Reuters:

The teen organizers of Saturday’s nationwide “March for Our Lives,” aimed at toughening gun laws to help stop school shootings in the United States, have won kudos and cash from dozens of celebrities, helping to raise their national profile.

The April 2 cover of Time magazine will feature five students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida who have organized rallies, walk-outs and challenged U.S. lawmakers since the February 14 mass shooting at the school that left 17 students and staff dead.

Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Hudson, Demi Lovato and Common are due to be among performers at Saturday’s main march in Washington D.C., while “Trainwreck” actress Amy Schumer and pop star Charlie Puth are expected to headline a march in Los Angeles, organizers said.

“So inspired by the incredible students behind #MarchForOurLives. Can’t wait to join them in DC to perform and show my support,” Cyrus tweeted earlier this week.

“Proud of these kids,” Justin Bieber wrote on Twitter.

Winfrey, Clooney, director Steven Spielberg and Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg have donated an aggregate of $2 million to the “March for Our Lives” movement. Clooney and his wife Amal have said they would march with the students on Saturday.

“This is their moment,” Winfrey told Reuters Television in praising the students. “They are the new young warriors of the light.”

“Groundhog Day” actor Murray compared them to the young protesters of the 1960s who helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.

Reuters is lying.  The students didn’t organize anything.  Everytown is organizing and managing the entire process.  The students are just being used.

The lie notwithstanding, make no mistake about what’s happening here.  This is a religious quest for them.  The language (“warriors of the light”) has very direct theological import.

This is a worship service, and they wanted to have the high priests of paganism there to preach sermons to them.  Thus, the priests were made available.

I know I have readers who do not hold to my own theological views or my Christian beliefs.  But you can be sure that your gun controller enemies aren’t atheists.  Their religion is collectivism, and their god is the state.  You’re on notice that they’ve declared war on you.

NBC News:

Experts say it is difficult to know what to do in those situations, but Dr. James Fox, an expert on gun violence and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder,” said it’s dangerous to assume that the mentally ill tend to commit these shootings.

“There’s not really a correlation,” said Fox, who maintains a database on mass shootings. “We like to think that these people are different from the rest of us. We want a simple explanation and if we just say they’re mentally ill, case closed. Because of how fearful dangerous and deadly their actions are, we really want to distance ourselves from it and relegate it to illness.”

Of course, he’s telling us things my readers already know.  Or said another way, he’s trying to teach his granny to suck eggs.

USA Today:

Appearing on the PBS NewsHour the day after the shooting, Deborah Epstein, co-director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center, claimed there is a strong correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings.  “If you look at all the mass shootings that have occurred on U.S. soil,” said Epstein, “the vast majority of them have been committed by people who have perpetrated domestic violence against an intimate partner, a series of intimate partners, or are in the process of dealing with domestic violence.”

In a one-week follow-up story about the church shooting, a headline in the San Antonio Express-News read, “Are mass killings and domestic violence linked? It depends who you ask.” You’d think such a determination would be a matter of fact, not opinion. Unfortunately, in the media version of the children’s game of telephone, the message is easily misinterpreted as it gets repeated from one news source to another.

“There is an obvious link between mass shootings and domestic violence,” suggested Susan Higginbotham, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She at least cited her evidence: “A study last year by Everytown for Gun Safety, which used FBI data and media reports to analyze mass shootings from January 2009 to December 2016, showed that 54% of the perpetrators of these horrific mass killings had a history of domestic or family violence.”

Higginbotham was only partially correct, misconstruing the most important point. The Everytown study did indeed find that 54% of mass shootings involved intimate partners or family members as victims. In this majority, however, the domestic violence was the mass shooting of family members, and not necessarily a history of previous domestic violence.

Everytown’s case summaries of 156 shootings from 2009 through 2016 (in which four or more victims are killed), reveal 85 incidents in which a gunman murdered at least some current or former intimate partners or family members. Of these, 41% were preceded by other acts of domestic violence. Among the entire pool of mass shootings, only 25% revealed any indication of prior domestic violence.

Even if a majority of mass shootings were preceded by violence against intimate partners or family, that still would hardly serve as a reliable predictor of mass murder. There are, unfortunately, at least 10 million incidents of domestic violence every year, according to estimates reported by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. By contrast, there are, on average, about 22 mass shootings annually with at least four fatalities. Were we to predict mass murder on this basis of domestic violence, we would be wrong well more than 99% of the time.

Just in case you missed it, the author, James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University, just completely demolished the Everytown argument.  It is history.  They should bow their heads and hide in shame.  Everytown is a fake, a fraud and a sham.  Their arguments are flimflam and claptrap.

So what is a controller to do when she runs out of ostensibly legitimate excuses?  Why, just go ahead and admit that you want the state to have a monopoly on violence, that you’re controllers, statists and collectivists, and an armed citizenry is an impediment to your statists dreams.

Go ahead and admit it.

John Feinblatt of Everytown:

When militia members and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday with Nazi flags and racist placards, many of them also carried firearms openly, including semiautomatic weapons. They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police. If you read reports of the physical attacks they abetted, apparently their plan worked.

They might try to rationalize their conduct as protected by the First and Second Amendments, but let’s not be fooled. Those who came to Charlottesville openly carrying firearms were neither conveying a nonviolent political message, nor engaged in self-defense nor protecting hearth and home.

Plain and simple, public terror is not protected under the Constitution. That has been the case throughout history. And now is the time to look to that history and prohibit open carry, before the next Charlottesville.

Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror. During Reconstruction, the military governments overseeing much of the South responded to racially motivated terror (including the murder of dozens of freedmen and Republicans at the 1866 Louisiana Constitutional Convention) by prohibiting public carry either generally or at political gatherings and polling places. Later, in 1886, a Supreme Court decision, Presser v. Illinois, upheld a law forbidding groups of men to “parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized.” For states, such a law was “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.”

In other words, our political forebears would not have tolerated open carry as racially motivated terrorists practiced it in Charlottesville. They did not view open carry as protected speech. According to the framers, the First Amendment protected the right to “peaceably” — not violently or threateningly — assemble. The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon. Open carry was antithetical to “the public peace.” Lawmakers were not about to let people take the law into their own hands, so they proactively and explicitly prohibited it.

Today, the law in most states is silent on open carry — and because most states do not explicitly prohibit it, it becomes de facto legal. Because it is legal, open-carry extremists take full advantage of this loophole, typically operating up to and even past the limits of the law. They carry everywhere, and the predictable result is the open carry of semiautomatic weapons in Charlottesville.

“They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police.”  This is so ass backwards on so many accounts it needs to be addressed.  First of all, the police weren’t intimidated.  Period.  The police have automatic weapons, MRAPs, and other weaponry that the militias didn’t have.  Feinblatt isn’t considering the possibility that the police were complicit in the whole thing.

But complicit in what?  The protest was by the militias, not Antifa.  They had permits, Antifa didn’t.  They were peaceable, Antifa wasn’t.  I said Feinblatt isn’t considering the possibility that Antifa and the police were on the same side, but in reality, he probably knows it and doesn’t want a conflict to go to waste to craft his anti-gun message.  But the point wasn’t to intimidate, but to protest.  Their carbines didn’t even have rounds chambered.  I’ve tried to consider whether I would have allowed myself to be put in those circumstances without a chambered round, and I think the answer is a resolute no.  The militias showed great restraint, contrary to the picture painted by Feinblatt.

Next, consider his statement that “Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror.”  Prove it.  And when Feinblatt tries to prove it, consider what we already know.

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

When the British government began to increase its military presence in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts responded by calling upon its citizens to arm themselves in defense. One colonial newspaper argued that it was impossible to complain that this act was illegal since they were “British subjects, to whom the privilege of possessing arms is expressly recognized by the Bill of Rights” while another argued that this “is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defense”. The newspaper cited Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, which had listed the “having and using arms for self preservation and defense” among the “absolute rights of individuals.” The colonists felt they had an absolute right at common law to own firearms.

But Feinblatt says “colonies.”  What colonies, when?  Prove it.  I want proof, Feinblatt.  Be specific.  As for his notion that the militia didn’t carry their weapons for the purpose of self defense, so the second amendment cannot apply (“The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon”), he misses the point of the second amendment, or more specifically, he really knows the point but wants you to miss it.

The second amendment is specifically about what he says it is not.  It is about the amelioration of tyranny, not personal self defense.  But since he reserves the right of collective violence only to the state, he never applies his missive to the police, who were complicit in the sins of Charlottesville.  He applies it to the only peaceable, law-abiding men there that day.  Because night is day, black is white, and every day is backwards day to the progressive.

Regardless of the moral backwardness of Everytown and their ilk, you should expect that our battle to ensure legal open carry in all fifty states will get infinitely harder, and there will be many attempts to reverse the open carry laws already on the books.  You can count on it.

Politico:

Preparing for life with Donald Trump as president and Republican majorities in Congress, Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group is threatening to spend more than $25 million in 2018 races.

Everytown for Gun Safety, founded and funded by the billionaire former New York City mayor, is hiring several new top staffers and turning much of its attention to state legislatures, while moving to a defensive posture in Washington as it tries to stop what’s known as “concealed carry reciprocity” from becoming law. That will include starting to score congressional votes, like the National Rifle Association does, to guide spending decisions more directly.

We knew that collectivists never give up, and neither can we.  Unfortunately, Bloomberg has been moderately successful at the state level in blue states at infringing more on gun rights.  That’s why as I’ve recommended to nice people that you can’t be nice with Everytown.  You have go to war with them.  They are at war with you and your rights, and war is interested in you whether you’re interested or not.  It remains a bright spot in my blogging history that Jennifer Mascia came into my back yard on behalf of Everytown and tried to run with the big dogs (my commenters) and got chewed up.

As for what Trump has or hasn’t done on our behalf, while I’m disappointed in the degree of control that McMaster seems to have over him and his entry into the war to topple Syria, there are bright spots in Trump’s brief history of appointments.

Jesse Panuccio, the third-highest ranking official at the Department of Justice, has argued to allow firearms sales to people under age 21 and in defense of a Florida law that prohibited doctors from asking patients if they owned guns.

Noel Francisco, Donald Trump’s nominee for solicitor general, has described the Second Amendment as “a structural protection that’s intended to protect all other rights.”

And Tom Wheeler, now a senior lawyer in the DOJ’s civil rights division, once gave a speech with the title: “Arming Teachers to Prevent Tragedies, Responding to Sandy Hook.”

Forget for a moment that Sandy Hook was a false flag.  These are good appointments (go read the entire article).  On the other hand, I hold out very little hope that national carry reciprocity or the hearing protection act will get traction (much less amending or outright undoing the NFA).  The gaggle of gargoyles and demons that inhabits the House and Senate has no interest in your rights, and even if they did, trying to get anything useful done is like trying to herd cats.

So I can only recommend that you don’t wait on national carry, and if you wanted to suppressor or SBR, go ahead and get it and file the paperwork.  If there is success on the horizon, I just don’t see it.  Perhaps I’m just being pessimistic.

What do my readers think?