Bloomberg's Texas shooting take: Only the government should have guns

Longtime gun control advocate and 2020 Democratic presidential contender Michael Bloomberg's response to last week's shooting at a church in Texas — the one that was stopped by pistol-packing hero Jack Wilson — is really something to behold.

"It may be true -- I wasn't there; I don't know the facts -- that somebody in the congregation had their own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people, but it’s the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot," Bloomberg said while speaking in Montgomery, Alabama, on Monday, December 30. "You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place."

We just can't have regular people with guns in crowded places? Really? A private citizen who was not present as a member of law enforcement but with a privately owned gun was exactly who saved lives in the situation he's referring to.

Gun control is Bloomberg's most defining career issue up to this point, so that he would try to spin the White Settlement attack to fit a pr0-gun control narrative isn't surprising at all. It does, however, demonstrate how detached from reality his gun control position really is.

In a situation where innocent people are threatened by a bad guy with a gun, the only way to stop it is with an armed response. We all have a natural right to defend ourselves and others from harm, and plenty of people do that legally with guns every single year. The kind of setup Bloomberg is arguing for doesn't take away that right; it merely makes sure that law-abiding people are less likely to be able to immediately defend themselves against the lawbreakers who won't comply with gun control efforts in the first place.

Rather, in Bloomberg's envisioned world, the law-abiding would be at the mercy of how soon the nearest law enforcement officer can arrive and respond to the threat. And just for reference, the National Sheriffs Association said that the average police response time was 18 minutes in 2016, while a 2013 story at the Wall Street Journal placed the average at 11 minutes. Either one of those is a long time to wait while facing an active shooting threat.

Given the scenario that played out in White Settlement — where the gunman shot two churchgoers before being shot in a matter of seconds — one shudders to think how many innocent lives could have been lost if the parishioners had been unarmed and the shooter had been given even an extra minute to carry out his wicked intentions. It's a terrifying thought, to be sure, but it's just the kind of scenario Bloomberg is asking for.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the name of Jack Wilson. It originally read "Jack Phillips." CR regrets the error.

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The Second Amendment saved lives in Texas. It saves lives everywhere it's unleashed

Once again we see it demonstrated in real life that the most effective response to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy — or multiple good guys — ready and willing to fire back. The sooner an armed attack is met with an armed response, the sooner the attack will be over.

Sunday morning in White Settlement, Texas, a Christian worship service was plunged into horror as a man armed with a shotgun walked into a church, walked up to someone serving communion, and fired before being shot by an armed churchgoer named Jack Wilson.

Some may try to explain away the facts of the matter by pointing out that the armed response came from volunteers on the church’s security team, and therefore this doesn’t fit in with the usual narrative of the "good guy with a gun." Such arguments ignore the fact that, prior security arrangement or not, we’re still talking about church members responding with their own guns. He was a good guy, he had a gun, he used it to save lives.

The reality is that this is another bad story for the gun control crowd. The assailant was carrying a shotgun, rather than a scary-looking semi-automatic rifle, and he was ultimately stopped by someone exercising his right to defend himself and others with deadly force. And while this is national news and a topic of debate, in context, it’s one of the estimated millions of defensive gun uses that take place every year. Plus, this all comes a couple months after a Texas law went into effect relaxing restrictions on concealed carrying in the state’s places of worship, a law that presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden criticized as “totally irrational” at the time of its enactment.

Yet no matter how many examples of this reality we're given, some people in the gun debate still manage to convince themselves that we need to disarm the law-abiding and continue to advocate for that, no matter how many lives are spared from evil intentions by privately owned firearms in the right hands.

But to get a fuller sense of what happens when law-abiding people are restricted in their ability to defend themselves, we need only look at the struggles of of another religious community in the United States currently living under far more restrictive gun laws than those in the Lone Star State.

The most glaring contrast to what happened on Sunday in Texas was the stabbing attack the night before in the Monsey suburb of New York City. At the end of a week marked by a shameful increase in anti-Semitic violence in the area, an assailant armed with a machete wounded five people in a rabbi’s home. One witness says he lured the attacker away from more potential victims by throwing a coffee table at him and running.

Indeed, if there is any group of people who clearly ought to defend themselves with carried firearms at this moment in time, it’s the Jewish community in the New York metropolitan area. Yet this violence is has been going on in a “may-issue” concealed carry permit state, where American citizens are forced to beg their government to return to them their fundamental right to adequately defend themselves -- and can be denied. On top of its concealed carry limitations, the state also has some of America’s strictest gun laws to begin with.

Self-defense is a fundamental human right. Gun control policies and draconian regulatory requirements don’t make that right go away; they merely render law-abiding people’s exercise of it far less effective against violent, lawbreaking aggressors.

We live in a world where previously unthinkable acts of murderous violence against innocents have become recurring subjects of national news headlines. And while we do desperately need to address the root causes of the deep, underlying societal sickness our country faces, law-abiding people need to be able to adequately defend themselves from its immediate symptoms in the meantime, whether they live in Texas, New York, or any other state in the union.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include information about Texas' September law relaxing restrictions on carrying guns in places of worship as well as Joe Biden's criticism of the law.

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Congress' spending deal will put millions of tax dollars toward government gun violence research

Part of the spending deal meant to avert a partial government shutdown at the end of this week includes $25 million in taxpayer funds to be spent on federal research into gun violence.

In a Monday statement, Connecticut House Democrat Rosa DeLauro took credit for securing the funds, saying that the resulting research "will help us better understand the correlation between domestic violence and gun violence, how Americans can more safely store guns, and how we can intervene to reduce suicide by firearms."

According to The Hill, the agreement would give $12.5 million each to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. It marks the first time in over two decades that Congress has directly appropriated money for the purpose of researching gun violence. The $25 million total is half of the $50 million Congressional Democrats asked for earlier in spending negotiations.

In a statement to Blaze Media about the news, Congressional Second Amendment Caucus Chair Thomas Massie, R-Ky., warned that the funds would be used to generate biased, anti-gun research at taxpayers' expense.

"The inherent bias at NIH and CDC in deciding how this money will be spent will compel left wing researchers to compete with each other to cook up the most anti-gun results possible," Massie said. "As with the climate change research industry and the privately funded gun-violence research industry, this newly christened government-funded gun-violence research industry will work mainly to justify its own existence, and unbiased voices won't be funded or even tolerated."

Gun control advocate and former Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords hailed the funding as a "historic win," noting it as the first time Congress had appropriated such funds in over 20 years. The reason for this, her statement says, is a long-standing federal spending provision known the Dickey Amendment, which says that federal funds can't be used for the advocacy or promotion of gun control. Gun control advocates have long said that the rule acted as a de facto prohibition on federal gun violence research and celebrated a 2018 clarification in a spending bill that it said it didn't ban research.

A 2018 blog post from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, however, pointed out that CDC gun research hadn't stopped during the time period between the amendment's inception and the passage of the 2018 language:

The CDC was never barred from any such research. In fact, the CDC has studied guns and suicide, noise and lead exposure at ranges, firearm violence prevention in Wilmington, Del., and issued a report on firearms homicides and suicides in metropolitan areas. That doesn't include a bevy of FBI, Department of Justice and Congressional studies.

In fact, former President Barack Obama famously ordered the CDC to do a study on gun violence in 2013 in the wake of the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. But what the agency found out ended up running contrary to a lot of what gun control advocates might have hoped for.

Among its several published findings, the CDC research pointed out that the use of guns in self-defense is actually pretty common, that gun buyback programs aren't very effective at lowering crime, and that there are "consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies."

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Levin explains exactly what Second Amendment sanctuaries are for: 'We're not giving up our guns. That's not happening'

Tuesday night on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin discussed the harm that immigration sanctuary jurisdictions are doing to America.

He noted that when the trend of jurisdictions bucking federal immigration laws with sanctuary policies began years ago, he said conservatives would eventually need to take a page out of the Left's book and create sanctuaries for the Second Amendment. Now that's happening, notably in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where an impending gun control push from Democrats in Richmond next year has driven several counties to declare themselves sanctuaries for Americans' right to keep and bear arms.

"You leftists and Democrats running for president, take notice," Levin said while reading a recent story about the movement. "We're not giving up our guns. That's not happening."

Listen:

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Get ready for another 2020 gun control candidate: Michael Bloomberg

Over the weekend, liberal billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended weeks of speculation with the announcement that he would join the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primary field.

Now the question is how much he'll want to focus his efforts on gun control, given his long history of fighting against Americans' Second Amendment rights.

As the founder of Everytown for Gun Safety, as well as a major financial backer of it, Bloomberg has already built himself quite a resume as a leader in the anti-gun movement. Bloomberg's Everytown also provided seed money to start up The Trace — an anti-gun nonprofit media organization — back in 2015. And years before that, he was a leading voice for the banning of so-called "assault weapons" and "high-capacity ammunition clips" (by which he probably meant magazines).

So, given his background, the question really isn't whether or not Michael Bloomberg will be a pro-gun control 2020 candidate. The question is whether or not he will make his signature issue of the past few years the signature issue of his campaign, and whether or not it'll actually work for him.

The Democratic presidential field has already seen the failure of two virulently anti-gun candidates who made infringement of the Second Amendment a centerpiece of their campaigns: Rep. Eric Swalwell, Calif., and former Texas Rep. Robert "Beto" O'Rourke. Bloomberg certainly has a longer resume and more money than either of them, but it remains to be seen whether either of those would make a difference.

Furthermore, he's going to have a harder time selling his message since his anti-gun bona fides are already tainted on the Left due to the controversy surrounding his "stop, question, and frisk" enforcement plan when he was still running things in the Big Apple. He formally apologized for the policy, but as the Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual explains, "if he continues backing away from his record in New York, he'll severely undermine one of his main arguments for sending him to Washington."

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'We have rights to bear arms. Point blank': Va. counties declare Second Amendment sanctuaries ahead of Dems' gun control push

As the prospect of new, draconian gun control continues to loom, the Second Amendment sanctuary movement continues to grow. Recently, ahead of the new Democratic legislature's immanent takeover in Richmond next year, counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia have started declaring themselves sanctuaries for Americans' right to keep and bear arms.

After the results of November's off-year election flipped control of both chambers of the state legislature to Democrats, Governor Ralph Northam announced that his party was already "working on" a plan to attack citizens' gun rights in the commonwealth. As of earlier this week, legislators had already started to pre-file gun control legislation for the upcoming session, including a ban on so-called "assault firearms." The Virginian-Pilot outlines eight bills that Democrats are likely to pass when they take control.

But despite the election results, some of the commonwealth's residents still care about keeping their Second Amendment rights intact. So far, Giles, Dinwiddie, Appomattox, Campbell, Carroll, Charlotte, Patrick, and Pittsylvania counties have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, with other county governments also considering doing the same.

“We have rights to bear arms. Point blank," said Dinwiddie Supervisor William Chavis in a report at WWBT-TV. "And our county, we have a lot of hunters, lots of sportsmen that like to sport shoot."

"Counties are saying, 'Look, we are not going to enforce any unconstitutional gun laws in our jurisdiction,'" Virginia Citizens Defense League president Phil Van Cleave explained to WRC-TV. "A sheriff is a constitutional officer, however, he can take the lead of the county if he wishes and say, 'We’re not enforcing any of this stuff.' And some sheriffs are going to do that."

The Second Amendment sanctuary movement has already made headlines out west after local officials in states including New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Washington made it clear that they wouldn't assist in the infringement of their citizens' gun rights. It's also been met with some pushback from national gun control groups.

Outside the Old Dominion, the movement is also coming to other states. Lake County, Florida, commissioners voted earlier this month to bar local law enforcement from enforcing federal gun restrictions. Florence County, Wisconsin, recently joined the sanctuary movement in opposition to a proposed "red flag" confiscation law in the state capital. Sullivan County, Tennessee, also made a sanctuary declaration recently to send a message to state legislators in Nashville.

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Gun sales continue to rise as Democrats push confiscation

Anti-gun rhetoric on the campaign trail seems to be helping out gun sellers once again.

A Thursday story at the Washington Free Beacon reports that gun sales from October were up 10 percent over the same month last year, citing numbers from Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting (SAAF) and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).

By SAAF's estimation, based on raw data from the FBI's gun background check system, Americans bought 1,159,277 guns last month, representing a 10.8 percent year-over-year increase from October 2018. Meanwhile, the NSSF found that last month reversed a downward trend in October gun sales, which peaked in 2016 just before the last presidential election. SAAF chief economist Jurgen Brauer also noted that the firearms industry has experienced "well-improved sales numbers over the past few months."

The statistics continue a recent trend of increased firearms sales in the months since multiple shooting mass murders over the summer led to renewed calls for gun control in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

"The NICS data continues to show us that Americans value their Second Amendment freedoms and ability to participate in the hunting and shooting sports," an NSSF spokesperson told the Free Beacon of the new statistics. "Today's firearms owners continue to vote with their wallets, purchasing the firearms that best suit their needs, whether that is for self-defense, recreational target shooting, or hunting."

An increase in gun sales against a backdrop of calls for new gun control has become an almost assured occurrence in the debate over the Second Amendment in recent years. When politicians start talking about restricting Americans’ gun rights, Americans have a habit of going out and acquiring more guns in response. Gun sales surged during the politicized aftermath of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook and the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino. They also increased during the calls for gun control after the Orlando nightclub shooting.

In fact, record firearm sales during the recurring threat of gun control during the last administration left President Barack Obama with the informal title of the best gun salesman in America or on earth.

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SCOTUS permits Sandy Hook parents to sue gunmaker

In an order issued Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court denied a petition to hear an appeal in a case about whether or not gun manufacturer Remington can be sued by the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut.

The case of Remington Arms v. Soto deals with whether or not Remington — which manufactured the modern sporting rifle used in the massacre — can be held liable in the matter because of how it advertised the gun.

While Congress passed a federal law in 2005 to shield gunmakers from liability when their products are used for criminal acts by third parties, the plaintiffs in the case claim that the advertising strategy violated Connecticut law governing fair trade practices by supposedly encouraging illegal use by associating it with the military.

“The Bushmaster Defendants’ militaristic marketing reinforces the image of the AR-15 as a combat weapon used for the purpose of waging war and killing human beings,” the initial complaint said.

Basically, the argument here is that because of how the gun company portrayed the gun in its advertising, the killer was more inclined to steal that firearm from his mother in order to commit the atrocity.

In a 4-3 decision, Connecticut's Supreme court held that the company's marketing was an unfair trade practice and remanded the case back to the lower courts for adjudication.

Independence Institute research director David Kopel, who joined in an amicus brief on the case, said that the Connecticut ruling is a problem for both the First and Second Amendments. "The notion that it is illegal for firearms advertisers to use 'militaristic' themes is absurd," Kopel writes:

The exercise of the right to keep and bear arms has always had a relationship to military use of arms. For example, the first clause of the Second Amendment is about "a well regulated militia." Colonial assemblies, early state legislatures, and Congress in 1792 mandated that American citizens possess firearms and edged weapons. The federal and state arms mandates were not enacted by legislatures insistent that everyone go duckhunting. They were enacted so that the population would have combat weapons. If guns were not useful for interpersonal fighting, they would not be "arms," and would not be protected by the Second Amendment.

Tuesday's order rejecting the appeal is part of a long list of rejected cases, and the high court provided no explanation for why it didn't take the matter up. But the rejection doesn't mean that this fight is anywhere near over.

Last month, University of Richmond School of Law Professor Carl Tobias told the Daily Caller that the petition may have been brought to the Supreme Court too soon in the legal process.

“The Connecticut Supreme Court decision is far from a final judgment,” Tobias explained. “The case will return to the lower court for discovery and a jury trial, unless the U.S. Supreme Court decides to hear it. The justices seem unlikely to hear it until the case has moved more fully through the state court system — that could consume several years.”

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Cory Booker thinks accurately describing gun confiscation is 'doing the NRA's work for them'

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., doesn't like that fellow candidate Pete Buttigieg referred to mandatory gun buybacks as "confiscation."

On an episode of SnapChat's "Good Luck America" show released Monday, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor criticized the gun confiscation proposal put forward by former Texas congressman and presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke in recent weeks.

Buttigieg referred to O'Rourke's mandatory buyback idea as "confiscation" and dismissed the idea in favor of other gun control proposals that he sees as more workable and pragmatic.

"I just don't think we should wait to have a fight over [gun] confiscation when we can win on background checks and assault weapons bans and red flag laws right now," Buttigieg said on the show. He added that he prefers gun control policies that can be put into place "right now."

Booker responded to Buttigieg's description of the policy by saying that the Indiana mayor was doing the bidding of pro-gun groups.

"Calling buyback programs 'confiscation' is doing the NRA's work for them, @PeteButtigieg," Booker tweeted, "and they don't need our help."

O'Rourke came out with the idea of gun confiscation for so-called "assault weapons" as part of his gun control plan released in August. He made a bigger splash with the idea, however, when he proclaimed "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47," at the September Democratic debate.

Booker, like O'Rourke supports the idea of forcing people to give their guns to the government but has also previously pushed back against objections to gun confiscation as "far-right fear-mongering."

"Look, we as a society have gotten weapons of war off of our streets in the past. In the 1980s it was machine guns. We collectively agreed these guns do not belong on our streets, and we got rid of them," the New Jersey senator told CNN in September. "We can do that with these assault rifles that are the tool of choice for mass murderers, and most Americans agree with that."

However, even if the proponents of mandatory buyback policies don't like the term "confiscation," it's not at all likely to go out of use. A mandatory buyback is when the government uses coercion to strip people of their once-legally-owned property, even if there is compensation offered in return.

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