Donate :: Search

Facebook :: Twitter ::

 

FOAC's Weekly Message For Sunday May 19th 2019 :: 05/19/2019

 

Just Imagine if the Media Treated 2^nd Amendment Advocates and the Gun Issue Honestly

In a recent Op-ed for Fox News, discussing the recent walkout of students and parents at a vigil-turned-gun-control-event, writer and author Frank Miniter drives a wooden stake deep into the heart of the media’s bias against the 2^nd Amendment, guns and the people who own them.

“Political differences aside,” Miniter stated, “imagine if the media actually treated gun rights groups honestly.”

Indeed. Imagine that.

For decades, gun owners and especially Second Amendment activists have complained about media bias. Editorials demanding increasingly restrictive gun control laws are one thing, but when – as many rights activists have asserted – bias finds its way into news columns, that’s a problem.

Miniter wrote about the walkout at the evening vigil for students who were shot by two of their own classmates at Colorado’s STEM School Highlands Ranch. Students and their parents were appalled and angered when visiting politicians tried to exploit the event to push a gun control agenda.

The event was admittedly sponsored by a Brady Campaign youth group called “Team Enough.” But, as Miniter painfully pointed out, “The very public scene of hundreds of Colorado students and their parents walking out of a vigil that was turned into a political theater by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was so embarrassing that the gun control group actually issued an apology.”

In a statement, the Brady Campaign said, “We are deeply sorry any part of this vigil did not provide the support, caring and sense of community we sought to foster and facilitate and which we know is so crucial to communities who suffer the trauma of gun violence.”

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, stated, “The Brady Campaign was well aware that an anti-gun politician would turn such a somber event into a gun control rally,” he said. “Instead, students and their parents were rightly offended and they responded appropriately by walking out.

“The Brady Campaign and the politicians who tried to exploit this tragedy should be ashamed,” he added.

But what about the media? Should they be ashamed as well?

By incorporating volatile terms including “gun violence” and “high-powered assault weapons” into their reporting, are the media telling a story or selling a particular viewpoint?

When some deranged individual stabs people, why isn’t that reported as “knife violence?” Does anyone in a typical newsroom know that common deer hunting rifles use ammunition that is far more powerful than ammunition used in a typical 5.56mm NATO semi-auto modern sporting rifle?

Miniter is not the only notable writer to blister media bias. Researcher John Lott has done the same, such as in this piece he wrote last year for the Washington Times.

While it may be difficult to imagine gun rights groups ever getting a completely fair shake, especially on editorial pages, Miniter does offer some hope.

“The students who boldly walked out en masse as they chanted ‘mental health, mental health’ from what shouldn’t have been a political event did shock the mainstream media into actually reporting on the story,” he noted about the Colorado flap. “That’s a big step toward finding honest solutions to a horrifying problem.”

Florida Sued by Gun Group over Violations Of Gun Background Check Laws; Should Pennsylvania Be Next?

A class action lawsuit for ongoing violations of Florida’s firearms background check and preemption laws was filed this past week on behalf of all Floridians whose right to acquire firearms have been illegally interfered with by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).

Florida Law 790.065 subsection (2) requires that FDLE complete background checks for firearm purchases within 24 working hours. In March of 2018, FDLE began illegally putting background checks into an indefinite “Decision Pending” status. Various plaintiffs have been waiting for as much as a year, in some cases even after providing FDLE with certified proof that they are not prohibited from purchasing firearms.

The law is crystal clear on how FDLE is required to conduct background checks and issue either approval, conditional, or non-approval statuses on background checks.

An indefinite “Decision Pending” is not a legal status under Florida statute. FDLE has knowingly and willfully changed its policies, rules, and regulations to illegally deprive many law-abiding Floridians of their right to keep and bear arms without proper evidence of a disqualifying background or the due process required for the denial of a fundamental right.

The analogy here is that the Pennsylvania State Police are doing the ‘very same thing’ here wherein they have instituted a ‘pending’ status and then they ‘automatically deny’ in virtually every instance. There are ‘many’ other reasons to find that the Pennsylvania Instant Check system is failing in its’ mission and exceeding its’ authority. In lieu of the uncertain outcome of legal action, Rep. Jason Ortitay has filed HB 1244 that would eliminate the PICS system (Money Pit) and replace it with the National Instant Check System. See if your State House member is a co-sponsor and if not please ask him/her to sign on to HB 1244.

Historical Perspective: Democrats & Guns – Pushing Gun Control Since 1934

In 1934, back when the concept that owning a gun to protect yourself was part of just being an American and the 2nd Amendment was never a question, the Democrats wove into their DNA the desire to disarm America.

While we know the National Firearms Act as a law meant to, supposedly, disarm criminals from having machine guns, which was the original intent, the original version pushed by FDR, was nothing less than comprehensive disarmament for ‘every’ American.

The definition of a “Machine Gun” originally included any semi-automatic firearm that could hold 12 rounds or more, basically, ANY semi-automatic with a magazine, add in the barrel length restrictions and lots of generic rifles also would have been tagged. All pistols and Revolvers would have also been banned. Or taxed out of existence really.

The purchase of every firearm would require registration and a fee. The $200 fee in 1934 is the equivalent of over $3,700 today. So sure, you COULD buy a gun, but only if you were rich and privileged. More than likely these firearms would have been squeezed out of the American Culture.

The TRUE intent of the NFA of 1934 was to disarm America.

How did FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) sell the NFA? Like all good Democrats he used fear and spin by focusing on criminal use of machine guns.

The Roosevelt Administration went to print and radio outlets and asked for their help. Just like today, the media took a side, to assure that any use of a machine gun was an evil event, even though most machine guns were on one gangster vs. another ‘and’, believe it or not, stolen from GOVERNMENT armories.

If any of this sounding familiar? Senator Feinstein has offered an “Assault Weapons Ban” so broad it included 1911’s!? The liberal media makes every use of an “AR patterned firearm” into a national disaster. Just like they did in 1934.

Disarming America is a CORE belief of an FDR Democrat in that time. Corry Booker and Eric Swalwell (that crowd) are doing NOTHING but following an 80-year-old playbook. They long to be the politician to fulfill Roosevelt’s dreams. In the halls of the Ivy League, the failure to disarm America is taught as Roosevelt’s only major failure. Good liberals line up to continue the battle not even knowing why.

Unprepared gentlemen rifle shooters of that day 1st stumbled in their testimony until the full weight and reality of the bill sunk in. Then nationally gun owners rallied and helped block many of the most egregious parts of the NFA.

Gun control is and never has been about saving lives. It is the last unfulfilled dream of the Roosevelt Administration. Then as now the Democrat’s strategy is to lie, use fear and scare tactics with the help of a biased and supportive media.

Imagine That: Murder Rates Drop in Brazil ‘After’ New President Relaxes Gun Control Laws

In the More Guns, Less Crime category, during the first two months of new Brazilian President Bolsonaro's term, the Brazilian murder rate fell by 25%.  From riotimesonline.com:

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The murder rates in Brazil for January and February this year were 25 percent lower compared to the same period last year, according to G1’s national homicide index. The index is based on official data from the 26 states and the Federal District.

Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil on 28 October 2018. President Bolsonaro has been adamant about reforming Brazil's extreme gun laws, to allow more Brazilians to defend themselves.

Did President Bolsonaro's reform policies in favor of self-defense cause the drop in murder rates? The answer is complicated. Bolsonaro's policies probably had a positive effect.

President Bolsonaro's opponents have routinely predicted that homicides would increase because of his reforms of Brazil's gun laws.  From worldpoliticsreview.com, in March 2019, before the new statistics were out:

But even if the law doesn’t pass, the presidential decree already represents a step backward for public security in Brazil. Broadening access to guns puts men, women and children at higher risk of lethal violence. Bolsonaro and other gun advocates say that more armed citizens will deter shootings, but there is simply no hard evidence that loosening restrictions on firearms improves public safety or security. In fact, research from IPEA shows that for every 1 percent increase in the number of firearms in circulation in Brazil, there is a 2 percent increase in homicides. In most other countries as well, there is a similar relationship between permissive gun laws and gun-related homicides.

Note the last sentence in the quote above. The author is not talking about a decrease in homicides, rather a decrease in gun-related homicides.

Those who wish a disarmed population assume that more guns = more crime. But numerous studies show there is no clear relationship. Some studies, done by John Lott and others show more guns = less crime. The effects are not extreme, but the overall trend shows a decrease in violent crime when more people are armed. Many studies show no relationship between guns and overall murder rates.

Decreasing gun-related homicides is ineffective if the overall homicide rate remains the same or increases. Much of the argument about restrictive gun law is about substitution effects. It does not matter to a murder victim if they are killed with a bomb or knife instead of a gun.  Making guns harder to get can also mean making victims easier to kill because they are unarmed.

President Bolsnaro issued his first decree reforming some of Brazil's extreme gun laws on 15 January 2019. How could his decree have such a dramatic effect in such a short time? It is unlikely that the total number of Brazilians with legal guns increased significantly in from January 15th to the end of February.

The answer is an inversion of the copycat effect. Just as some people are more likely to commit horrific crimes because of media publicity, criminals are less likely to commit a violent crime if they perceive the risk to be great because of media coverage.

When their perception is that crime has a greater risk, crime rates decrease.

There are historical examples that illustrate this effect. When women were widely reported to receive firearms training in Orlando, Florida, in 1966, the number of rapes decreased by 88% in the next year. There were similar effects when Kennesaw Georgia received substantial publicity for an ordinance requiring a gun in the home (an 89% decrease in residential burglaries). Several other instances are cited by Professor Gary Kleck in his seminal work, Point Blank, Guns and Violence in America.

In order to continue the initial drop in homicides, Brazil will need to reinforce the perception that violent crimes have become more dangerous.

ERPO/Red Flag Laws Have ‘NO’ Legitimacy and Must Be Fought Head On

Under ERPO/Red Flag laws your “due process rights and justice” will be delayed for weeks or months after they have already confiscated all your firearms, with no actual crime having been committed. And how does one even PROVE that they are not dangerous? And if a person is truly dangerous, why don't the ERPO laws make any attempt to have the “dangerous” person taken into custody or to get them help?

ERPO laws violate the following Amendments to the Constitution:

• 2nd (right to keep and bear arms)
• 4th (protection against unreasonable search and seizures)
• 5th (right to due process, just compensation, self-incrimination)
• 6th (right to confront accusers, cross-examine witnesses, have a public defender).

Some are now offering advice meant to keep gun owners from being victims of ERPO/Red Flag laws in other states by having them stay under the radar. I/we look at hiding gun ownership as giving the anti-gun groups exactly what they want – gun owners burying their Freedom.

ERPO/Red Fag laws are not about saving lives. They are about gun confiscation, plain and simple. Possibly, a low profile ‘may’ reduce your chances of becoming a victim but in reality, you will still never know if that 4 am knock on the door is coming anyhow.

The best medicine for dealing with these unconstitutional, Freedom killing laws is to go on the offensive. We need to remind our fellow Americans, the media and politicians, that there are over 100 million of us and we are NOT going to go quietly into the night. In fact, we are not going to go anywhere:

• We must educate others, every chance we get. Too many people, including our fellow gun owners, have fallen for the soundbites that ‘appear’ reasonable on the surface, but are lies and misrepresentations of the real effects of Red Flag laws. Many people simply don't know the truth. Firearms Owners Against Crime has a flyer we encourage gun owners to print out and give away at gun shows and other events, and to give to reporters, family, friends, and coworkers – anyone that will take one. Feel free to steal the concept and create your own flyer, if you wish, or just use ours: https://foac-pac.org/uploads/talking_points/Extreme_Risk_Protection_Orders-FOAC-Review-2019.pdf
• We need to write letters to the editor of our local papers and certainly never let a pro-Red Flag letter or editorial go unchallenged.
• We need to call talk-radio shows and discuss the dangers that ERPO laws present.
• We need to educate politicians. If that fails, then we need to organize protests outside their local offices, which will hopefully be picked up by local news to spread the word even further.
• We need to make it a priority to vote out of office ANY politician who supports ERPO laws.

The ongoing war against gun ownership, and most of our other American values continues to escalate daily and we have no choice but to meet it head on and to defeat it. Our opponents want to divide us and we can't let that happen. If you own a gun, regardless of whether it is a handgun, rifle, or shotgun, or regardless if it is for self-defense, target shooting, collecting, or hunting, or regardless if you think a gun-control law, such as a ERPO/Red Flag law, won't affect you personally, you are deluding yourself. We must ALL stand together in protecting ALL of our Constitutional Rights. 100 million of us, standing as one, makes us an unstoppable force and the gun controllers know it.

Anti-Gun Politician Statement: NY Governor Andrew Cuomo pompously derided Americans who cherish the Bill of Rights in 2014 with the following statement:

“Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/19/gov-cuomo-pro-life-conservatives-have-no-place-new/

Gun Ownership is a Dangerous Choice. . .We Must Defend it or Fall Victim to the Consequences

Free speech is dangerous. The right to petition our government and to own guns is dangerous. Those rights are particularly threatening to entrenched politicians and the special interest they represent. Besides being dangerous, those rights are also the safest way to organize a society. It is time we defended them, not because they are safe, but because they are virtues.

Your gun might be “safer” if it was under lock and key. It is also less useful that way. You can’t use your gun to protect yourself and your family if it takes you minutes to put to use. We forget that. We forget that in your hands, guns save lives. Making firearms “safer” and less accessible means we save fewer lives.

We defend ourselves thousands of times a day.

About 20 million of us have permits to carry a concealed weapon in public. That is about one-in-ten adults. The number of us carrying in public increases to about one-in-five adults when the government gets out of the way. Government fees and licensing requirements disarmed about half of us. That is bad. Disarming the good guys makes us less safe.

Gun-control disarms us by inches. As we’ve seen in the news, there is no such thing as a “gun-free” zone. Politicians said that honest people should be disarmed so that only criminals would be the only ones with guns. Politicians don’t want your gun to be too big or too small, too old or too new.. except for their bodyguards, of course. Politicians want you disarmed. For many reasons, disarming you is safer for them. Being disarmed is not safer for you and me. Good women with guns and good men with guns make their families safer and their communities safer.

You can’t be a force for good if you don’t have your self-defense tools, and the training to use them.

I have to address a comforting myth about owning a gun. The average defense takes place in seconds. That isn’t enough time for you run to your gun safe, get your ammunition that you stored separately, load a magazine, and then protect your family or your employees. Time yourself.* You’ll see that I’m right. A gun you can’t use is dangerous.

We defend ourselves a million times a year, or more, with a firearm. We also have hundreds of firearms accidents each year, many related to criminal activity. Criminals put their guns under the front steps. Thugs leave their guns under the couch cushions in their girlfriend's house. That is where children find them and where children get hurt. We want you to own your firearms responsibly, but also want you to keep them accessible so you can use your “rescue tools” when you need them. For many of us, that means you carry your gun on your body and then put it in a small, quick-access, gun safe. We want you to exercise your rights. We want you to have dangerous freedom because we trust you. You have more common sense and honesty than the politicians paraded before us on the news. We trust your wisdom and your motives far more than we trust theirs.

Historical Perspective: Joe Biden – Cop Killer Bullet Hoax and Abuse of Power and Position

Biden is an unethical, self-aggrandizing bully. For this particular example I am referring to the hearing that took place on March 7th, 1984.

Armor-Piercing Ammunition Wednesday, March 7, 1984 U.S. Senate, Committee On The Judiciary, Subcommittee On Criminal Law, Washington, DC

From Lt. Kayne Robinson's testimony before the judiciary committee on 7 March, 1984 Page 80:

In testing our own vests in the Des Moines Police Department, we manufactured-here are some samples of bullets. It took us about 15 minutes apiece to modify commonly available, ordinary, everyday police type ammunition that would shoot through our vests with no difficulty at all and penetrate way into our bullet catching device. It is the common one that is used, but it nevertheless absorbs energy to capture the bullet.

The point is that it is very easy for anyone to make this ammunition in his own basement. It is very, very easy to do. It is going to be extremely difficult to define that kind of a situation in the law. That ammunition obviously was not originally manufactured for that purpose. Yet it was very easy to modify it. Needless to say, that is cheaper and more readily available than some of the highly restricted ammunition like the KTW that would leave a more dramatic trail, certainly, with regard to the person who bought it.

So as regards the specific proposals that I have read, the one that is before the committee, it will ban many sporting cartridges. It will ban cartridges like some of those standing before you that were not designed to be armor piercing cartridges, and that is a serious problem.

 From Page 86:

Senator BIDEN. And speaking of Iowa's battles, there IS an assistant chief named Zinzer who says you do not speak for the dt~part­ment. I guess he is your assistant chief. We just got him on the phone.

Mr. ROBINSON. Is that right? Senator BIDEN. Yes. He says specifically you do not speak for the department. 1

Mr. ROBINSON. OK.
Senator BIDEN. Is that right? Did you think you did? I mean:. I am confused here.

Mr. ROBINSON. I am not going to debate you about what Assistant Chief Zinzer has to say, sir.

Senator BIDEN. Does that surprise you that he would say that? Mr. ROBINSON. I do not have any way of knowing what he said. Senator BIDEN. I'll tell you what, you could make it in the State Department. [Laughter.]

You might be able to make it in politics…

Kayne was strong and unflappable. Biden gave him a compliment by saying he could make it in politics. It was months later that it was learned that after Lt. Robinson had testified, Biden had a staffer call Robinson's police department to apply pressure to try to get Robinson fired.

Isn't this very close to Stalinist tactics.

The account of Biden attempting to use his clout as a Senator to get a police officer fired, for giving effective testimony in opposition to the bill Biden was promoting, was obtained second hand.

More and more of Americans are having their eyes opened to the seamy side.

Aftermath: In 1986, the “cop-killer” bullet ban was passed. It did nothing to increase officer safety, but it did chip away at the Second Amendment.

Biden supported the ban on some bullets, the so-called, Orwellian termed “cop-killer” bullets, in 1986, when it passed the Senate.

Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), chief sponsor of the bill, along with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), noted that it is supported by numerous law enforcement groups.

The ban was never about protecting police officers. No officer was ever killed by an “armor piercing pistol bullet” being shot through an armor resistant vest. It was a made-up controversy to create the precedent the government could regulate the type of ammunition used by the citizenry.

President John F. Kennedy’s thoughts on Freedom: “if freedom is to survive and prosper, it will require the sacrifice, the effort and the thoughtful attention of every citizen. In my own native state of Massachusetts, the battle for American freedom was begun by the thousands of farmers and tradesmen who made up the Minute Men -- citizens who were ready to defend their liberty at a moment's notice. Today we need a nation of minute men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of America, cannot succeed with any lesser effort.” John F. Kennedy, Commemorative Message on Roosevelt Day, January 29, 1961

Yours in Freedom,

Kim Stolfer, President

• mission statement
• privacy policy
• contact us

Copyright © 2024 Firearms Owners Against Crime, P.O. Box 213, Presto, PA 15142

Website design and application development by davidcdalton.com