Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Mr. Jones (todd.jones@publix.com),

It is with great sadness that I write to you.  I have readers who have already done so, but I thought I should weigh in on your recent decision to ban open carry in your stores.

I had occasion to shop at Publix on Saturday and asked to talk to the manager.  He was a delightful man, very respectful, but just a bit ill-informed on what the law says about open carry and leaving me a bit confused on your policy.

I informed the gentleman that I chose to shop at Publix not only because I can openly carry, which is entirely legal in North Carolina, but also because I wanted to reward Publix for your stand.  I had previously been told by the store manager that Publix follows state law, whatever that happens to be.

In North Carolina, that has worked just fine.  No one gives me strange looks, women and children don’t run screaming for the doors, and sometimes store employees even discuss it with me, asking me what brand of firearm I have, asking about my recommendations for purchases, and so forth.

Your manager brought up the issue of the recent shootings in El Paso and elsewhere, saying that they would not allow something like an AR-15 to be brought into the store, and I explained to him that, as he knew, it was legal to openly carry a firearm in North Carolina.  If I touched my weapon, that’s called brandishing, and it’s illegal.  If I unholstered it, or pointed it towards anyone, that’s called assault with a deadly weapon, and it’s illegal.  He had not previously understood that.  The shooter in El Paso broke the law the second he exited his automobile holding a rifle.

When asked for clarification on the new Publix policy, he explained that Publix would “respectfully request” that people not openly carry in Publix stores, but that legally they could not do anything about it.  That’s not true, I explained.  I must respect the wishes of private property owners and refrain from openly carrying if I know the request has been made.

You see, there is no easy way around this.  You cannot have your cake and eat it too.  You cannot please the forces of gun control while at the same time leaving room for me to openly carry in Publix stores by merely “requesting” that I not openly carry, leaving it to my discretion because “there’s legally nothing you can do about it.”

I suspect that your HR department, your financial people, and your legal department, have made a choice to involve you in corporate gun control as social signaling at the country club.  You’ve been backed into a corner by your own people, and perhaps too stolid to understand that.  Otherwise, this decision is entirely on you, and you should be considered 100% responsible for the new policy.

Which is it, sir?  Were you backed into a corner by your own people, who convinced you that there was a happy medium on this issue?  Or was this your decision?  Who is it that wants to virtue signal at the country club?  Are you a member of a country club, sir?

In either case, I cannot say enough to express my disappointment with your company.  I explained to the manager that while I may have to make a pragmatic decision and shop at Publix in the future because only you happen to have a product and someone else doesn’t, I will not longer happily reward Publix with my hard earned money as a patron.  You are not entitled to my hard earned money.  You must earn it, and this decision is a huge blow against your account.

Don’t you see how much easier it would be had you simply told the controllers to go away, and that “You follow state law, whatever that may be?”  It works fine here in North Carolina.  How would you like it if we came to Florida and forced our own laws on you?

See this report, and then watch this video.

Horace Mann was very effective at educating a new generation of communists, yes?  The funny thing is that I agree that our children are not our own, but not in the way they do.

They believe in the dictum “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”  I’ll leave it to the reader to ascertain the origin of this quote.

No, neither my children nor my grandchildren belong to me.  Neither do they belong to the state.  I am not an anarchist/libertarian, and I am not a statist.

I am a Christian.  That means when I baptized my children, they were marked into the covenant.  They belong to God, and God will do with them as He wishes.  They are accountable to Him, as I am for teaching, raising and training them up in a world and life view that honors Him.  I am God’s custodian and servant, I am in responsible charge of His living creation.  That’s an awesome responsibility.  It cannot be turned over to the state.

For once, I agree with a collectivist, but I still find myself on opposite sides.  The state wants to be God.  I will always war against that notion.

Independent Sentinel.

Democrats advanced a new measure this week to encourage states to pass “red flag” laws. These so-called extreme risk protection orders authorize removing guns and ammunition from individuals deemed as dangerous by some anonymous, unaccountable person, but it would not include the ready-made lists of gang members.

Republicans tried to add an amendment including known gang members, but the Democrats will not permit the inclusion of gang databases. It’s odd since gangs are the ones causing most of the so-called gun violence.

They would agree to include the names of white supremacists, but not other terror groups.

The House Judiciary rejected any effort by Republicans to include gang databases since they are worried about people mistakenly taken for a gang member. They brought up the ‘no-fly, no-buy’ list which was filled with inaccuracies, but Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican, who hoped to amend the measure to include gang databases, reminded the Democrats the restrictions for placing someone on a gang database are much tougher than the no-fly list.

“White supremacists.”  If you believe that the U.S. should close the borders, that includes you.  As for the rest of it, this little tidbit is just rich: “They brought up the ‘no-fly, no-buy’ list which was filled with inaccuracies …”

Yes it is, but whether it falsely flags “white supremacists” is another story.  They care about the one, but not the other.

Frank Clarke.

“It’s sad to see a highly-respected American corporation cravenly bending the knee to the forces of darkness. It shows a lack of courage. It shows a lack of foresight. It shows a lack of knowledge or, worse, a rejection of knowledge.

Only two states, Texas and Florida, keep statistics on “does this arrestee have a weapons permit?”. The data from these two states is startling. Lawful gun-carriers are arrested (not convicted, just arrested) at rates between 1/7th and 1/13th the rate for the general population, depending on the year chosen. What that means is that the people who go to the trouble of getting a carry permit are among the safest, most law-abiding people in the country. As a class, they are more law-abiding than the police, and your policy is to insult them and treat them as if they were criminals-in-waiting. Was that your intent or did you simply not think this all the way through?

Recall, as well, that on August 8th, an ordinary citizen — not law enforcement — stopped a potential mass shooting at a Wal-Mart in Springfield MO. Are you publicly asserting that you don’t want any of your customers intervening to stop such incidents in your stores? That would be a surprise, and not a pleasant one, either.

Principles are funny things. They sometimes cause us to say things or do things that others — often ‘others who lack much in the way of principles’ — interpret negatively. That is, alas, what Publix’s latest announcement looks like. It looks like Publix flinched in order to avoid ‘bad PR’ from people whose thinking doesn’t extend beyond “guns bad”. Those same people see the world as full of evildoers who wish nothing so much as to harm others. In such a world, people with guns are a positive danger.

You might suspect that I hold a different view, and you would be correct. I believe our world, despite the occasional ‘bad apple’, is full of loving people who care about their neighbors and want them to live happy, safe, and prosperous lives.

How do you see the world?”

Via David Codrea, I already knew this but it bears repeating.

The CFR and other illegal immigration supporting groups have made it clear that open-borders, global and regional governance over America, Amnesty for illegals, and full gun confiscation are their top agenda items.

I’ve told y’all about the CFR before.  Beware an organization like this one.

“The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence, and submergence into an all-powerful one-world government.”

I’ve mentioned the CFR when discussing child trafficking, precious gems, precious metals, oil pipelines, various military contractors, etc.  Members of the CFR include employees at the U.S. Department of State, Saudi oil tycoons, U.S. journalists, high ranking members of the U.S. military or former military (Petraeus, McMaster, etc.), former VPs (Dick Cheney), owners of large businesses in the military industrial complex, and on the list could go.  It’s the closest thing to a public face on the “deep state” as you’ll find.

They all want the same thing for you and yours.

Politico:

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday differences between Republicans are “all reconcilable” on gun control legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week that strengthening background checks and so-called red flag laws “will be front and center” when addressing gun violence in the Senate after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio left at least 32 people dead.

But John Barrasso of Wyoming the No. 3 GOP senator, told reporters Friday he has “a lot of concerns about the due process component of“ red flag laws, adding he doesn’t “want to punish law-abiding citizens.”

Asked about the conflicting responses, Conway said on “Fox News Sunday” it’s “all reconcilable.”

[ … ]

“We can protect people’s civil liberties, privacy, constitutional rights and public safety all at the right time,” Conway said.

“A” can be “not-A” at the same time it’s “A.”  I guess she believes in the tooth fairy too.

So either Trump (or his communications people) sent her out to parrot those words, or she believes them and is counseling the White House (and thus, Trump).

Either way, it doesn’t portend good things and it once again demonstrates that Trump is out to alienate the base that put him in office.

David Codrea:

It’s telling that The Hunt is coming from an industry that relies on fantasy depictions of gun use for so much of its profits and special operator class armed security for protecting its elites while simultaneously being such a major social and political influencer for disarming its customers.

I haven’t heard much about this silly tripe, but I did see one short clip where someone who was being hunted by Antifa was cowering in fear and trying (unsuccessfully) to hide.  From this little clip, it’s obvious that the “hunters” don’t understand their supposed prey.

‘Nuff said.

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
– St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803

Cited by David Codrea.  His article at Firearms News is full of important commentary on the current state of affairs, and the apparent current support for a new AWB if only enough rulers would favor it.

Don’t miss the fact that Mitch McConnell feels pressured.

“The urgency of this is not lost on any of us,” McConnell said.

But he noted the bar for legislation includes passing the House, garnering 60 votes in the Senate and a presidential signature.

He did not rule out looking at a ban on assault weapons, but noted there is a dispute over whether the 1994 ban that expired in 2004 had showed results.

“It’s certainly one of the front and center issues,” he said. “But what we can’t do is fail to pass something. What I want to see here is an outcome, not a bunch of partisan back and forths, shots across the bow.”

It’s urgent.  They must do something, because politics.  Codrea points out that Trump has jettisoned his base of gun owners.

Since Donald Trump was elected, the gun community has seen the president bypass Congress and ban bump stocks, support over 21 gun purchases, a Department of State over 32-round magazine ban for civilian firearms exports, push red flag laws which destroy the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th and 5^th Amendments, and a complete ignoring of the evisceration of the 2^nd Amendment in the states of: CA, OR, WA, IL, NM, NV, VT, FL, NY, NJ, MA, etc… And then there is his statement that he “doesn’t like” silencers.

Yes, and I’ll point out one more time that Florida received an influx of Puerto Ricans after the hurricane who will likely vote collectivist, Trump won North Carolina by a small margin, and he is in trouble in Ohio, possibly Georgia and perhaps even Texas.  The road to victory in the next election is narrow.

But it’s like that when you have no principles and undercut the very base you used to put you in office.  We are where we are because enough people didn’t ask Trump the hard questions on his core belief in gun rights (or enough people didn’t listen when I asked the hard questions on core beliefs).  It appears he doesn’t have any.

CTC:

In addition to this, over the last few years, we have seen—certainly across the English-speaking and Western world—an increase in seriousness and coherence of extreme right-wing groups. It used to look like the extreme right was made up of political movements, and when they conducted violent acts, it was often a lone actor. What we are seeing now is groups of likeminded individuals coming together and talking in a type of language and approach that is used by violent Islamists, using words such as “embracing martyrdom.” In part, this is a response to the broader political context. The far-right parties and movements now have an increasingly coherent narrative, and stronger links to a shared philosophy. Books which espouse this extreme right-wing philosophy are readily available on Amazon, where they have multiple five-star reviews, very few negative reviews, and through algorithms lead the reader to other similarly extreme material. We have not yet worked out, as we did previously with violent Islamist material, what is and is not acceptable on the extreme right-wing side of the ideological equation. The New Zealand attack demonstrated this very clearly when he titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” drawing on a French right-wing philosophical tract of the same name.

This apparently passes for scholarship at the center.  We’ve discussed this before, how the nexus connecting the shooters in New Zealand, El Paso and Dayton is: Eco-terrorism, a desire for universally guaranteed income, belief in gun control philosophy, and general anti-religious zealotry.  The shooters were much closer to Antifa than any right wing cause, as pointed out just today (fortunately for readers, you hear it here first).

She passes on the false narrative that these were right wing extremists.  But the important thing isn’t that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  I expect that.  The important thing is that the CTC at West Point has their eyes on “right wing extremism” in America.

Whatever that is.

IBT:

Visa Inc. said it won’t stop customers from using its services to buy guns in the United States.

The CEO of Visa, the world’s dominant credit card outside China, said the company will continue to facilitate gun purchases as long as it remains legal for Americans to buy firearms. Visa acts as a payment processor for purchases.

In contrast, other payment companies such as PayPal and Square don’t allow their services to be used for gun purchases. Mastercard, however, has taken a position similar to that of Visa’s as regards the self-regulation of gun purchases.

“We are guided by the federal laws in a country, and our job is to create and to facilitate fair and secure commerce,” Visa Chairman and CEO Alfred Kelly told CNBC. “We shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda. We shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs.”

Visa’s stand on its role in facilitating gun purchases hasn’t changed over the past year.

Thus will I continue to support Visa.