quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Do you understand their position on the subject?

They say they support the constitutional right to own guns but want to restrict certain “assault“ rifles and large capacity magazines to the public.

Once in while, someone sneaks a logical opinion piece into the the Washington (Com) Post. However, the comments reflect the paper's uber-liberal "thinking."

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.2e8b857887bc

Attacking the NRA is really attacking everyday Americans

By Marc A. Thiessen February 28 at 8:04 AM

A few weeks before the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (Tex.) invited a special guest to attend the State of the Union address: Stephen Willeford, the hero who just months earlier had stopped a mass shooter at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex.

An ordinary citizen who heard the shots from his home across the street, Willeford grabbed his weapon, ran to the scene barefoot (knowing every second he delayed could mean another life lost) and exchanged fire with the gunman, wounding him in the leg and torso. When the killer jumped into his vehicle to escape, Willeford stopped a passing vehicle and followed in hot pursuit until the shooter crashed his car and shot himself in the head.

Willeford says he’s not a hero. “I’m no brave man. I was terrified,” he said after the shooting. But, he added, “I was there when nobody else was.” Thank God he was.

Here’s something else you need to know about Willeford. First, he is a long-time National Rifle Association instructor; it was his NRA training that allowed him to subdue the shooter. Second, the weapon he used to stop the killing spree in Sutherland Springs was an AR-15 — the very weapon gun-control advocates now want to ban. Without an AR-15, he says, he might not have stopped the killer. “If I had run out of the house with a pistol and faced a bulletproof vest and Kevlar and helmets, it might have been futile,” he said. Because of his weapon, his training and his courage, countless lives were probably saved.

They could have used a Stephen Willeford in Parkland.

Keep his story in mind as you watch the current movement to boycott the NRA and ban so-called assault weapons. In the wake of the Parkland shooting at least a dozen companies — including United Airlines, Delta, Best Western and First National Bank of Omaha — have joined the NRA boycott. Chubb Limited insurance even announced it would cancel a program, “NRA Carry Guard,” which provided insurance for NRA members who faced lawsuits for using their weapons in self-defense. When companies do this, they are not boycotting lobbyists in Washington; they are boycotting upstanding citizens such as Willeford. He and his fellow gun owners deserve better.

The NRA is a grass-roots organization made up of millions of decent, patriotic Americans who believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens make our country safer, not more dangerous. To suggest that it is responsible for what happened in Parkland is obscene. Police officers were called to shooter Nikolas Cruz’s house on 39 separate occasions since 2010. The FBI was warned about the shooter in January and failed to adhere to its own procedures to follow up. An armed sheriff’s deputy was on the scene at the shooting, but he failed to act. And yet somehow the NRA is at fault? Please.

The NRA is far from perfect. I’ve criticized the NRA leadership’s resistance to legislation banning “bump stocks.” And there is nothing sacrosanct about the age of 18 for buying certain guns (or voting for that matter).

But NRA members have done more to prevent gun deaths, and promote firearms safety, than any other citizens’ association in the country. When Democrats respond to shootings like the one in Parkland by demonizing the NRA and calling for a ban on weapons such as the AR-15 that are critical to Americans’ right to self-defense, they send a clear and unmistakable message to millions of gun owners across the country: We don’t respect you or your gun rights. This makes it harder to reach bipartisan agreement on solutions that could improve public safety without threatening the fundamental constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms.

We all want to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people such as Nikolas Cruz. But we should all want to keep guns in the hands of responsible citizens such as Stephen Willeford. That’s not the case today. Willeford deserves a medal, not a boycott. If corporate America can’t figure that out and continues capitulating to the NRA boycott movement, maybe it is time for gun owners to boycott them.

Marc Thiessen writes a twice-weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Follow @marcthiessen

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes explains that women can't carry concealed weapons

https://youtu.be/g_7vhwvUwrs

"Where are you going to hide that gun ?"

Just sayin.

^^^ Nice boot. That your grandma?

Did anyone wonder why the Broward Sheriff's office made umpteen calls on the soon-to-be mass murderer but never made an arrest? Just bad policing? Bad protocols? But wait! There's more!:

quote:

Parkland and the culture of leniency
Daniel Horowitz convincingly ties the Parkland shooting to the culture of leniency towards criminals, also known as the jailbreak agenda. He writes:

The jailbreak agenda is definitely on display in the Broward County law enforcement agencies. It turns out that Broward County has been promoting a program, funded in part by the federal government, to incentivize local officials to do everything they can to keep juveniles out of jail. . . .

As Catharine Evans writes at the American Thinker, Broward County “had the highest number of school-related arrests statewide at 1,062” before Obama began his Common Core-style grant programs for local jailbreak agendas. Once millions of dollars were doled out for juvenile feel-good programs to avoid arrest, such as the PROMISE program, the number of arrests plummeted by 63 percent from 2011-2012 to the 2015-2016 school year.

The Obama administration touted this dubious achievement by Broward County. In fact, the school district’s superintendent was invited to the White House in 2015 for an event, “Rethink Discipline,” that would highlight the success of Broward and other localities’ success in “transforming policies and school climate.”

However, as Broward County Sheriff Deputies Association President Jeff Bell told Laura Ingraham, PROMISE “took all discretion away from law enforcement to effect an arrest if we choose to.”

If law enforcement had retained discretion, there’s a good chance Cruz would have been arrested and/or committed. After all, the sheriff’s department received dozens of credible complaints against him. Some described his violent acts and tendencies, others his threats to shoot up the school.

Moreover, as Kent Scheidegger points out, Cruz was expelled for bringing weapons to school. And when he got into a fight in September of 2016, he was referred to social workers rather than to the police. Similarly, when he allegedly assaulted a student in January 2017, it triggered a school-based threat assessment, but no police involvement. The Washington Post notes that Cruz “was well-known to school and mental health authorities and was entrenched in the process for getting students help rather than referring them to law enforcement.”

When I was growing up, there was no chance that a juvenile with a file like Cruz’s would be outside of the justice system. Law enforcement would have been looking for excuses to take him off the street, not making excuses for failing to do so.

But that was before arresting delinquent teenagers came to be considered taboo by the left and by naive conservatives. And before not arresting them became cause for being feted at the White House.

Sheriff Scott Israel provides a perfect example of the new mentality — the culture of leniency. Speaking at a mosque, he remarked:

I have said over and over again, we have to measure the success of the Broward Sherriff’s office by the kids we keep out of jail, not by the kids we put in jail. We have to give our children second chances and third chances.

Unfortunately, Nikolas Cruz’s victims never even had a first chance.

The idea of measuring the success of a law enforcement agency by the number of people not in jail is sheer lunacy. The only valid measurements of success are (1) prevention of crime and (2) apprehension and successful prosecution of criminals. If, instead, we were to measure success by the number of people not in jail, then the most successful sheriffs would be the ones who didn’t arrest anyone, or at least any youths. And the logical way to build on that “success” would be to release those already in custody.

Even the jailbreak lobby isn’t advocating this, but it is pushing things in that direction.

The push should be in the opposite direction. To that end, Horowitz urges the Trump administration to cut off all federal funding for jailbreak grant programs. He also calls on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to rescind all Obama-era agreements and guidance documents pressuring local school districts to change their methods of discipline.

It’s not enough to condemn Scott Israel as incompetent. His incompetence is only part of the story. The rest of the story is the culture of leniency, enshrined in federal policy, that encouraged Israel’s department to keep Nikolas Cruz free to kill.

Link to Powerlineblog.com

The Left: they turn everything they touch to shit.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
^^^ Nice boot. That your grandma?

That looks like a kilt. I'm betting its nobody's grandma. And no, I am *not* asking if the kilt is being worn correctly.

Commanding officer initially ordered responding deputies to 'stage' not enter Stoneman Douglas, sources say

Fox News has learned that in the critical moments as first responding deputies were searching for an active shooter on the property of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, a commanding officer on scene apparently ordered some of the initial responders to “stage” and set up a “perimeter” outside -- instead of immediately ordering or allowing officers to rush in to neutralize the suspect, Nikolas Cruz.

“It’s atrocious,” a law enforcement source who was on the scene after the shooting told Fox News. “If deputies were staging it could have cost lives.”

The law enforcement source said responding deputies and officers were called to an active shooter scene in which they are trained to immediately “go, go, go” toward the direction of the shooter. “Every second is another life,” the source said.

The Broward County Sherrif’s Office policy on active shooters indicates responding deputies may enter the building to preserve life without permission. That remains the priority until various objectives are met such as the shooter being detained. The policy does not appear to list staging -- setting up an area to keep first responders safe before police secure a violent scene -- or a perimeter as an immediate priority.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018...las-sources-say.html

Napolitano: What 'the right to bear arms' really means



http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...p-and-bear-arms.html

quote:

Originally posted by Sigmanic:
Napolitano: What 'the right to bear arms' really means



http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...p-and-bear-arms.html

Sorry, but he lost me in his two opening paragraphs:

quote:

It was no more senseless than other American school shootings, but there is something about the innocence and bravery and eloquence of the youthful survivors that has touched the souls of Americans deeply.

Innocence my butt. They are out there cruising the country on the talk show circuit, seemingly having the time of their lives. The picture of them on the plane Bama posted on page 38 looks more like a Senior class trip to Disney than a group of people who are 'grieving the loss of their classmates/friends.'

quote:

After burying their dead, the survivors have mobilized into a mighty political force that loosely seeks more laws to regulate the right to keep and bear arms. The young people, traumatized and terrified with memories of unspeakable horror that will not fade, hope that a person bent on murder will obey gun laws.

They are not a 'political force.' That's just feeding their collective ego. They are a bunch of ignorant kids being used by the gun control crowd to push an agenda. And, I don't see ANY 'unspeakable horror' in the faces in that picture above.

Maybe he was just buttering up the crowd with his opening (the rest of the article was pretty good).

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:

quote:

Originally posted by Sigmanic:
Napolitano: What 'the right to bear arms' really means



http://www.foxnews.com/opinion...p-and-bear-arms.html

Sorry, but he lost me in his two opening paragraphs:

quote:

It was no more senseless than other American school shootings, but there is something about the innocence and bravery and eloquence of the youthful survivors that has touched the souls of Americans deeply.

Innocence my butt. They are out there cruising the country on the talk show circuit, seemingly having the time of their lives. The picture of them on the plane Bama posted on page 38 looks more like a Senior class trip to Disney than a group of people who are 'grieving the loss of their classmates/friends.'

quote:

After burying their dead, the survivors have mobilized into a mighty political force that loosely seeks more laws to regulate the right to keep and bear arms. The young people, traumatized and terrified with memories of unspeakable horror that will not fade, hope that a person bent on murder will obey gun laws.

They are not a 'political force.' That's just feeding their collective ego. They are a bunch of ignorant kids being used by the gun control crowd to push an agenda. And, I don't see ANY 'unspeakable horror' in the faces in that picture above.

Maybe he was just buttering up the crowd with his opening (the rest of the article was pretty good).

Shame on all those parents for letting their children be exploited in this manner instead of focusing on healing and grieving. If one of my kids went through something like this, he would be home with family and loved ones and counselors if needed.

Shouldn't they be in school??

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
Shouldn't they be in school??

Don't be silly, their on a mission! Not necessarily theirs, but a mission.

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:
They are not a 'political force.' That's just feeding their collective ego. They are a bunch of ignorant kids being used by the gun control crowd to push an agenda. And, I don't see ANY 'unspeakable horror' in the faces in that picture above.

They're the Tide Pod generation, a group I have 'zero' intention of listening to or taking seriously about any topic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.c52f9a294df6

As U.S. gun debate rages on, Australians hand in 57,000 firearms, and Norway is set for a broad ban

By Rick Noack
March 1 at 10:15 AM

As more U.S. companies were showing support for stricter gun laws this week, two foreign governments announced Wednesday that they had made significant progress on restricting access to firearms.

In Australia, authorities revealed that citizens had handed over 57,000 illegal firearms between July and September last year during a gun amnesty. In total, more than 35,000 rifles and more than 12,000 shotguns were turned in, among other firearms.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian government now appears to have a majority for its plan to ban semiautomatic rifles — similar to those used in a string of deadly mass shootings in the United States — by 2021, despite protests from farmers and hunters.

[Trump says some lawmakers too fearful of NRA to act on guns]

If passed, the Norwegian law would classify previously legal rifles used by hunters as “military-style” weapons. It would be accompanied by other measures, such as upgraded background checks before handgun purchases, according to Peter Frolich of the Norwegian parliament’s judicial affairs committee, who spoke to the Associated Press.

Both initiatives indicate the lengths to which governments have gone in response to mass shootings in their respective countries.

Australia’s firearms amnesty is based on a nationwide scheme that followed a mass shooting at a tourist site in the country in 1996 that left 35 people dead. At the time, the Australian government decided to buy back firearms and strengthen gun-control laws, managing to significantly reduce the number of weapons in circulation.

[Trump: ‘Take the guns first, go through due process second’]

The Australian measure is based on the assumption that any reduction of the number of available weapons that could fall into the wrong hands can help prevent shootings -- and there is some statistical evidence for this. In his study published in 2016, “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries,” University of Alabama's Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminology, found a link between the number of guns and mass shootings that killed four or more people. The data set ranged from 1966 through 2012.

Since 1996, countries including Canada, Britain and Norway have tried out modified versions of Australia’s measures, allowing owners of illegal weapons to hand them in without fear of legal repercussions.

In Norway, lawmakers’ willingness to reduce the number of firearms in circulation can mainly be traced to the 2011 Utoya shooting, in which a right-wing gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 people in one of Europe's most gruesome terrorist attacks. Most of the victims were children or teenagers. One of the weapons Breivik used was a semiautomatic rifle.

Since then, the Norwegian government has pondered the feasibility of a much broader ban of semiautomatic rifles than is in place elsewhere. A commission proposed such restrictions last fall, and lawmakers are now set to approve the measures.

In Australia and in Norway, two major shooting massacres appear to have changed the national debate over gun ownership, but both examples also show the limits of such approaches in the United States. Gun amnesties on illegal firearms naturally worked only if certain types of firearms were banned or their access was limited.

"Taking these unregistered firearms off the streets means they will not fall into the hands of criminals, who might use them to endanger the lives of innocent Australians,” Law Enforcement Minister Angus Taylor said Thursday.

But based on numbers provided by Canadian authorities, amnesties mostly help to reduce the number of illegal firearms accidentally inherited by daughters or sons of gun owners. Hence, such initiatives are ill-equipped to directly combat illegal weapons ownership among criminals or individuals willing to commit attacks.

To prevent massacres, amnesties tend to work only if deployed in tandem with the European-style measures deeply loathed by American conservatives: broad bans or restrictions on firearms ownership.

“In the United States, of course you have the gun lobby and the Second Amendment,” said Anders Romarheim, associate professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies and an expert who advised the commission looking into the Utoya attack. “But in Norway, we don’t really have anything similar to that. So, once the idea came up to restrict firearms access, it was a done deal.”

http://humanevents.com/2018/03...ass-murder-pipeline/

The School-To-Mass-Murder Pipeline
Ann Coulter | Thursday Mar 1, 2018 12:01 PM

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Nikolas Cruz’s psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to.

School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.


If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other “red flags.”


Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz’s terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, “security specialist,” and Peter Mahmood, head of JROTC.

At least three students showed school administrators Cruz’s near-constant messages threatening to kill them — e.g., “I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass,” “Im going to watch ypu bleed,” “iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.

Threatening to kill someone is a felony. In addition to locking Cruz away for a while, having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun.

All the school had to do was risk Cruz not going to college, and depriving Yale University of a Latino class member, by reporting a few of his felonies — and there would have been no mass shooting.

But Cruz was never arrested. He wasn’t referred to law enforcement. He wasn’t even expelled.

Instead, Cruz was just moved around from school to school — six transfers in three years. But he was always sent back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in order to mainstream him, so that he could get a good job someday!

The moronic idea behind the “school-to-prison pipeline” is that the only reason so many “black and brown bodies” are in prison is because they were disciplined in high school, diminishing their opportunities. End the discipline and … problem solved!

It’s like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse. The Wizard told the Scarecrow: You don’t need an education, you just need a diploma! The school-to-prison pipeline idiocy tells students: You don’t need to behave in high school, you just need to leave with no criminal record!

Of course, killjoys will say that removing the consequences of bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior. But that’s not the view of Learned Professionals, who took summer courses at Michigan State Ed School.

In a stroke of genius, they realized that the only problem criminals have is that people keep lists of their criminal activities. It’s the list that prevents them from getting into M.I.T. and designing space stations on Mars. Where they will cure cancer.

This primitive, stone-age thinking was made official Broward County policy in a Nov. 5, 2013, agreement titled “Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline.”

The first “whereas” clause of the agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.”

Get it? It’s the arrest — not the behavior that led to the arrest — that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life. (For example, just look at how much the district’s refusal to arrest Nikolas Cruz helped him!

The agreement’s third “whereas” clause specifically cites “students of color” as victims of the old, racist policy of treating criminal behavior criminally.

Say, in the middle of a drive to cut back on the arrest or expulsion of “students of color,” how do you suppose the school dealt with a kid named “Nikolas Cruz”? Might there be some connection between his Hispanic last name and the school’s abject refusal to do anything about Cruz’s repeated criminal behavior?

Just a few months ago, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert W. Runcie, was actually bragging about how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership.

When he took over in 2011, the district had “the highest number of school-related arrests in the state.” But today, he boasted, Broward has “one of the lowest rates of arrest in the state.” By the simple expedient of ignoring criminal behavior, student arrests had declined by a whopping 78 percent.

FOOTBALL COACH: “When I took over this team a year ago, we were last in the league in pass defense. Today, we no longer keep that statistic!”

When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail. In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.

These were the parties to the Nov. 5, 2013, agreement that ensured Cruz would be out on the street with full access to firearms:

Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools

Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit

Michael J. Satz, State Attorney

Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender

Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff

Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department

Wansley Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice

Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board

Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too. They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
^^^ Nice boot. That your grandma?

No, that's Jack's boot.

Joneston boot.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
^^^ Nice boot. That your grandma?

No, that's Jack's boot.

Is he a thug?

Guys

follow up to an earlier post

earlier the Georgia House had passed the bill, now the GA senate also

Pro-gun Georgia lawmakers scored a political victory Thursday over Delta Air Lines, making good on Republican threats to deny the company a hefty tax break after it cut ties with the National Rifle Association in the wake of the deadly shooting at a Florida high school.

The state House and Senate within hours of each other passed a sweeping tax bill that Republicans had amended to strip out a sales tax exemption on jet fuel. Atlanta-based Delta would have been the prime beneficiary of the tax break, which would have been worth an estimated $38 million.

the governor is likely to sign it.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...nra-members-n2454588