Category: Politics

Gun Misinformation: Assault Rifles and Assault Weapons

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from interacting with gun control advocates it’s that they’re the most misinformed & ignorant people from across the political spectrum. Not only that but they don’t care that they’re misinformed & prefer to remain that way. So this post and my other upcoming posts aren’t for them. Instead I’m doing this to help inform those who are actually interested in being informed.

So, let’s start with one of the most talked about gun types in the country right now. Assault rifles and so-called “assault weapons”.

First off, the term “assault weapon” is essentially a made up term that doesn’t actually refer to any unique subset of guns based on function. Instead, the term is used by gun control advocates to try and ban gun accessories that have certain misidentified or ridiculously exaggerated functions.

For instance, here are a few of the accessories the Brady Campaign wants banned & the utterly ridiculous effects the clearly ignorant person who wrote their frequently asked questions section imagines they have:

A pistol grip which facilitates spray-fire from the hip without losing control. A pistol grip also facilitates one-handed shooting.

This is completely absurd on all levels. First off, you can’t “spray-fire” in any realistic sense with a semi-automatic rifle. Additionally, shooting with one hand or from the hip is the least accurate or useful way to use any gun.

A threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor which allows the shooter to remain concealed when shooting at night, an advantage in combat but unnecessary for hunting or sporting purposes. In addition, the flash suppressor is useful for providing stability during rapid fire.

Flash suppressors do only what the name implies: suppress the flash created when firing a round. They don’t “provide stability during rapid fire”. They are also not useful for the purposes of criminals or mass murderers and the Brady Campaign doesn’t produce a single example of anybody using a flash suppressor in the way they describe and I can’t find one either… probably because there aren’t any.

A threaded barrel designed to accommodate a silencer which allows an assassin to shoot without making noise.

While the entire list is filled with misinformation, this point is by far the most absurd. Silencers do not make guns silent. They simply suppress the amount of noise created by each shot fired. That’s why people in the gun community usually refer to them as suppressors instead of silencers. I encourage anybody interested in how loud a suppressed gun is to actually go to a range and hear it for yourself (if you can actually find one since current gun laws make them difficult to buy). You may not need ear protection depending on the suppressor and gun, but there will be no doubt a gun has been fired.

Honestly, the only way anybody could draw the conclusions written in this Brady Campaign document, especially about hip firing & silencers, is if their only contact with guns involves watching 80s action movies. Given that, I see no way to take these groups and their supporters seriously. At least until they stop spreading ridiculous misinformation.

So, an “assault weapon” isn’t a real subset of firearms based on function but rather a firearm that features some random subset of accessories unrelated to the way the firearm operates  However, an assault rifle is an actual term used to describe a specific subset of rifles originating in World War II. The first of this type of firearm was the German Sturmgewehr 44 which means “storm rifle” of the year 1944.

Assault rifles are firearms that combine the fully automatic feature of the sub-machine gun with rifle ammunition. If you remove either one of those features then the firearm is no longer an assault rifle. An assault rifle must be able to shoot rifle ammunition at a fully automatic rate of fire.

Therefore, a rifle only capable of semi-automatic fire is not an assault rifle. That means that the AR-15 commonly available for civilian purchase, which gun control advocates are mainly after and the kind I own, is not an assault rifle. In function it is no different from any other semi-automatic rifle.

Click here for the next post in my gun misinformation series.

David Frum Pushes ABC’s Anti-Gun Propaganda

As most people already know David Frum is a hack. So much so that I’ve taken to labeling people who call themselves conservatives but do their best to undermine and attack conservative beliefs at every turn “Frums”. Therefore it should come as no surprise that Frum was out on Twitter forwarding some old ABC anti-gun propaganda.

Frum anti gun

Now, there’s a lot of stupid to unpack here, so let’s start with the bizarre statement Frum makes in his tweet. Now, I’ve never been quite sure what the alternate reality David Frum inhabits is like but it’s apparently a place where concealed carry laws haven’t been in existence for decades. Back here on earth though we’ve had concealed carry laws in place in most states for a long time and, as the recent shooting in Oregon reinforces, they’re life savers.

Ok, now that we’ve cleared that up, lets move on the poorly made anti-gun propaganda from ABC that Frum finds so enlightening.

Yea, wow. There’s so many ways in which this “experiment” is stacked against concealed carry. Let’s start with the basics.

In this “experiment” completely untrained & inexperienced college students are pitted against highly trained firearms instructors in a close range shooting match in order to test the effectiveness of carrying a concealed weapon. So the only thing they’re really testing is whether these college students can win in a shootout with a fully trained firearms instructor who attack them with a gun already drawn & using the element of surprise. What a worthwhile undertaking…

But that obvious stacking of odds against concealed carry was apparently not enough for ABC News though as they continued their skewing in several other ways. First off they force the college kids to wear ridiculously long & impractical shirts with snapping holsters, a combination which nobody who carries on a regular basis would ever use. Then the highly trained firearms instructor purposely targets the college kids immediately after shooting the teacher.

Of course even all that wasn’t enough bias for ABC as they basically have to lie about the results of their own test involving the young woman in order to fit their narrative. Not only was the completely untrained woman able to draw her weapon from under her ridiculously over sized shirt but she was able to fire it at the firearms instructor, hit him in the groin, and effectively end the shooting.

ABC labels this a stunning failure because the marksman they used as the bad guy hit her giant helmet at some point, she wasn’t sure about where she had shot the gunman (because that matters for some reason), and because she stood up slightly.

It is important to note that the firearm instructor & police officer’s warnings that being trained & prepared is an essential part of being armed are, of course, sound advice. Nobody should carry a weapon unless they know how to do so responsibly.

However, what’s more important to note is exactly what ABC recommends you do instead of arming yourself since they’ve just had you sit through propaganda about how crazy & ineffective that is. Against a myriad of evidence ABC tells its viewers that it’s better to hide, play dead, try to run away, or use your cellphone. Obviously those are things that should be employed if they’re most likely to keep you alive in the situation but pretending you aren’t utterly exposed if those are your only options is insanity.

This clearly serves to remind us that when gun control advocates argue guns are too ineffective or dangerous to be used in self-defense their alternative is always that you be left defenseless. That is absurd.

But when you’re an gun control advocate absurdity is a key piece of most of your arguments so I suppose none of this bothers ABC or David Frum. It should, though, bother anybody who does cares about logic or fact. Hopefully that’s more people than not.

Fact Checking Sally Kohn

Sally Kohn’s opinion article on Paul Ryan’s speech last night is making the rounds with liberals. The thinking goes that, hey, her piece was published on Fox News so it couldn’t possibly be liberal and everything in it must be true. That idea is, of course, absurd but I’ve decided to go through and refute the “facts” she lists in her article one by one.

Her first “fact” deals with Ryan’s attack on the President for presiding over the only national credit downgrade in American History:

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

In reality S&P said they downgraded the rating because “The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics”.

Not because, as Sally Kohn says, “Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling”.

Her second “fact” deals with Paul Ryan’s assertion that, despite then candidate Obama’s assertion that he’d keep the Janesville GM plant open for 100 years in 2008 it didn’t even last through 2009:

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

As my post from earlier today calling out Politifact’s lies explains, the Janesville GM plant continued building trucks until April 23rd, 2009. That’s completely indisputable, and Sally Khon is either lying on purpose or too lazy to look into the details.

Kohn’s third “fact” isn’t exactly clear but I’m guessing she’s referring to Paul Ryan’s attack on President Obama’s now infamous “you didn’t build that” speech:

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn’t what the president said. Period.

This statement isn’t remotely one of fact. It’s very obviously a statement of opinion on both what Ryan and Obama said. One that I couldn’t disagree with more. Period.

Her fourth, and final, “fact” deals with Ryan’s attack on how the President cut money from Medicare in order to make Obamacare’s financials seem more palatable.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Frankly, she doesn’t even appear to dispute that $716 billion is being cut from Medicare. She simply calls it “savings” and, in an obviously sloppy mistake, links to a Politifact post about welfare waivers. Heck, even the NYT post she also links to says “The 2010 health care law cut Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and insurers, not benefits for older Americans, by that amount over the coming decade” right in the second paragraph.

So, as you can see, none of the “facts” in Sally Kohn’s piece are accurate. The piece can’t stand on its own two legs. If this is the best the left can do at “fact checking” it should give up the pursuit altogether.

Politifact Lies About Paul Ryan and the Janesville GM Plant

Last night Politifact Wisconsin issued one of the least factual and most skewed “fact checks” I’ve ever seen. Not only do they bend over backwards to provide cover to one of the most impotent promises President Obama ever made, they also simply lie about the key facts they use to label Paul Ryan’s claim false. Here is Politifact’s ruling:

Continue reading Politifact Lies About Paul Ryan and the Janesville GM Plant

Times Have Changed

August, 2004.

That’s the month Green Day released the first single off it’s iconic pile of crap known as American Idiot. The catchy little tune about how evil and stupid Republicans are became a quick hit. Sitting right there in the middle of our pop culture and, therefore, in the middle of our minds just before the election was the line “don’t wanna be an American idiot”.

August, 2012.

Continue reading Times Have Changed

Scott Walker: Honey Badger

In case any of you missed this the first time around… which might not be a lot of you considering it was on the front page of Yahoo and garnered over 120,000 views… here is the Scott Walker tribute video I made with some friends.

Scott Walker. Total bad ass.

Oh, also, Buzzfeed says I forced my way into the political conversation through Twitter. Which is pretty cool and pretty true.

Anyway. I’m working on another parody video that should be out shortly. Keep your eyes peeled.

Sandra Fluke, Gender Reassignment, and Health Insurance

Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.

As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years according to the Washington Post.

However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.

The title of the article, which can be purchased in full here, is Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review. I have posted a transcript of the section I will be quoting from here. In a subsection of the article entitled “Employment Discrimination in Provision of Employment Benefits” starting on page 635 of the review Sandra Fluke and her co-editor describe two forms of discrimination in benefits they believe LGBTQ individuals face in the work place:

Discrimination typically takes two forms: first, direct discrimination limiting access to benefits specifically needed by LGBTQ persons, and secondly, the unavailability of family-related benefits to LGBTQ families.

Their “prime example” of the first form of discrimination? Not covering sex change operations:

A prime example of direct discrimination is denying insurance coverage for medical needs of transgender persons physically transitioning to the other gender.

This so called “prime example” of discrimination is expounded on in a subsection titled “Gender Reassignment Medical Services” starting on page 636:

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.

To be clear, the argument here is that employers are engaging in discrimination against their employees who want them to pay for their sex changes because their “heterosexist” health insurance policies don’t believe sex changes are medically necessary.

Additionally Sandra Fluke and her co-editor have an answer for why exactly these “heterosexist” insurance policies, and the courts that side with them, deem sex changes as medically unnecessary:

In Mario v. P & C Food Markets, Inc., an employee who was denied such coverage brought claims under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security (ERISA) and Title VII. The court rejected the ERISA claim, finding the plaintiff’s mastectomy and hormone therapy were not medically necessary. The court’s ruling was based upon controversy within the medical community regarding that treatment plan. Much of that controversy has been linked to ignorance and bias against transgender persons, and the American Medical Association has declared the lack of coverage to be discrimination.

You see, all opposition to the determination that sex changes are medically necessary, and therefor must be covered by private employer provided health insurance, is based on “ignorance and bias against transgender persons”.

The section on discrimination against those seeking  gender reassignment ends with Sandra Fluke and her co-editor wondering why more lawsuits aren’t filed against private employers on these grounds. Especially in comparison to the frequency with which these types of cases are filed against Medicare, Medicaid, and even the prison system:

The reason for this lack of cases is unclear. Private employee insurance plans do not more frequently cover this need, so it may be a sign that transgender employees do not see the courts as likely to provide any assistance against private employers.

The argument made in this article edited by Sandra Fluke and Karen Hu is quite clear. “Gender reassignment” is a medically necessary set of procedures that must be covered under employee provided health insurance policies. If it is not covered by those policies that is tantamount to discrimination and legal action should be taken against the employer.

So, as you can see, Sandra Fluke is not what she is being sold as. Instead she is a liberal activist pushing some rather radical ideas. Keep that in mind as the left holds her up in the spotlight.

Sandra Fluke, Gender Reassignment, and Health Insurance – Transcript

Here is an excerpt of Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons appearing in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law’s Annual Review 2001 between pages 635 and 637 edited by Sandra Fluke and Karen Hu:

III. Employment Discrimination In Provision Of Employment Benefits

Many LGBTQ individuals face discrimination in the provision of employment benefits. Discrimination typically takes two forms: first, direct discrimination limiting access to benefits specifically needed by LGBTQ persons, and secondly, the unavailability of family-related benefits to LGBTQ families. A prime example of direct discrimination is denying insurance coverage for medical needs of transgender persons physically transitioning to the other gender. Denial of family-based employment benefits (including family health insurance, survivor benefits, and time off for family illnesses) is often predicated on a lack of recognition of civil unions, domestic partnerships or co-habitation. Only 33% of all organizations offering spousal benefits include benefits to same-sex partners, and LGBTQ employees in lower paying industries are less likely to be granted suck benefits.

A. Gender Reassignment Medical Services

Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered. In Mario v. P & C Food Markets, Inc., an employee who was denied such coverage brought claims under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security (ERISA) and Title VII. The court rejected the ERISA claim, finding the plaintiff’s mastectomy and hormone therapy were not medically necessary. The court’s ruling was based upon controversy within the medical community regarding that treatment plan. Much of that controversy has been linked to ignorance and bias against transgender persons, and the American Medical Association has declared the lack of coverage to be discrimination. Mario’s rule that gender reassignment treatment is normally not medically necessary forces any individual claiming otherwise to show why his or her case is exceptional. This presumption is the reverse of the prevailing one for Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries; those plans may not have a blanket denial, but can deny coverage on a case-by-case basis.

There is a relative lack of case law addressing coverage denials under private plans, as well as the difficulty of accessing FMLA leave for recovery from gender reassignment surgeries. By contrast, there are many cases adjudicating claims for Medicaid and Medicare denials of these services, as well as many cases relating to the government’s responsibility to provide prisoners with access to such services. The reason for this lack of cases is unclear. Private employee insurance plans do not more frequently cover this need, so it may be a sign that transgender employees do not see the courts as likely to provide any assistance against private employers.

(This transcript does not contain the citations originally included in the article but they are available in the full copy of the article which can be purchased at the link above)

A Fond Memory of Andrew Breitbart

I’ve known Andrew Breitbart for several years. This picture is of us from the 9/12/2010 tea party. I considered him a friend. Sadly, though, I didn’t get to know Andrew as well as many others were lucky enough to. I wasn’t close enough to him to do justice in explaining all the details of his life that made him a great man. However, I do have one of those details that I’d like to share.

Andrew Breitbart never turned down a request from a fan for a picture. He never blew off somebody who had a question for him or a story to tell him. He was simply too nice to do that. He was a great guy.

Everybody knows that he never shied away from a fight he thought he was on the right side of. He never feared showing his righteous indignation. That’s always been clear to everyone.

But if you ever met him in person you saw another side to him. He never dismissed anybody simply because he didn’t recognize their name or hadn’t read their work. He was open to any and every person that approached him.

I remember hanging out with Breitbart in the hall outside radio row at the AFP Defending The American Dream Summit last August talking about the video I’d shot of an occupier using her kids to blockade a door that I’d shot the night before. He was, of course and as always, ready to expose that dirty trick for the world to see (and he did help do so). However, we were also in a public hallway with lots of summit attendees walking by. Naturally many of them wanted to talk to Andrew or have their picture taken with him.

At that point I ended up becoming an impromptu camera man of sorts. After all, he was a nice guy so he always said yes and he always listened to what people had to say to him with genuine interest. It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, that I witnessed Breitbart doing that but it did give me pause and make me marvel at his nature.

A nature that was truly one of a kind. I’m not sure anybody will truly be able to replace him but I know the imprint he left on the conservative movement, his family, his friends, and even complete strangers will never disappear.