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FOAC's Weekly Message For Sunday December 2nd 2018 :: 12/02/2018

The City of Pittsburgh Mayor and Council Are Continuing to Pursue Crimes Against the State and The People’s Rights. Recently, an online publication published this article showing that we are facing an anti-gun juggernaut of coercive and illegal behavior sponsored by the city of Pittsburgh and abetted by the anti-gun group cease-fire PA! Pittsburgh mayor Peduto and city Council city officials are conspiring to violate our Preemption Law (Title 18, Section 6120). This effort is clearly in violation of the law, to which city officials are giving the middle finger salute, as well as a consent decree that was signed in 1995 by the city of Pittsburgh to abide by all Pennsylvania gun laws.

If it’s not already, it will soon become apparent that we are facing an anti-Constitutional onslaught the likes of which many of today’s gunowners have NEVER seen! Just as a historical reminder FOAC was at the forefront of the fight against ACT 17 (S.S.H.B. 110-1995) when many other Pennsylvania gun groups acquiesced to the items below and much more:

• Assault Weapon Bans!
• Concealed Carry Restrictions!
• Attacks on Due Process!

As you know, FOAC has been at the forefront of fighting gun control and advancing good legislation for nearly 3 decades!

It appears the city of Pittsburgh is getting ready to pursue four separate areas of restrictive legislation:

• An “outright ban” on assault weapons in Pittsburgh;
• A ban on accessories, including bump stocks and some magazines;
• An “extreme risk protection” bill that allows for temporary gun seizures based on family or law enforcement intervention.

No details on the legislation have been released. A fourth potential bill relates to background checks.

Historical note: the language for an assault weapon ban, in defiance of the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas consent decree, continues to remain on the books for the city of Pittsburgh. The construction of the language in the city of Pittsburgh 1993 assault weapon ban even included single shot weapons. Hunters take note!

We need to rekindle the flame of freedom in Pennsylvania gunowners because at the heart of this is the very clear reality that we must get gun owners more actively involved!  FOAC has fought successfully to stop Preemption law violations all across Pennsylvania.  Our latest Preemption Case was against Lower Merion Township and is the preeminent cited case in this area of law at this time.

Further, this shows that city of Pittsburgh public officials are openly encouraging other municipalities to join them in flaunting the law, violating Pennsylvania preemption law in particular, and engaging in a battle of official oppression that is unconscionable for representatives of the people!

Fighting this is NOT going to be cheap and has already cost FOAC tens of thousands of dollars to fight these legal battles all on our own!  Freedom is NOT Free!  Pennsylvania Gun Owners have been sitting on the sidelines far too much and in past writings we have cautioned about the impact of apathy in encouraging public officials to violate our rights!

This is where each of you come in! Are YOUR friends and fellow gun owners going to get involved and, if so, what are they prepared to do about this?? Are they prepared to join with us? This fight IS coming and this article shows the criminal intent of Peduto and O'Connor to intentionally violate the law and LAUGHING at ALL gun owners and the Constitution.

There SHOULD BE 5,000,000 Pennsylvania gun owners reacting to this article and EVERY PA Gun Owner should be 'up-in-arms' about this blatant disregard for the law and our Rights.

Initial things to do:

• Ask the Allegheny County DA ((412) 350-4401) https://alleghenycountyda.us/ WHY he isn't prosecuting Peduto and O'Connor for Criminal Conspiracy and violating the 1995 Consent Decree and Title 18 Section 6120?!
• Contact YOUR PA House and Senate member and insist they strengthen PA Preemption Law!!

Make NO MISTAKE this IS coming to ALL Pennsylvania cities/towns/counties!

We either ALL get involved or we can watch our fellow gun owners sit back and let the socialists in government and the anti-gun groups shaft ALL of us, your family and all those who died for this country and serve it now just like the gun owners in Maryland, New York, California, New Jersey and elsewhere!

Direct link to article: https://www.publicsource.org/pittsburgh-officials-pursue-a-new-strategy-to-push-for-aggressive-gun-control-measures/

National Concealed Handgun Carry Reciprocity – The Time to Act is NOW

Concealed handgun carry reciprocity – HR 38 - is about to die. It is about to die through deliberate inaction or callous indifference of the U.S. Senate. We have a small window of opportunity: 21 days left to achieve the goal that has eluded us for years. It seemed assured of being accomplished by the Republican-controlled 115th Congress but, it wasn’t.

Congress still has time to act before the end of the year, but that does nothing to explain why Congress failed to get this done. It certainly had ample opportunity to do so.

Senator Mitch McConnell, who, as Senate Majority Leader, has ultimate authority for determining what bills are voted on by the full Senate, said and did nothing to get the Judiciary Committee to act so that the bill could be voted on by the full Senate.

This Much We Do Know:

Senator Mitch McConnell CAN get things done when he wants to. Senator McConnell was able to get Judge Brett Kavanaugh confirmed as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He still has time to get this done before the 116th Congress begins its first term, on January 3, 2019, because, at that point, it would be futile. The House will seat a Democratic Party majority!

Self-Defense Rights are now slipping through our fingers.

The Senate has had over a year to act on the bill, from late 2017, when it first received the bill from the House. But the Senate failed to act.

There is no time to waste. The Senate is scheduled to adjourn on December 14, 2018. If the Senate fails to pass the bill by emergency roll call vote, we will have lost the only real opportunity to see concealed handgun carry reciprocity through to fruition for the foreseeable future.

WHAT CAN YOU DO? IMMEDIATELY CALL:

• U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (Chairman of the Judiciary Committee): (202) 224-3744
• U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: (202) 224-2541
• Your Senate Delegation: (202) 224-3121

TELL THEM THIS:

“The Senate must vote on the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 bill immediately. The bill passed the House on December 6, 2017, almost one year ago, and has since been stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. That is unacceptable! We have only a few precious weeks to get this matter completed. The Senate must pass this bill and send it immediately to the President for his signature. President Trump will sign the bill into law, fulfilling an important campaign promise. My continued support for you depends upon your vote to approve this bill.”

You should also contact President Trump, reminding him of his commitment to support National Concealed Handgun Carry Reciprocity. The contact numbers are as follows:

• The White House: (202) 456-1111 or (202) 456-1414

We must put pressure on those who can get this matter accomplished.

Making a few important phone calls will only take a few minutes of your time. It is quick and easy, and critically important to safeguard and strengthen our right to keep and bear arms.

What you do can make a difference, and you will be proud to have taken an active part in protecting our natural, fundamental, unalienable, and sacred right to safeguard our lives and the lives of those closest to us, with the best means available: a firearm.

If you chose to do nothing, you will only have yourself to blame.

Common Sense Approaches to Stopping Attacks at Schools and Churches

It is tragic and sad that we even have to about protecting our children and students from violence. Politicians won’t tell you, but we can do a lot to prevent the violent attacks on our schools and churches. Preventing a mass murder stops the violent event before it happens. In contrast, responding to an attack stops the violence once it has started. We want to do both. Prevention isn’t easy but it has a huge reward. Here are four steps to prevent attacks on our schools. Politicians won’t talk about these solutions because they are simple to describe but have profound effects on our personal lives.

News Media and Turning Killers into Martyrs

Our immersion in the media culture has grown enormously over time and at an accelerated rate. Today we carry video media in our pocket. Our media exposure is so pervasive that most children spend more time watching screens than interacting with real people.

Unfortunately, the news and entertainment media work hard to keep our attention. If it bleeds it leads..and the coverage of mass murder lasts for days. Add the fact that some angry and narcissistic young men will do anything for fame. After the next mass murder, the news media will flood us with the murderer’s face and name as they turn the murderer into a celebrity. That billion-dollar 2^nd Amendment hating media campaign is an advertising campaign, a casting call, searching for the next mass murderer to make them even richer.

Media analysts and psychologists say we could cut the rate of mass murder by a third to as much as half. All we have to do is stop turning these murderers into celebrities. There are media guidelines in place that stop news organizations from showing the face and saying the name of the mass murderer. Only a few US media organizations have signed on.

Yes, you can watch the news without becoming a mass murder. The same isn’t true for narcissistic psychopaths and sociopaths. We have to stop rewarding these narcissists if we want to stop mass murders.

Synthetic Violence

Killing our fellow man isn’t easy for most of us. Immersing ourselves in simulated violence makes killing easier. By the time they reach their early 20s, most of us have seen a quarter million violent acts on TV.

The murderer at Sandy Hook Elementary School who killed 20 children and seven adults immersed himself in video games as he failed in his real relationships. He played 4,901 simulated combat matches over more than 500 hours. He killed 83,496 characters. During that simulated violence, he shot 22,725 characters in the head to kill them. He later repeated that exercise in real life at a public school.

I’m glad that you can play video games without becoming a murderer. Some people can’t. If you want to save lives then stop teaching our kids to kill.

Failure of Mental Institutions and Government Institutions

We emptied most of our mental hospitals in the 1970s. Some of the mentally ill were successfully treated in local treatment facilities. Many were not. Our response to dealing with the mentally ill was to make all of society into a low-quality mental institution and numb their minds with medication. That isn’t a sophisticated or targeted solution.

Many mass murderers have a history of violence and mental illness. Politicians tell us to say something if we see something..and we have. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives were called many times about the murderer at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida and about the murderer at the High School in Parkland, Florida. The police were called to the Parkland murderer’s home 45 times and no one asked for a mental evaluation to make the murderer prohibited from owning firearms.

Government agencies would rather look the other way than to do their job. If you want to stop mass murderers then we have to hold politicians and bureaucrats accountable for their mistakes.

Killing Zones

Prevention only takes us so far. Unfortunately, we cannot identify every one of the people who will become violent, just as we cannot tell which people with heart conditions will suffer a heart attack tomorrow. That means we should prepare to deal with heart attacks and with school attacks in order to save lives. We have to plan to respond in addition to implementing preventative measures. In too many cases we’ve deliberately prohibited a defensive response to public violence. Mass murderers look for crowds of defenseless victims. We are 30 times more likely to be attacked in a “gun-free” zone. Stop creating hunting grounds for sociopaths by disarming the victims.

Summary

Our news and entertainment media is violent and voracious. Stopping “celebrity violence” will clearly save lives. Eliminating “gun-free” zones reduces the times and places where mass murderers will strike. All of those solutions are simple and easily achievable compared to making bureaucrats do their job. All are worth it because each one saves lives.

Gun Control Fails in New Jersey, Anti-Gun Groups Silent, Victims Weep

CeaseFire PA would see Jersey style gun control exported to PA. This would result in enormous increases in crimes such as the two thugs who recently chased a 19-year-old woman across a street, into a store, and then executed her by shooting her 20 times. She died on a weekday afternoon in broad daylight. She was killed in front of witnesses in Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey.

The murder was caught on security cameras. Jersey politicians and the news media have told us time and again that this could never happen. We were supposed to be safe since the rigorous gun-control laws in New Jersey have disarmed the criminals. That obviously isn’t true and Jersey politicians and the news media lied to us. In fact, honest law-abiding people were disarmed while the criminals still have guns. Gun control failed again and today, honest people pay with their lives.

WHEN is this madness going to be enough?

Gun Control Jersey Style

New Jersey has some of the strictest gun control laws in the United States. The Gifford’s Law Center, funded by Michael Bloomberg, gives New Jersey an A- rating for gun-control. To quote Gifford’s,

“New Jersey has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation. The state requires the licensing of all firearms dealers and their employees, and requires a permit to purchase any handgun.”

Unfortunately, criminals don’t obey gun laws and they don’t buy their guns from federally licensed dealers.

New Jersey requires a permit to purchase any handgun, rifle, or shotgun. ALL PURCHASES require a background check. You won’t get a concealed carry permit in New Jersey unless you are a politician or a judge. Honest law-abiding citizens can only buy one gun per month, but it takes months to get police permission to buy a handgun. Add a state mandated seven day waiting period on top of those delays. Ammunition magazines are limited to a maximum capacity of ten rounds. Jersey gun owners can be charged with a crime if they are late reporting of a lost or stolen gun, and honest gun owners can be held liable for the actions that criminals take if the stolen gun is used in a crime.

Jersey gun laws didn’t stop the murderers who shot the 19-year-old woman from getting a gun and carrying their guns in public.

Those laws didn’t stop criminals. It can take an honest person at least half a year to get a firearm legally in New Jersey.  A criminal buys a new one in an hour off the street.

Crime in Trenton

One horrific story is not the same as data. Unfortunately, this story is repeated day after day across the city. Trenton is the 32nd most a dangerous city in the US, though even that does not qualify as the most dangerous city in New Jersey. (That would be Camden at #4.) 94 percent of US cities are safer than Trenton. Your chance of being a crime victim in Trenton are 1 in 26 each year. Even with all the gun laws in New Jersey, the number of crimes in Trenton increased by 9 percent last year. When we look at only violent crimes, Trenton is 249% more dangerous than the US taken as a whole.

Gun Control fails New Jersey

If that is what gun-control looks like, then I don’t want any of it. The reason gun control fails is obvious. In the criminal justice system, only the first crime is expensive: all the other crimes are free. You don’t care if you use a stolen gun or a stolen car once you are going to commit murder. There is no deterrent, no incremental penalty that changes your behaviour, once you’re the gang hitman. That is why gun control only disarms honest people..which is what the Dirty Jersey politicians wanted all along.

Gun control works for Jersey politicians, but fails for New Jersey. Honest people die because of it. Do you want Jersey style gun control coming to Pennsylvania?

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Replacing the Failed NAFTA Trade Deal

It was not long ago, that taking guns into Canada, a nation with vast areas of wilderness, was uncomplicated and straightforward for U.S. citizens. There were virtually no restrictions on rifles and shotguns.

The Canadian government required a simple seal on handguns to ensure they were not fired in Canada. If the seal were broken when the border was crossed going back into the United States, an explanation was in order. It had to be good. That changed in January of 2001.

As more and more restrictions on the ownership of firearms have been pushed by leftists on both sides of the border, crossing the border with firearms has become a legal minefield to trap the unwary. The nadir was reached when a U.S. citizen had to register any rifle or shotgun they brought into Canada, which included a $25 fee that was good for a few months.  All long guns in Canada had to be registered. It is virtually impossible for an ordinary U.S. citizen to transport a handgun in Canada.

Hundreds are trapped in inadvertent offenses every year. Taking a handgun into Canada, as many find prudent when traveling to Alaska, is so complicated and confusing as to be legally impossible for an ordinary traveler. Bringing personal guns from Canada into the U.S., as many Canadians wish to do when they travel south for the winter, has numerous restrictions and difficulties.

President Trump and his administration are renegotiating the Canadian and U.S. trade agreement, reconstructed from the failed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the United States Mexico and Canada agreement (USMCA).

The Trump administration should include a return to less regulation of personal firearms. Any legal U.S. resident not barred from exercising their Second Amendment rights should be able to carry legal firearms into Canada.

It is unreasonable that both governments allow their legal residents to travel freely with firearms inside their borders, but restrict each other's residents when they cross the border.

We should include in the trade deal the ability of any Mexican who may legally possess firearms in Mexico, traveling lawfully in the U.S., to legally possess them in the U.S., with the reciprocity that legal U.S. residents may possess legal personal firearms in Mexico when legally traveling there.

Before 1972, possession of .22 rifles and pistols, by U.S. citizens in Mexico, was nearly unregulated. As Mexico has become more dangerous, paradoxically, the legal ability to be armed for self-defense has become almost impossible.

Citizens who are legally possessing guns, in all three countries, are not a problem. They have exemplary records. They commit almost no crime. In the United States, people with carry permits are more law abiding than police officers.

The mass punishment principle has always been wrong. Punishing the mass of the innocent to get at a few bad apples is terrible policy. Punishing the enormous mass of legal gun owners because criminals break the law is a stupid way to attack a problem confined to small numbers of violent criminals.

A growing body of criminological evidence shows that serious violence (and much other crime) is concentrated among remarkably small numbers of “hot” people and places. We now know that homicide and gun violence are overwhelmingly concentrated among serious offenders operating in groups: gangs, drug crews, and the like representing under half of one percent of a city’s population commit half to three-quarters of all murders.

As recently as 1972 for Mexico, and 2001 for Canada, legal gun owners were able to travel between all three large North America nations with arms and few limitations. It worked then. It can work again.

There is no logical reason to prevent the travel of legally armed residents, only the superstitious fear of firearms in the hands of ordinary people by hoplophobes and would be dictators

Declining U.S. Life Expectancy Reflects Cultural Issues and NOT the 2^nd Amendment

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Mortality in the United States, 2017” report reveals that, while mortality hasn’t cliff-dived — the aggregate rate of 78.7 years in 2016 fell just a tenth of a point to 78.6 years in 2017 — some of the chief contributors are greatly disconcerting.

In 2017, 47,173 Americans took their own lives, propelling the suicide rate to a half-century high. According to the Associated Press, “The suicide rate was 14 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s the highest since at least 1975.”

The AP adds, “Drug overdose deaths also continued to climb, surpassing 70,000 last year, in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history. … Accidental drug overdoses account for more than a third of the unintentional injury deaths, and intentional drug overdoses account for about a tenth of the suicides, said Dr. Holly Hedegaard, a CDC injury researcher.”

We’ve come a long way in terms of life expectancy, of course, and we’re still better off than European and Asian nations with higher suicide rates. But the trend has unfortunately become transposed. “For decades,” the AP explains, “U.S. life expectancy was on the upswing, rising a few months nearly every year. Now it’s trending the other way: It fell in 2015, stayed level in 2016, and declined again last year, the CDC said. The nation is in the longest period of a generally declining life expectancy since the late 1910s, when World War I and the worst flu pandemic in modern history combined to kill nearly 1 million Americans. Life expectancy in 1918 was 39.”

Thankfully, today’s mortality is nowhere near that. But taking into account the technology age that has revolutionized medicine, the fact the rate is falling at all signals a deeper issue. It speaks to the cultural rot that has inflicted America to an ever-worsening degree. Even researchers partially acknowledge this.

According to Dr. Robert Redfield, “These sobering statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.” Dr. William Dietz added, “I really do believe that people are increasingly hopeless, and that that leads to drug use. It leads potentially to suicide.”

But what causes hopelessness? The Left and Right differ greatly on the answer. But common sense suggests the collapse of the family and even technology are foremost culprits. As columnist Mona Charen observes, “Due to unmarriage and divorce, more Americans are living alone than at any time in our history. Let me quickly acknowledge that the steep rise in adolescent depression in recent years may have more to do with social media than anything else.”

She adds, “Not only do divorce and rapidly cycling relationships (and living arrangements) leave adults and especially children emotionally scarred, the loss of secure families also leaves millions of people lonely. … We are not meant to be alone, and we don’t find emotional succor or physical satisfaction in relationships with screens.”

Fewer than 20,000 people are murdered every year (less than half of those with firearms), meaning suicides and drug overdoses vastly outnumber homicides. Yet far more attention is paid to murders and “gun violence.” But make no mistake: All of them are linked by an indifference for earthly life, which in turn stems from a mentality that’s devoid of gratitude, meaning, and, most importantly, spiritual direction. For these reasons, don’t hold out hope for the secular, fearmongering media to provide the right remedy.

Where are ALL the Firearms Coming from in England and Other Countries with Highly Restrictive Gun Laws?

A new study, financed by the U.S. State Department, called ‘Beyond State Control: Improvised and Craft-produced Small Arms and Light Weapons. G. Hays and N.R. Jenzen-Jones contains 136 pages and is very well done and demonstrates just how easily gun control is defeated.  There is a wealth of knowledge and information in this seminal report. In the “Key Findings” there is this gem:

Improvised and craft-produced small arms account for a sizable proportion of weapons seized in domestic law enforcement operations in several countries. In the UK, some 80 per cent of all guns used in crime in 2011 and 2012 were improvised, craft-produced, or converted; in São Paulo, Brazil, 48 per cent of the sub-machine guns recovered during the same period were homemade; and in Indonesia, 98 percent of the guns confiscated from robbery suspects in 2013 were homemade.

It’s important to review ALL the publicly available facts such as how “Gun crime” in the UK, is higher today than it was when the draconian control of firearms was implemented, starting about 1920. Brazil has a homicide rate about eight times that of the United States. Its highly restrictive gun control scheme reached its height 15 years ago.

“Gun Control” is promoted as a crime reduction measure in the Western world. That is how it was characterized in England in the 1920s and later. It is how it is promoted in the United States today. The ability of criminals and criminal enterprises to access effective, improvised, homemade, and craft-produced small arms create a limit, determined by technology and physics, on how much crime can be reduced by limiting legal access to firearms.

Making factory produced firearms difficult to procure creates strong incentives to produce firearms beyond state control, aka the Firearms Black Market. The vast majority of improvised and craft produced weapons are used by criminals:

Data suggests that the highest concentrations of craft-produced small arms are among individual criminals and criminal groups outside of active conflict zones.

In the United States, homemade and craft-produced guns are primarily made by hobbyists for technological interest and ideological reasons.  The authors of the study understand that controlling the making of firearms relies on controlling the flow of information:

Many of the books, magazine articles, and other publications containing instructions for the manufacture of improvised and craft-produced weapons have since been digitized and are readily available via the Internet. Home gunsmiths and hobbyists—including those who produce firearms legally in countries such as the United State—regularly post technical know-how and techniques related to home gunsmithing and the manufacture of arms on YouTube and other social media platforms. In some cases, non-state armed groups have also produced online documents, guides, and videos that provide instructions for the manufacture of improvised or craft-produced weapons. Various armed groups in Iraq and Syria, for instance, have posted videos focused on the design and construction of anti-materiel rifles (ARES, 2018).

The Second Amendment and the First Amendment support each other. Both are essential to limited government.

Many millions of improvised and craft-produced small arms have and are being manufactured the world over. Craft-produced arms are becoming well known in international black markets.

We are deluding ourselves (politicians anyway) if we believe that controlling guns, through laws, will stop their manufacture and availability.  The only thing that will happen is that more disarmed good people will be killed.

Important Quote: "Totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: They cannot give a rifle to a factory-worker, and then tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is The symbol of Democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." - George Orwell

Yours in Freedom!

Kim Stolfer, President

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