Amazing.

Justice Barrett asks about the difference between bump firing and bump stocks

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Justice Jackson says guns with bump stocks can fire 800 rounds a second

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

The government says that a rifle without a bump stock can only shoot about 60 rounds per minute

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Jerry Miculek is laughing.

Justice Jackson asks why the NFA doesn't ban guns that can fire as fast as machine guns. Cargill says because that's not what the law says

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Justice Kagan says that with a bump stock, you can hold the trigger and bullets come out. Cargill says that's incorrect; bump stocks don't alter the trigger at all

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Justice Kagan says that with a bump stock, you can hold the trigger and bullets come out. Cargill says that's incorrect; bump stocks don't alter the trigger at all

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Justice Jackson is asking why the chemical reaction after the trigger is pulled isn't the single function that causes the gun to fire automatically. Like all of Jackson's other arguments, Cargill says that is also incorrect

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Good Lord! So the FedGov is relying not just on the communists on the court, but the general stupidity as well.

I listened to the arguments in Cargill before the SCOTUS for a few minutes. I’m out of time with this and cannot devote more to it. I’ll embed Mark Smith when he comes out with an analysis of it.

They’re focused on procedural issues, and nothing more. There is nothing in the arguments or even the attorney presentations dealing with the legality of the ATF just making up rules out of whole cloth.

Prediction: They will issue a ruling addressing the minutia of the procedural rules and punt this back down to the lower courts. They will avoid the issue entirely and thus free and exonerate themselves of holding anyone in the FedGov accountable.

Finally, the attorney for the plaintiff absolutely blew it. His presentation was awful, his speech stammering and stuttering, and he was slow on the responses, wasting time in his presentation.

And never forget. You have Trump to thank for this.

Pure trash.

A wise man once told me that organizations take on the personality of their managers. Or another way of saying it may be that these people seek each other out. Or another way of saying it in a more pedestrian fashion may be that “Birds of a feather flock together.” Unless DEI has affected them.

They think this way because their chief of police thinks this way. The chief of police thinks this way because the city management thinks this way. They are all the same.

They don’t care. To them, they own your children – you don’t. They don’t function in loco parentis, at least as they see it. By preventing fathers from rescuing and saving their own children, they were merely controlling their own assets and property.

Get your children out of public schools. I know. There are some good ones, they say. Listen to me on this. All of your teachers have been trained by Marxists and controllers. All of them. Even if they don’t make a scene of it, that’s coming through whether you know it or not.

And remember. There is never a situation so bad or desperate that it cannot be made worse by the presence of the police.

h/t Wisco.

The Uvalde police who stood in the hall for over an hour as over 40 children and teachers were shot (21 died) were quick to arrest parents of the victims like Brett Cross for making public outbursts at County Commissioners they accuse of a coverup. pic.twitter.com/iZRSu8cbqd

— @amuse (@amuse) February 27, 2024

I don’t know what the SCOTUS will do. I suspect the two “conservative” women on the court, Roberts and Barrett, will side with the FedGov. If that’s the case, then there’s pain ahead because the ATF will use this to reinterpret semi-automatic weapons as machine guns and demand registration, tax stamp, and ATF approval of all semiautomatic firearms, which is what they want anyway.

Oh, and never forget that you have Trump to thank for this. And also, never forget that the FBI wouldn’t let the ATF examine the weapons after Las Vegas and it was never demonstrated that Paddock used bump stocks.

Source.

A reporter for Politico is firing back at critics she says are taking her out of context based on comments she made bashing “Christian nationalists.”

Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Politico national investigative correspondent Heidi Przybyla was asked about the “infusion of Christian nationalism” in Congress following the appointment of Louisiana representative and devout Christian Mike Johnson as House Speaker.

“The base of the Republican Party has shifted, right?” Przybyla began. “Remember when Trump ran in 2016, a lot of the mainline evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the divorced, you know, real estate mogul who had cheated on his wife with a porn star and all of that. So what happened was he was surrounded by this more extremist element. They’re gonna hear words like ‘Christian nationalism,’ like the ‘New Apostolic reformation.’ These are groups that you should get very, very schooled on because they have a lot of power in Trump’s circle.”

“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists – not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different – is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining- man, men, it is men are determining what God is telling them,” Przybyla said.

[ … ]

“That is NOT what I said & you know it. Why don’t you play the full clip?” Przybyla reacted to Miller’s viral post of her comments. “I said men are making their own policy interpretation of natural law. MLK did so w social justice. You’re welcome to as well but you don’t speak for all Christians & certainly not for God.”

She later added, “While there are different wings of Christian Nationalism, they are bound by their belief that our rights come from God. If you are Hindu, Jewish etc, this might help you understand the next part of my point, which is they are using this for a man-made policy agenda… which distinguishes this from other Christians who leave these God-given rights at our inherent right to ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ — vs banning abortion, contraception etc.”

She’s a ditz. She sounds like a second-grader. She wouldn’t be able to think her way out of a wet paper bag to save her life. Unfortunately, the study of epistemology has gone by the wayside.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge – where it comes from, how you define its basis or foundation, in short, how one would assign positive or negative truth-value to propositions. Additionally, in order to study philosophy properly, one has to learn syllogistic reasoning, the role of presuppositions, pre-theoretical commitments, or axiomatic irredicibles.

She knows none of those things. Notice how quickly and naively she completely reverses the order of things. God speaking authoritatively and clearly through His Holy Writ is man making things up as they go. But the notion of rights coming from the congress or courts somehow avoid that trap. It’s astonishing, really, how stupid she is and in fact how stupid most young Americans are.

But she did land on something – even as a blind squirrel finds a nut I guess. That is the concept of natural law and how it can be twisted. This writer is smarter than she is and so he should have done a better job with this.

Now at last let’s answer the question this column’s title posed. If someone actually asks you whether you are a “Christian Nationalist,” there are several things you could say — depending on whether you thought the person sincerely confused or deluded, or instead was trying to trap you as the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus. Here are a few sample responses, for use in different contexts, to the question, “Are you a … Christian Nationalist?”

• “Are you a pagan globalist? Just wondering.”
• “That’s a hate-mongering dog-whistle, like Josef Goebbels’ made-up slur ‘Judeo-Bolshevik.’ Would you ask a Jewish person if he were one of those?”
• “I believe that Natural Law, revealed to everyone Christian or not, ought to undergird all our laws. I learned that from reading Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ Do you think he was wrong? The Nazis did. They persecuted people for promoting Natural Law.”
• “I’m a patriotic Christian, like George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Pope John Paul II. What do you think I should be instead?”

No, don’t quote Martin Luther King. That’s an appeal to emotion or might be the genetic fallacy – and appeal to authority, or at least, one whom many men won’t criticize. Martin Luther King knew no more about epistemology that the ditz above did. And no, don’t appeal to so-called “natural law.”

Natural law, which is in fact one of the pillars of Roman Catholicism, comes from the Thomistic synthesis, or the combination of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. I won’t bother you with the details, but you can do your own reading on the Thomistic synthesis. Every student of philosophy has done some or will do some reading on that most important part of history.

It relies on what the reformers would call general revelation, which as they point out is enough to hold all men accountable for the fact that there is a God and He is our creator, but not enough to save a man. That requires special revelation, i.e., the revelation found in the Holy Scriptures.

Besides, Paul points out in Romans Chapter 1 that men suppress the truth in unrighteousness, just as congress and the supreme court do. Natural law, or general revelation, gets twisted by wicked men, contrary to the ditz above who believes that God’s words are the only twisted thing. She has it exactly backwards.

No, God has spoken, he was clear (it’s called the perspicuity of Scripture), it’s authoritative, and it’s final. God has declared that all men everywhere are accountable to Him, and in addition, that life is sacred and not only deserves but demands defense. We have discussed that at length and in detail before.

You don’t need to turn to silly, childish arguments or appeal to emotion or other logical fallacies. For the difference between right and wrong, turn to the Scriptures. Yes, yes, I know, the animal kingdom teaches us that all animals defend their lives, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t care. Men aren’t animals and I don’t need to study the African safari to understand that God demands that I defend my own life and those of my family. I need only to turn to the Scriptures.

I am not a libertarian, and moreover I don’t believe in natural law. I am a Christian libertarian, and I believe in God’s law.

He makes a good case, but my question is why hasn’t the SCOTUS taken up one of the AWB cases yet? Are they still running from it like screaming little girls? That would be appropriate for Roberts and Barrett.

Regarding the bump stock ban, you have Trump to thank for that, along with the notion of making laws up by sitting in in the Oval office and telling the ATF what laws to make and the awful precedent that sets. Never forget that.

I watched it all but didn’t have to.  Is the 30-30 still relevant?  You betcha!

Especially with the newer cartridges.  In fact, Ryan’s point at the end was what I’ve known for a long time. The best 30-30 performance approaches (even if it doesn’t exactly equal) the .308.

Texas Monthly.

By the age of thirty, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring high-risk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-twenties, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God.

So as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, he couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.”

As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land stretched out before him, a rustic valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment.

But mostly, he thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, seven-inch tusks to stab him at least fifteen times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.

It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig. “For years, that animal trusted me everyday and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”

They’re not pets. Feral hogs will kill you, folks.

Source.

A bill introduced in the Louisiana House would ban state and local enforcement of federal gun control; past, present, and future. Passage into law would represent a major step toward ending federal acts that infringe on the right to keep and bear arms within the state.

Rep. Danny McCormick introduced House Bill 62 (HB62) on Feb. 6. Titled the Second Amendment Preservation Act, the legislation would prohibit the use of state personnel or resources for the enforcement of any federal gun control.

No public office, public officer, employee, or political subdivision of this state shall enforce or attempt to enforce, give or attempt to give material aid to, or participate in the enforcement of any federal acts, executive orders, administrative orders, rules, regulations, statutes, or ordinances regarding firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition against any law-abiding citizen.

“Law abiding citizen” is defined in the bill as “any person who is not otherwise precluded under state law from possessing a firearm and shall not be construed to include anyone who is not legally present in the United States or the state of Louisiana”

It also bars public offices and state employees from providing “material aid” for enforcement of the same. Material aid is defined as “any assistance that allows a person to make use of lodging, communications equipment or services, social media accounts, facilities, weapons, personnel, transportation, clothing, or other physical assets. This term shall not include the provision or allowance of the use of medicine or other materials necessary to treat physical injuries or assistance to aid the escape of a serious, present risk of life-threatening injury.”

This is a good move and should pass muster. However, it’s the easy part. The much harder part is passing legislation that uses local and state law enforcement to prevent enforcement of federal gun control laws by agents of the federal government.

Doubtless the supreme court wouldn’t like it, but hey, states and courts everywhere in America routinely ignore Bruen, Heller, McDonald and Caetano without anyone on the SCOTUS showing any interest whatsoever.