f_townsend
f_townsend's JournalDid you know that GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (KY-04) is deaf?
He's got gun lobbyist dollars stuffed in his ears.
Can't hear you.
Repubs can't help groveling at Trump's feet, no many how times he insults and belittles them
Sad, pathetic, and funny at the same time.
Two weeks ago:
Trump lashes out at DeSantis, says he regrets his endorsement of him
Former President Donald Trump is intensifying his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, calling him disloyal and saying that his political career would have been over had he not endorsed his ultimately successful 2018 campaign.
“He was dead as a dog, he was a dead politician. He would have been working perhaps for a law firm or doing something else,” Trump told a small group of reporters aboard his plane on Monday afternoon en route to Iowa, where he was to make an appearance that evening.
Asked if he regretted endorsing DeSantis for governor in 2018, Trump responded: “Yeah maybe, this guy was dead. He was dead as a doornail. … I might say that.”
But then tonight:
DeSantis: Florida won’t cooperate with Trump extradition
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday called the indictment of former President Trump “un-American” and said the state would not assist in any extradition request.
“The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American,” DeSantis, who is seen as Trump’s top rival in a potential 2024 GOP primary, tweeted after news of the indictment broke.
“The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent,” DeSantis continued, adding that Florida would not assist in an extradition request “given the questionable circumstances at issue.”
...
Trump, who is a Florida resident, is expected to be arraigned next week.
Nashville massacre -- and most gun murders -- could not and would not have happened in Hawaii
And highly unlikely such massacres could have happened in RI, NJ, and majority of the northeastern blue states, either. (And when they do happen, it's almost always only because the killers obtained their weapons thanks to the red state "iron pipeline" gun trafficking operation -- or from a blue state gun nut who stupidly let their guns get into a crazy family member's hands.)
Why? Because, as of now (and I emphasize, "as of now", because of the right-wing SCOTUS Bruen ruling which will make the lack of gun murders and gun crime in HI a thing of the past), a potential mass murderer such as the Nashville shooter would never been capable of purchasing their weapons. In fact, they would have been nabbed by law enforcement while trying to make such purchases:
1) Hawaii requires law enforcement to conduct a thorough background check of potential handgun purchasers. This is something that goes a necessary thousands steps further than just a simple 30-second-long computer NICS check for recorded felony convictions. The killer's severe mental health issues -- including suicide threats -- would have quickly become known to LE upon simple inquiries to family and friends. Result: no gun sales allowed..
Tennessee? Law enforcement is expressly prohibited from looking into prospective handgun buyers. Result? Lots of people, including children, murdered.
2) Hawaii: semi-automatic rifles are outlawed.
Tennessee? Semi-automatic rifles are perfectly legal to purchase -- and without any background check or permits required to make the purchase.
3) Hawaii: Red flag laws in effect.
Tennessee: Red flag laws have been outlawed. Cops are completely and utterly helpless to stop a potential mass murderer from legally purchasing an arsenal, even if the future mass murderer has a demonstrated history of stalking his ex, threatening suicide, walking around naked in a daze, screaming at the sky, etc.
4) Private gun sales are completely illegal in Hawaii, and guns outside of legal private hands are so scarce on the islands, there isn't anything like a firearms "black market" for the the Nashville killer to have found an alternative route to get his hands on weapons.
Tennessee: Private gun sales are perfectly legal. Any budding mass murderer can quite easily and quickly obtain a shooting arsenal in a parking lot deal, because it is legal for any scumbag gun seller to privately sell guns to any possible criminal and future mass murderer without fear of being prosecuted for anything. "No questions asked, no information wanted" = perfectly legal in Tennessee, Texas, Florida, etc.
5) A reminder: the Founders and early Americans passed local and state gun control ordinances all of the time -- they weren't fools.
Q.E.D.
Did you know that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison banned UVA students from keeping guns?
The two people most responsible for the Second Amendment prohibited militia-aged college students from keeping guns? Yes.
It happened in 1824, shortly before the University of Virginia first opened its doors to students the following year.
Jefferson, the former President and the university's primary founder and its first rector; Madison, the nation's fourth President who was Jefferson's close friend and university co-founder; and four other members of the university's Board of Visitors (all of whom could also be considered UVA co-founders), decreed that no student "shall keep or use weapons or arms of any kind, or gunpowder...".
Read the minutes, the original written in Jefferson's own hand The topic of guns and not allowing students use them comes up repeatedly in the discussion -- no less than four times -- four times more than any other outlawed conduct infraction. Furthermore, while militia training was mandatory, the Board was clear that the muskets used for the training were absolutely not to be made available to the students when not in training use:
Substitutes in the form of arms shall be provided by the Proctor, at the expence of the University; they shall be distinguished by numbers, delivered out, recieved in and deposited under the care and responsibility of the Instructor, in a proper depository to be furnished him; and all injuries to them by a student shall be repaired at the expence of such Student.
"Distinguised by numbers..." Did you get that? Yes, gun registration. ("Substitutes in the form of arms": despite that strange description, they actually were not "dummy" firearms at all, but real working muskets, stored at a local bank.)
Why would the author of the Bill of Rights (Madison), the main champion of the Bill of Rights (Jefferson), a ratifier of the Bill of Rights (James Breckenridge, who voted to ratify the Bill of Rights when he was a member of the Virginia legislature), and three other early Americans who venerated Jefferson and who certainly weren't opposed to the Bill of Rights, not allow rich, lily-white young Virginia males of militia age to keep guns while on campus? After all, as far as gun ownership was concerned, the students were not legally minors, as they could otherwise purchase and keep them off-campus. UVA students could be no younger than 16. And Virginia residents of 16 years of age, despite federal guidelines, could be conscripted for state militia duty.
Why? Because they knew that the rich young white men of university age of their time could often be violent thugs. Student riots occasionally happened at Harvard and Princeton, and students at William and Mary were known to threaten professors, attack slaves, sexually assault female slaves.
They were right to be worried, because what happened at those other universities was replicated in even worse ways during the following years at UVA, despite many attempts to put a stop the constant UVA student violence. The professors were actually expected to be something like policemen, since the state of Virginia refused to pay for campus security, but the students would run wild and smuggle guns onto campus. At one point, a group of students stole the militia muskets and took over the campus. The Virginia state militia had to be called in to put the riot down.
In 1840, during a later riot, Professor John Davis was shot dead while attempting to disarm a student.
There was no talk at all that prohibiting students from possessing guns was an "infringement" of any kind, for the simple reason that it could never be an "infringement"; the purpose of the Second Amendment was exactly as it's written -- it prevented the federal government from disarming members of the well-regulated state militias (within reason, of course, i.e. criminal activity, and, even more telling as far as one-half of the 2A's purpose, disloyalty to the federal government) Anything else related to gun regulation? Perfectly fine.
These were the people who wrote, ratified, and championed the goddamned thing -- you think they didn't know what the 2A was and what it actually meant?
The moral of the story is this: the Founders' Second Amendment is not the gun lobby's made-up version of the Second Amendment.
If David equals "porn", then the USA has truly reached the tipping point of no return
Unless the vast silent majority of sane Americans finally gets off its ass and flexes its muscle, the lunatic fringe right wing really has succeeded at taking over the USA.
Have you ever heard of a stolen Danielle Steele novel being used to commit a carjacking?
I haven't. But that's the question you should ask anti-gun-registration gun fanatics when they proclaim that "The Government" requiring firearms be registered by serial number would be the "same thing" as the government requiring people to officially register what kinds of books they are reading or have read.
Go ahead -- ask these self-proclaimed experts and proponents of the Second Amendment and the Constitution about any known occasions when a copy of a Nora Roberts or John Grisham novel was stolen from a car's glove compartment and was then later used to hold up and shoot a clerk in a convenience store, or to kill some innocent person during a carjacking, or to blow a police officer's brains out who responded to a call.
However, I have heard of countless thousands of times when a handgun stolen from a car was used to commit a violent and usually fatal crime.
I have also heard of many times when a stolen gun's registration information helped law enforcement put away a criminal who would ordinarily have continued to kill innocent people with the stolen gun.
We don't know how many crimes have been averted by requiring gun owners to register their firearms -- probably untold thousands of crimes have been averted because the very act of firearm registration served as a vital incentive for gun owners to make absolutely sure their guns were secure from theft and "loss" (i.e. illicit sales and trades).
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Member since: Thu Feb 23, 2023, 05:43 PMNumber of posts: 260
