Guns Are Not the Problem

It’s the culture, stupid. Gun violence is the penalty 

for our failure to uphold a moral, functioning society.

by Matthew Boose for American Greatness

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

In the wake of recent mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma, Democrats are once again sending Americans up a blind alley. Their “solution” is to punish millions of law-abiding gun owners for the crimes of a few evil maniacs. Undeniably, there is a certain appeal to this response. Gun control is a facile “fix” to a complex problem. 

Americans have owned guns since the founding, but it wasn’t until comparatively recently that mass shootings became a concern. Guns are not the problem. Our culture is. Broken cultures produce broken human beings. For every school shooter, there are thousands of other weak, confused, mentally disturbed men who are drifting away from society. They aren’t dating, aren’t working, and they spend most of their time in their bedrooms playing video games, smoking weed, watching pornography, and stewing in social media echo chambers. 

None of this is healthy or normal, but we have been desensitized to dysfunction. It is considered offensive or stodgy even to suggest that things are not as they should be. We’re living in a male-dominated world, we are told over and over. Men are thriving. But it’s the women who are thriving. They are getting educated more than ever, making more money than ever, and they are finding the pickings of marriageable men with secure jobs (thanks, globalization) are slim. The result is fewer marriages, or marriages delayed, and fewer families.

Our infertile, androgynous blob-society has destroyed masculinity and femininity both, leaving the sexes repulsed by one another. Society ridicules masculinity and sets men up to fail with terrible advice: become docile and vulnerable, and be more like women. While men have softened, femininity is becoming a rare quality in women. The typical modern “boss bitch” talks and acts like a man, is fatter than her predecessors, and has a sense of entitlement and an inflated sense of what she has to offer. 

The marriage market is a minefield, and it’s not hard to see why members of both sexes are approaching with caution. For men especially, marriage no longer offers the promise of security and respect that it once did. The traditional breadwinner role is culturally obsolete and, because of no-fault divorce laws, legally perilous. 

Rarely are we asked to consider these matters. Isn’t that strange? The family is the core institution of human society. Why don’t we hear more about the fact that it is in shambles? We almost never hear about marriage and family in our politics, and if we do, it is in tones of derision. The Left, it goes without saying, does not consider the decline of family to be a real problem. All that matters to them is “choice,” the choice to have as much consequence-free sex as possible, the choice for a homosexual couple to adopt, the choice to maim one’s child with body-altering hormones (but not the choice to own a firearm, of course.) 

For them, society has only improved by becoming more “inclusive,” and our main concern should be stamping out what remains of the abstract “isms” that continue to obstruct the “inclusive” world from coming to pass.

As for the Right, they mostly make reactionary noises about the liberal outrage du jour. 

The only times we even hear morals discussed, anymore, are when these shootings sporadically occur. As Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) put it recently, mass shootings are a “mirror” to what has become of our culture. He’s right, but we spend too little time looking in that mirror.

It’s the height of folly that we spend so much time shouting about a handful of mass murders, and almost no time talking about the collapse of our society, about the dysfunction that Americans live with every single day. We seldom hear about shootings in inner cities, where the vast majority of gun violence actually occurs and where the average kid is raised by a single mother. Nor do our politicians seem to care about the opioid crisis, which is killing Americans in record numbers as deadly drugs pour into the country uninterrupted.

Anyone who suggests that there is something wrong with our culture can expect to be mocked as a repressed theocrat projecting his own vices. This was the response to recently resurfaced remarks from J. D. Vance suggesting a ban on pornography. It takes only a moment’s reflection to see that porn is harmful to the formation of healthy, lasting relationships between men and women. It is easier to access and more graphic than ever. For growing numbers of men, it has become a substitute for love and marriage, one that feeds on and fuels feelings of insecurity, bitterness, and rage. But Vance’s proposal was met with universal snickering from liberal trolls: “Show us your browser history.” 

Laura Ingraham was likewise derided for talking about the connection between marijuana, which has become more potent in recent years even as PR from lobbyists has cleaned up its image, and mental illness. Like pigs rolling in mud, the Left can’t imagine that anyone lives or could want to live differently than they do, that a higher life, a life of duty and order, is both possible and desirable.

Our moral imaginations have been so blunted by years of “studies show” talk that we forget the basics. Your average school shooter spends months writing the script of his own little action movie that he wants to force society to watch. They are living out a fantasy of glory. The childish, sadistic theatrics of these spectacles bear the imprint of a childish and sadistic popular culture. It is absurd to suggest that the man who dresses up like a “Call of Duty” character to go kill children has not been influenced in some way by gratuitous violence in mass media. 

Our vapid, narcissistic “me” culture worships the self, and then we wonder why a handful of deranged people with no audience go out and make a spectacle of carnage. We seem to have acquired a strange skittishness of the word “evil” when these shootings occur. We have found abortion too convenient to give up. Majorities of Americans, including religious Americans (with the exception of evangelical Christians and Mormons), are fine with it. We have an entire month dedicated to celebrating the “pride” of anal sex. It’s considered controversial and “hateful” to push back on those trying to groom children in schools and through entertainment media with twisted gender ideology.

We are becoming a nation of distracted lotus-eaters. The percentage of Americans left who truly love freedom like a jealous lover cannot be more than a vocal minority, as the COVID experience showed us. Our society is hollowed out. It has no purpose, nothing that gives people a sense of common destiny. What is left of a national identity is under constant assault. Our cities are filthy, disgusting hellholes. The homeless and mentally ill roam streets littered with needles and reeking of drugs.

Gun violence is the penalty for our failure to uphold a moral, functioning society. It simply beggars belief that we could allow things to carry on like this and have nothing bad happen as a result. But that is exactly what the Left would have us think. The “solutions” they offer are band-aids for a dying civilization, a civilization that they destroyed. Fixing this mess we’re in would be hard. It’s much easier to blame law-abiding white Republicans and steal their guns.

Liberal midwits tell themselves, in self-satisfied tones, that the founders could not have envisioned modern firearms. This shortchanges the founders’ wisdom. We are learning what John Adams meant when he said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”

X22, And we Know, and more- June 6

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news.

The Sovietization of American Life ~ VDH

Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. 

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses. 

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions. 

Why does the state that formerly served as a model to the nation regarding transportation now suffer inferior freeways while its multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project remains an utter boondoggle and failure? 

Why was its safe and critically needed last-remaining nuclear power plant scheduled for shutdown (and only recently reversed) as the state faced summer brownouts? 

Why did its forests go up in smoke predictably each summer, as its timber industry and the century-old science of forest management all but disappeared from the state?

Why do the state’s criminals so often evade indictment, and if convicted are often not incarcerated—or are quickly paroled? 

Why are its schools’ test scores dismal, its gasoline the nation’s highest-priced, and the streets of its major cities fetid and dangerous—in a fashion not true 50 years ago or elsewhere today?

In a word, the one-party state is Sovietized. Public policy is no longer empirical but subservient to green, diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas—and detached from the reality of daily middle-class existence. Decline is ensured once ideology governs problem-solving rather than time-tested and successful policymaking.

In a similar fashion, the common denominator in Joe Biden’s two years of colossal failures is Soviet-like edicts of equity, climate change, and neo-socialist redistribution that have ensured (for the non-elite, in any event) soaring inflation, unaffordable energy, rampant crime, and catastrophic illegal immigration. Playing the role of Pravda, Biden and his team simply denied things were bad, relabeled failure as success, and attacked his predecessor and critics as various sorts of counterrevolutionaries.

Biden rejected commonsense, bipartisan policies that in the past kept inflation low, energy affordable, crime controlled, and the border manageable. Instead, he superimposed leftist dogma on every decision, whose ideological purity, not real-life consequences for millions, was considered the measure of success.

The Caving of Expertise

Entire professions have now nearly been lost to radical progressive ideology.

Do we remember those stellar economists who swore at a time of Biden’s vast government borrowing, increases in the monetary supply, incentivizing labor non-participation, and supply chain interruptions that there was no threat of inflation? Were they adherents of ideological “modern monetary theory”? Did they ignore their own training and experience in fealty to progressive creeds?

What about the Stanford doctors who signed a groupthink letter attacking their former colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, because he questioned the orthodoxies of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the state bureaucracies—who we now know hid their own involvement with channeling funding to deadly gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Did they reject his views on empirical grounds and welcome a give-and-take shared inquiry—or simply wish to silence an ideological outlier and advisor to a despised counterrevolutionary?

Or how about the 50 retired intelligence “experts” who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not genuine but likely Russian disinformation? Did they really rely on hundreds of years of collective expertise to adjudicate the laptop or did they simply wish to be rewarded with something comparable to a “Hero of Woke America” award?

Or what about the 1,000 medical “professionals” who claimed violating quarantine and protective protocols for Black Lives Matter demonstrations was vital for the mental health of the protestors? Or the Princeton creators of a video identifying Jonathan Katz as a sort of public enemy for the crime of stating that racial discrimination of any sort was toxic?

Career Advancement, Cowardice, & Membership in the Club

There can be no expertise under Sovietization; everything and everyone serves ideology. Our military—especially its four-star generals, current and retired—parroted perceived ideologically correct thought. Repeating party lines about diversity, white supremacy, and climate change are far more relevant for career advancement than proof of prior effective military leadership in battle. 

The ultimate trajectory of a woke military was the fatal disgrace in Afghanistan. Ideologues in uniform kept claiming that the humiliating skedaddle was a logistical success and that misguided bombs that killed innocents were called a “righteous strike.” Afghanistan all summer of 2021 was to be Joe Biden’s successful model of a graduated withdrawal in time for a 20th-anniversary commemoration of 9/11—until it suddenly wasn’t.

Pentagon decision-making increasingly privileges race, gender, sexuality, and green goals over traditional military lethality—a fact known to all who are up for promotion, retention, or disciplinary action.

How predictable it was that the United States fled Kabul, abandoning not just billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to terrorists, but also with Pride flags flying, George Floyd murals on public walls, and gender studies initiatives being carried out in the military ranks. Ask yourself: if a general during the Afghanistan debacle had brilliantly organized a sustainable and defensible corridor around Bagram Airfield but was known to be skeptical of Pentagon efforts to address climate change and diversity would he be praised or reviled?

The elite universities in their single-minded pursuit of wokeness are ironically doing America a great favor. For a long time, their success was due to an American fetishization of brand names. But now, most privately accept that a BA from Princeton or Harvard is no longer an indication of acquired knowledge, mastery of empiricism, or predictive of inductive thinking over deductive dogmatism. 

Instead, we now understand, various lettered certificates serve as stamps for career advancement—proof either of earlier high-school achievement that merely won the bearer admission to the select, or confirmation that the graduate possesses the proper wealth, contacts, athletic ability, race, gender, or sexuality to be invited to the club.

Universities’ abandonment of test scores and diminution of grades—replaced by “community service” and race, gender, and sexuality criteria—has simply clarified the bankruptcy of the entire higher education industry. 

Our “diversity statements” required for hiring at many universities are becoming comparable to Soviet certifications of proper Marxist-Leninist fidelity. Like the children of Soviet Party apparatchiks, privileged university students now openly attack faculty whose reading requirements or lectures supposedly exude scents of “colonialism” or “imperialism” or “white supremacy.” 

Faculty increasingly fear offering merit evaluation, in terror that diversity commissars might detect in their grading an absence of reparatory race or gender appraisals. The result is still more public cynicism about higher education because it is apparent that the goal is to graduate with a stamp from Yale or Stanford that ensures prestige, success, and ideological correctness—on the supposition that few will ever worry exactly what or how one did while enrolled.

We have our own Emmanuel Goldsteins who, we are told, deserve our three minutes of hate for counterrevolutionary thought and practice. Donald Trump earned the enmity of the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS. Now Elon Musk and his companies are suddenly the targets of the progressive state, including repartees from the president himself. To vent, the popular Soviet directs its collective enmity at a Dave Chappelle or Bill Maher, progressives who exhibit the occasional counterrevolutionary heresy.

Cabinet secretaries ignore their duties—somewhat understandable given their resumes never explained their appointments. What binds a Pete Buttigieg, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jennifer Granholm is not expertise in transportation, border security, or energy independence but allegiance to an entire menu of woke policies that are often antithetical to their own job descriptions.

“Diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” started out as mandated proportional representation as defined by the state allotting spoils of coveted admissions, hiring, honors, and career advancement by race and gender percentages in the general population. The subtext was that federal and state governments imported and incorporated largely academic theories that alleged any disequilibrium was due to bias. 

More specifically, racial and sexual prejudices were to be exposed and punished by morally superior castes—in politics, the bureaucracy, and the courts. There was never any interest in detailing how particular individuals were personally harmed by the system or by the “other,” which explains the Left’s abhorrence of racially blind, class-based criteria to establish justified need.

Reparations

In the last five years, American Sovietization has descended into reparatory representation. Due to prior collective culpability of whites, heterosexuals, and males, marginalized self-defined groups of victims must now be “overrepresented” in admissions, hiring, and visibility in popular culture 

As the Soviets and Maoists discovered—and as was true of the Jacobins, National Socialists, and cultural Marxists—once radical ideology defines success, then life in general becomes anti-meritocratic. The public privately equates awards and recognition with political fealty, not actual achievement.

Were recent Netflix productions reflections of merit or ideological criteria governing race and gender? Do the Emmys, Tonys, or Oscars convey recognition of talent, or of adherence to progressive agendas of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Does a Pulitzer Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, or a MacArthur award denote talent and achievement or more often promote diversity, equity, and inclusion narratives?

Consequences of Failing Up

Where does woke Sovietization end once accountability vanishes and ideology masks incompetence and malfeasance?

We are starting to see the final denouement with missing baby formula, epidemics of shootings and hate crimes, train-robbings reminiscent of the Wild West in Los Angeles, Tombstonesque shoot-up Saturday nights in Chicago, spiking electricity rates and brownouts, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, unaffordable and scarce meat, and entire industries from air travel to home construction that simply no longer work. 

Everyone knows that the status of our homeless population in Los Angeles or San Francisco is medieval, dangerous, and unhealthy. And everyone knows that any serious attempt to remedy the situation would cause one to be labeled an apostate, counterrevolutionary, and enemy of the people. So, like good Eastern Europeans of the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s, we mutter one thing under our breath, and nod another publicly.

Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura. 

Biden Gets Destroyed in New Poll That's the Worst Yet, as Gas Prices Soar to Incredible Amounts

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

Joe Biden’s approach to the rising gas prices has largely been to try to blame Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices were on the rise long before that.

The only action Biden seems to have done in response to try to lower prices has been to release barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and deplete our emergency stores. He said he would release one million barrels a day for six months. He likely hoped that would bring down the prices before the election. But it hasn’t done that and Biden hasn’t done anything to change his policies against the energy sector that are part of the problem. Biden has continued to block oil drilling and cancel oil leases. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has called out his approach.

A new ABC/Ipsos poll shows that Biden’s numbers have gotten even worse on everything, particularly inflation and gas prices. They were already bad enough, so much so that even CNN was blasting Biden over his approach. But now he’s at 28 percent approval when it comes to inflation, with 71 percent disapproval, and when it comes to gas prices, 27 percent approval and 72 percent disapproval.

Eighty-three percent say that the economy is “extremely or very important” to how they will vote, and 80 percent say inflation is “extremely or very important” to how they will vote. Seventy-four percent say gas prices are “extremely or very important.”

It’s bad, and the Republicans are leading in the enthusiasm gap as well for the midterms, another killer number for the Democrats. Biden is sinking them big time.

Democrats can talk all they want about other issues and try to deflect, but it’s the pocketbook issues that are leading people’s concerns–which the Democrats can’t hide or cover up.

Gas is just under ten dollars at a Mendocino, California, station, hitting $9.60 a gallon on Friday. Owner Judy Schlafer says that she paid $50,000 for an 8,880-gallon delivery this week. Three months ago, it would have cost $30,000. She said if she doesn’t charge that price, she’s out of business. “I’m going to be lucky if I make the year with all the fees, the regulation, the payroll fees,” Schlafer said. “If it continues the way it is, Mendocino won’t have a gas station next year.”

While that’s the most expensive in the country, the state average is up to $6.30 and the national average is now $4.82.

It’s hard to get around how bad all that is and how much it is affecting everyone. What makes it worse on top of all that is how Biden just doesn’t seem to give a darn and says things like it’s an “incredible transition” to his fossil free world or claims more people are “feeling financially comfortable.” It’s that deflection that is making Americans even angrier at Joe Biden.

Schiff Gives a Problematic Answer on Meadows, Scavino Not Getting Charged by DOJ

Becca Lower reporting for RedState 

CBS News’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan described one segment on the most recent show that aired Sunday as “a preview” of the prime time, January 6 House Select Committee hearings. Those will take place starting this week — and trust me, readers, the media won’t let you forget about them.

To set up what they seem to think is momentous and very serious work by Congress, CBS congressional reporter Scott Macfarlane intoned:

The committee has completed more than 1,000 depositions and interviews, including with several members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle. And they have collected nearly 140,000 documents.

…

Some key figures have defied the committee’s subpoenas, including Meadows and five Republican members of the House, including Leader Kevin McCarthy.

He added that among others they’re seeking to speak in front of the committee is former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, and that “[l]ate Friday, the committee said they’d been notified that the Justice Department will not be prosecuting Meadows or former White House staffer Dan Scavino for contempt of Congress.”

To kick things off, Brennan spoke to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of seven Democrats on the committee cobbled together by Democrat leadership, whom I don’t have to tell you holds an irrational and seething hatred for former President Donald Trump and anyone connected to him.

The host asked Schiff what he thought about two of Trump’s close advisers, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Scavino, not being prosecuted. His answer was problematic, to be charitable.

Take a listen yourself.

Here’s part of what Schiff said, in the exchange:

…[I]t is very puzzling why these two witnesses would be treated differently than the two that the Justice Department is prosecuting. There is no absolute immunity. These witnesses have very relevant testimony to offer in terms of what went into the violence of January 6th, the propagation of the big lie, and the idea that witnesses could simply fail to show up. And when the statute requires the Justice Department to present those cases to the grand jury, they don’t, is deeply troubling. We hope to get more insight from the Justice Department, but it’s a, I think, a grave disappointment and could impede our work if other witnesses think they can likewise refuse to show up with impunity.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Is it because these two men had such close proximity to President Trump, is the executive privilege argument actually applying here?

ADAM SCHIFF: That shouldn’t be the explanation here because, of course, there are a great many things these witnesses can testify with no even plausible claim of executive privilege. They were both involved in campaign matters. They both have documents that they could offer. None of which is protected by privilege.

And the idea that you can simply refuse to show up, rather than show up and say, as to this question I’m going to assert a privilege, that just invites others to be in contempt of Congress or be in contempt of judges around the country in other courtrooms. And I think it’s a very dangerous precedent to set.

There are two glaring issues with his argument. The first is that Meadows and Scavino did cooperate, just not as much as he or others on the committee demanded. Take a look at what they turned over; it’s no small potatoes.

Fox News:

Meadows and Scavino entered into negotiations with the Jan 6 Committee and participated to a lesser extent than the committee requested, despite Meadows turning over over 9,000 documents, whereas Navarro and Bannon rejected the committee’s request outright on the grounds of executive privilege. In a statement, Navarro described the Jan 6th committee as a “kangaroo committee” with “7 partisan Democrats” and “2 RINO Republicans.”

The other problem is that a legacy media outlet like CBS News isn’t going to give Schiff any pushback for his interpretation of what “cooperation” or the truth looks like. But, are you at all surprised?

We reported last week on how, like the others, Navarro was indicted by the Biden Justice Department — and unlike former Attorney General Eric Holder, he was arrested “at an airport in the Washington, D.C., area and later appeared in court, where he faced two contempt counts.”

As my colleague at our sister site PJ Media, Rick Moran wrote in May about this committee’s ongoing witch hunt, at that time against a Republican congressman for meeting with a constituent’s family last January 5, the day before the Capitol riot:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said astronomer Carl Sagan. He was referring to claims of aliens visiting earth, but he may as well have had the Democrats smearing Republicans with baseless charges of complicity in an insurrection in mind.

This is a recycled smear that the Committee wants to regurgitate in the news lull before the public hearings begin on June 9.

Indeed. And it’s one they intend to keep beating like a drum, as long as the news cameras keep the spotlight on them. But, hey, no more mean tweets, right?

Senators Toomey and Murphy Discuss Current Scope of New Senate Gun Control Measures to Be Completed This Week

Republican Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appear on Sunday broadcasts to discuss the most likely framework the Senate group is putting together for new gun control legislation.

The general convergence appears to surround: •a possible raising of the age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle (definition to be determined) from 18 to 21; •new federal red flag laws and/or financing to state government to construct ‘red flag’ laws; •increased federal funding for mental health screenings and facilities; and •new federal background check requirements for gun purchases.

Pat Toomey appeared on Face the Nation, while Chris Murphy appeared on CNN with Jake Tapper.  Both interviews below, starting with Pat Toomey on CBS. 

[Transcript Link Here] WATCH:

CNN State of the Union, Jake ‘Furrowed Brow’ Tapper, interviewing Chris Murphy:

New Poll Shows Biden's Support Among Black America Waning

Kira Davis reporting for RedState 

Democrats continue to hold the majority of the Black vote in America, but a recent poll shows that support for Biden in the Black community is waning.

As reported at RedState, an ABC/Ipsos poll shows Biden flailing on issues like inflation (71 percent disapproval rating), gas prices (72 percent disapproval rating) and economic recovery (61percent disapproval rating).

Now, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows Black Americans souring on the President just a bit. While the polling shows that 70 percent of the 1250 respondents approve of Biden’s performance, only 23 percent “strongly approve.” This may seem like an irrelevant difference, but the shift in certainty could be representative of the public frustration over Biden’s failure to keep his campaign promises.

Black Americans in particular were moved by the Biden/Harris campaign’s unkeepable promise to forgive student debt. Biden tried to gin up the Black voter base by recalling the days of the Democrat-led, segregated South, calling Georgia’s election reform laws “Jim Crow 2.0.” However, his hyperbole lost a lot of steam after Georgia turned out record numbers in primary voting. Meanwhile, Black voters have been feeling the sting of inflation and gas prices just like everyone else.

The polling may not show the Black vote shifting in dramatic numbers, but it does indicate an apathy that may keep many voters at home come midterm elections.

The poll was conducted from April 21 to May 2 based on a random sample of 1,248 non-Hispanic Black adults and a partially overlapping sample of 977 adults. The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points. – The Hill

500% Spike In Biden Administration Shutting Down Gun Retailers Over Typos

Firearm license revocations for retailers have increased greatly, and overzealous inspectors risk retailers’ cooperation with law enforcement.

Mark Oliva reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden is overzealously targeting firearm retailers to drive them out of business. Federal firearm license revocations for retailers have increased 500 from previous years. That’s got gun control groups excited, but it is casting a pall over the cooperative relationship firearm retailers maintain with law enforcement.

President Biden never hid the fact that he intended to use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to drive his gun control agenda. He campaigned on a platform of targeting the firearm industry instead of focusing on criminals.

“Our enemy is the gun manufacturers, not the NRA, the gun manufacturers,” President Biden said from the presidential campaign debate stage.

That hostility produced a platform that turned the ATF from the bureau that regulates the firearm industry and enforces federal gun laws into the hammer and anvil by which the Biden administration is pummeling flat firearm retailers. Instead of compliance inspections by ATF Industry Operations Investigators to work to ensure firearm retailers remain within federal firearm regulations, those inspections are now driving firearm retailers out of business.

Revocations

Lee Williams, an independent investigative reporter specializing in covering firearms, revealed that ATF once revoked the licenses of federal firearms licensees (FFLs) at a rate of about 40 each year. “But, in the 11 months since Joe Biden declared war on ‘rogue gun dealers,’ the ATF has revoked 273 FFLs — an increase of more than 500%,” Williams reported. “However, rather than targeting the true rogues, Biden’s ATF is revoking FFLs for the most minor of paperwork errors, which were never a concern for the ATF until Biden weaponized the agency.”

That’s due to the Biden administration’s “zero tolerance” inspection policy. That means inspectors are revoking federal firearms licenses for even minor clerical errors that previously would warrant a warning letter.

ATF has the authority to revoke licenses for even these minor clerical errors but used to be more interested in compliance. That changed under the Biden administration and the Department of Justice (DOJ) led by Attorney General Merrick Garland. National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is providing retailers with guidance to be prepared for these inspections.

Misplaced Priorities

The White House budget request clearly identified that driving gun stores out of business was a higher priority than pursuing criminals. President Biden proposed earlier this year to spend $20.6 billion on the Justice Department for federal law enforcement, crime prevention, and intervention.

Tucked into that spending proposal were plans for the ATF to hire 140 special agents and another 160 Industry Operations Investigators. That’s more inspectors to revoke licenses than special agents to actually lock up criminals. The Biden administration refuses to get tough on crime but is zealous in targeting the firearm industry.

Thomas Brandon, former ATF acting director, told USA Today that the goal of inspections is to get dealers compliant, not to penalize them. “The high majority of FFLs are good hardworking people running businesses, and they’re our front-line of defense for intelligence for diversion of firearms with straw purchases,” Brandon said, referring to when someone attempts to purchase a firearm for someone else who can’t.

The firearm industry absolutely wants firearm retailers that flout the law to be held accountable, but addressing the rare instances of criminal activity at the gun counter neglects the larger problem of criminal misuse of firearms. Indeed, that policy of targeting “rogue gun dealers” could have unintended consequences.

Unintended Consequences

Firearm retailers willingly cooperate with ATF special agents on suspect attempts to purchase firearms. They are often the ones providing tips to special agents on suspected straw purchases. Now, those same retailers are forced to consider the consequences of inviting ATF into their retail locations. When a potential tip to criminal activity by a random person wandering into their store could result in a business owner losing a license and income, that threatens the ability of the ATF to enforce the law.

That’s got special agents in the field concerned. Agents in ATF field offices who chose to remain anonymous have told NSSF the “zero tolerance” policy will do more harm than good. It will dry up their most valuable source of intelligence on criminal activity — the local gun store owner who wants criminals to be locked up.

Now, owners are forced to consider the unintended consequences of trying to do the right thing. Tips of suspect activity could lead to an inspection and a misplaced entry in a record book could put that gun store owner out of business.

There’s little reason to believe the policies will be reversed. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee questioned President Biden’s nominee to become ATF director, Steve Dettelbach, in a confirmation hearing last week. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) confronted Dettelbach about the “zero tolerance” policy and the Biden administration’s policy of rooting out “rogue dealers.” Dettelbach demurred on defining a “rogue dealer,” adding only that federal firearm license revocations should be reserved for “willful violations” and not “inadvertent errors.”

“The key to enforcement programs, it has to be fair, it has to be consistent, and it has to be effective,” Dettelbach told Sen. Grassley. The Biden administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to decimate firearm retailers is proving to be counterproductive.

Adam Schiff Claims 'A Great Deal' of New Evidence Exists in Capitol Probe

Bob Hoge reporting for RedState 

California Representative Adam “Shifty” Schiff appeared on CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday morning and promised, that “a great deal” of new information will be coming out about the events on January 6, 2021, when a group of protesters entered the US Capitol while the presidential electoral count was in progress.

Schiff is a member of an investigatory Select Committee announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in June 2021. Now almost a full year later, Schiff finally thinks he’s got some true gold.

Host Margaret Brennan asked him:

MARGARET BRENNAN: But if you don’t deliver a bombshell on Thursday, don’t you run the risk of losing the public’s attention here?

ADAM SCHIFF: Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country, how close we came to losing our democracy, what led to that violent attack on the 6th. The American people, I think, know a great deal already. They’ve seen a number of bombshells already. There is a great deal they haven’t seen. But perhaps most important is the public hasn’t seen it woven together. How one thing led to another. How one line of effort to overturn the election led to another, and, ultimately, led to terrible violence. The first non-peaceful transfer of power in our history.

Schiff is famously a windbag prone to using over-inflated, hyperbolic language, but it still stuns when you hear him say things like, “how close we came to losing our democracy.” Not close at all, Adam, not close at all. Do you really think a rowdy band of protesters was going to overthrow the Capitol, move on to the White House to take over the executive branch, then seize control of the mightiest military on the planet?

Where Schiff really loses his credibility though—if he has any left—is the line, “There is a great deal they haven’t seen.” Really? There’s some bombshell info you have in your back pocket that you’re going to drop on the American people shortly? Schiff is a notorious leaker, and if he had something juicy you can be sure it would have come out in the pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times a long time ago. We’ve seen this movie before.

Asked a simple question about what witnesses might be appearing in front of the committee, Shifty refused to offer specifics:

Margaret, we’re not commenting on specific witnesses, so I can’t confirm or deny who will appear before us.

The real problem for Schiff is he repeatedly promised he had bombshell evidence about the Trump Russia collusion hoax, yet he never produced it. It makes him completely untrustworthy.

From the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal on May 12, 2020:

Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice. Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence…

In December 2017 he told CNN that collusion was a fact: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the President made full use of that help.” In April 2018, Mr. Schiff released his response to Mr. Nunes’s report, stating that its finding of no collusion “was unsupported by the facts and the investigative record.”

None of this was true, and Mr. Schiff knew it.

Schiff may indeed ride into the committee to throw down some bombshell evidence Thursday, but his past lies certainly make that hard to believe. He earned his nickname “Shifty” with his endless dishonesty, distortion of the facts, and outright lies.

As the old saying goes, “You can’t trust him any further than you can throw him.”