The correct response to the news that a private citizen has stopped a would-be mass murderer is: “Thank you.”
It is not to lament that the citizen’s “split-second heroism has been turned into a PR tool by gun advocates.” Alas, that is precisely how The Arizona Republic’s Elvia Diaz responded in an op-ed that, having been picked up and reprinted by USA Today, quickly went viral on social media.
One struggles to imagine what Diaz—or the legions of people who shared and echoed the piece—could have been thinking. Of course “gun advocates” pointed to the incident as evidence that their policies are in fact the correct ones:
The incident is, well, evidence that their policies are the correct ones as they always are of course
After the massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, “gun advocates” suggested that it would have been much better had licensed parishioners been allowed to carry firearms in their church as they did elsewhere. Texas’ government agreed with this suggestion and changed the law accordingly. Two years later, in White Settlement, that changed law saved countless lives. What is the correct response from its advocates if not: “We were right”?
Embedded in Diaz’s reaction is a chronic mistrust of her fellow Americans that, sadly, is shared by far too many major politicians. Commenting on the new law when it came into effect, Joe Biden said it was “irrational.”
“With all due respect to the governor of Texas,” Biden said, “it’s irrational what they’re doing.”
Does Biden genuinely believe that laws prohibiting guns in churches prevent those who would do harm from carrying guns into churches? If so, he is obliged to explain why the vast majority of mass murders occur in places where guns are verboten. Or perhaps Biden believes that if licensed carriers begin carrying in church, they will be unable to prevent themselves from opening fire like Yosemite Sam—a strange conviction, given that the data shows the precise opposite to be true.
In her piece, Diaz suggested that while the man who took down the murderer—the hero in this case being 71-year-old Jack Wilson—may certainly have been a hero, but yet “we know absolutely nothing about the at least six other parishioners who also appeared to draw their handguns at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas.” She described this as “terrifying.”
This isn’t remotely true to any rational person. We know a great deal about these people, and none of what we know is “terrifying.” We know that they all tried to help. We know that they conducted themselves responsibly, even amid a firefight. We know that they grasped immediately who the bad guy was and who the good guys were. We know, more broadly, that licensed carriers in Texas are up to six times more law-abiding than even the police. Permitting these people to carry in church is rational.
The American gun-control movement has a bad habit of trying to “do something” only if those measures are things it approves of. This habit was summed up well by Beto O’Rourke, who tweeted, “Clearly what we are doing in Texas, what we are doing in this country, when it comes to guns is not working.”
Isn’t it? Because, from where I’m sitting, it looks as if the change in the law worked. As one might expect, the man who attacked the church had multiple prior convictions that prohibited him from buying, owning and carrying a gun. Naturally, he didn’t care. What changed was that the good guys in the church—the ones who care about the law—were given the chance to fight back.
A 2015 tape has emerged clarifying “Megabucks Mike” Bloomberg’s gun/crime policy.
Describing what Bloomberg views as a profile of murderers, Megabucks Mike argued that killers “… fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.”
Michael Bloomberg: His solution? According to Megabucks Mike:
The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands [that is, those who are 16-25] is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.
Welcome to Megabucks Mike’s Orwellian future, where people are seized without probable cause for the purpose of gun confiscation on the basis of stereotypes.
Yesterday, it was black youths, but tomorrow it will be pro-gun “bitter clingers.”
And what does “Megabucks Mike” have to say about this?
After increasing warrantless searches by 7-fold during his administration, Bloomberg supposedly renounced his entire record — about one second before he announced his run for the presidency.
You may remember that Bloomberg has aggressively tried to bring his anti-gun fascism not only to New York City, but also to pro-gun states:
He sent scam artists to states like Virginia, for the sake of entrapping gun dealers.
He pushed massive gun bans and middle-of-the-night “red flag” SWAT Team raids — again, without any due process whatsoever.
He spent millions of dollars buying entire state legislatures, such as in Virginia, for the purpose of destroying the Second Amendment.
And now Bloomberg is trying to use his $64 billion fortune in order to buy America — so that he can use the Constitution for toilet paper, as he sits on his golden toilet.
Well, America is not for sale. The Constitution is not for sale. And the Second Amendment is not for sale so go crawl back from under that rock which you came Mike.
First, some basic facts to convey the scale of the problem. Cancer is the second most lethal disease in the U.S., behind only heart disease. More than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, and more than 600,000 died. Over 15 million Americans cancer survivors are alive today. Almost four out of ten people will be diagnosed in their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected).
Research funding has also surged. The budget of the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency founded in 1937, now totals over $6 billion/year. That is a fraction of the total spent on research by nonprofit foundations ($6 billion a year, according to 2019 study), private firms and other government agencies. Total research spending since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971 exceeds a quarter trillion dollars, according to a 2016 estimate.
Cancer-industry boosters claim that investments in research, testing and treatment have led to “incredible progress” and millions of “cancer deaths averted,” as the homepage of the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit that receives money from biomedical firms, puts it. A 2016 study found that cancer experts and the media often describe new treatments with terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” “miracle,” “cure,” “home run,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” “life saver,” “groundbreaking” and “marvel.”
There are more than 1,200 accredited cancer centers in the U.S. They spent $173 million on television and magazine ads directed at the public in 2014, according to a 2018 study, and 43 of the 48 top spenders “deceptively promot[ed] atypical patient experiences through the use of powerful testimonials.” A 2014 study concluded that cancer centers “frequently promote cancer therapy with emotional appeals that evoke hope and fear while rarely providing information about risks, benefits, costs, or insurance availability.”
LITTLE NET PROGRESS AFTER 90 YEARS, BESIDES ANTI-SMOKING EFFORTS
What’s the reality behind the hype? “No one is winning the war on cancer,” Azra Raza, an oncologist at Columbia, asserts in her 2019 book The First Cell: And the Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Claims of progress are “mostly hype, the same rhetoric from the same self-important voices for the past half century.” Trials have yielded improved treatments for childhood cancers and specific cancers of the blood, bone-marrow and lymph systems, Raza notes. But these successes, which involve uncommon cancers, are exceptions among a “litany of failures.”
The best way to measure progress against cancer is to look at mortality rates, the number of people who succumb to cancer per unit of population per year. The risk of cancer grows with age. (Although childhood cancer gets a lot of attention, Americans under 20 years old account for less than 0.3 percent of all U.S. cancer deaths.) Hence as the average life span of a population grows (because of advances against heart and respiratory disorders, infectious disease and so on), so does the cancer mortality rate. To calculate mortality trends over time, therefore, researchers adjust for the aging of the population.
With this adjustment—which, keep in mind, presents cancer medicine in a more favorable light–mortality rates have declined almost 30 percent since 1991. This trend, according to cancer-industry boosters, shows that investments in research, tests and treatments have paid off. What boosters often fail to mention is that recent declines in cancer mortality follow at least 60 years of increases. The current age-adjusted mortality rate for all cancers in the U.S., 152.4 deaths per 100,000 people, is just under what it was in 1930, according to a recent analysis.
The rise and fall of cancer deaths track the rise and fall of smoking, with a lag of a couple of decades. Cigarette consumption in the U.S. more than doubled between 1930 and the early 1970s and has fallen steadily since then, according to the nonprofit site Our World in Data. Smoking raises the risk of many cancers but especially of lung cancer, which is by far the biggest killer, accounting for more deaths than colon, breast and prostate cancer combined.
Over the past two decades lung-cancer mortality has dropped, but it still remains higher than it was in the 1960s, especially among women, according to Our World in Data. A 2006 analysis concluded that without reductions in smoking “there would have been virtually no reduction in overall cancer mortality in either men or women since the early 1990s.”
NEW TREATMENTS YIELD SMALL BENEFITS, BIG COSTS
Research has linked cancer to many internal and external factors, notably oncogenes, hormones, viruses, carcinogens (such as those in cigarettes) and random cellular replication errors, or “bad luck.” But with the notable exception of the smoking/cancer link, which led to effective anti-smoking measures, that knowledge has not translated into significantly improved preventive measures or treatments. Clinical cancer trials “have the highest failure rate compared with other therapeutic areas,” according to a 2012 paper.
Pharmaceutical companies keep bringing new drugs to market. But one study found that 72 new anticancer drugs approved by the FDA between 2004 and 2014 prolonged survival for an average of 2.1 months. A 2017 report concluded that “most cancer drug approvals have not been shown to, or do not, improve clinically relevant end points,” including survival and quality of life. The authors worried that “the FDA may be approving many costly, toxic drugs that do not improve overall survival.”
Costs of cancer treatments have vastly outpaced inflation, and new drugs are estimated to cost on average more than $100,000/year. Patients end up bearing a significant proportion of costs. More than 40 percent of people diagnosed with cancer lose their life savings within 2 years, according to one estimate.
Immune therapies, which seek to stimulate immune responses to cancer, have generated enormous excitement. Two researchers won the 2018 Nobel Prize for work related to immune therapies, and a new book, The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, claims that they represent a “revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it.”
According to a 2018 report in Stat News, drugs firms aggressively market immune therapies, and patients are “pushing hard to try them, even when there is little to no evidence the drugs will work for their particular cancer.” A 2017 analysis by oncologists Nathan Gay and Vinay Prasad estimated that fewer than 10 percent of cancer patients can benefit from immune therapies, and that is a “best-case scenario.”
Immune therapies trigger severe side effects, and they are also extremely expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a bestselling history of cancer, reported in the New Yorker last year. “Subsequent hospital stays and supportive care can drive the total costs to a million dollars or more,” he writes. “If widely prescribed, immune therapies “could bankrupt the American health-care system.”
TESTS LEAD TO OVERDIAGNOSIS AND OVERTREATMENT
The cancer industry, aided by celebrities who claim that tests saved their lives, has convinced the public that screening for cancer is beneficial. The earlier we can detect cancerous cells, the more likely it is that treatment will succeed. Right? Wrong. One of the most significant findings of the past decade is that many people have cancerous or pre-cancerous cells that, if left untreated, would never have compromised their health. Autopsies have revealed that many people who die of unrelated causes harbor cancerous tissue.
Tests cannot reliably distinguish between harmful and harmless cancers. As a result, widespread testing has led to widespread overdiagnosis, the flagging of non-harmful cancerous cells. Overdiagnosis leads in turn to unnecessary chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Gilbert Welch, a physician whose 2011 book Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in Pursuit of Health helped bring overdiagnosis to light, recently called it “an unfortunate side effect of our irrational exuberance for early detection.” Overdiagnosis is more insidious than false positives, when tests erroneously indicate the presence of cancer. Biopsies can overturn false positives but not overdiagnoses.
Mammograms and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests have led to especially high rates of overdiagnosis and overtreatment for breast and prostate cancer. A 2013 meta-analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international association of experts that assesses medical procedures, estimated that if 2,000 women have mammograms over a period of 10 years, one woman’s life will be saved by a positive diagnosis. Meanwhile 10 healthy women will be treated unnecessarily, and more than 200 “will experience important psychological distress including anxiety and uncertainty for years because of false positive findings.”
Another nonprofit medical group, theNNT.com, has spelled out a disturbing implication of these data. (NNT stands for “number needed to treat,” which refers to the number of people who must receive a treatment for one person to receive any benefit. Ideally, the number is 1.) The NNT notes that some overdiagnosed women might “die due to aggressive therapies such as chemotherapy and major surgery.” Thus any benefit from screening “is balanced out by mortal harms from overdiagnosis and false-positives.” Breast-cancer specialist Michael Baum, who helped found the United Kingdom’s breast-screening program, has advocated abandoning such programs, which he believes might cut short more lives than they extend.
As for PSA tests, a federal task force of medical experts estimates that 1.3 deaths may be averted for every 1,000 men between the ages of 55 and 69 tested for 13 years. But for every man whose life is extended, many more will experience “false-positive results that require additional testing and possible prostate biopsy; overdiagnosis and overtreatment; and treatment complications, such as incontinence and erectile dysfunction.” A 2017 analysis by the task force estimated the ratio of beneficial PSA tests to false positives and overdiagnosis to be as high as 1/240.
A 2013 meta-analysis by Cochrane Group found “no significant reduction” in mortality resulting from PSA tests. “The strategy of routinely screening all men with PSA tests leads to interventions that are not saving lives and may be causing harm,” the NNT stated. The discoverer of the prostate-specific antigen, pathologist Richard Ablin, has called the PSA test a “profit-driven public health disaster.”
ALL-CAUSE VERSUS SPECIFIC MORTALITY AND “TORTURING THE DATA”
Studies of tests for a specific cancer generally look at mortality attributed to that cancer. Mammograms are thus deemed effective if women who get mammograms die less often from breast cancer than women who do not get mammograms. This method can overstate the benefits of tests, because it might omit deaths resulting, directly or indirectly, from the diagnosis. After all, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can have devastating iatrogenic effects, including heart disease, opportunistic infections, other forms of cancer and suicide.
Therefore some studies measure “all-cause” mortality. A 2015 meta-analysis by epidemiologist John Ioannidis (renowned for bringing the scientific replication crisis to light) and others found no reductions in all-cause mortality from tests for cancer of the breast, prostate, colon, lung, cervix, mouth or ovaries for asymptomatic patients.
In a recent editorial in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ioannidis and four co-authors argue that cancer screening (especially mammograms and PSA tests) does more harm than good and should be abandoned. They expect this proposal to be met with “fierce opposition.” Screening they note, “is big business: more screening means more patients, more clinical revenue to diagnostic and clinical departments, and more survivors in need of care and follow‐up.”
Cancer boosters commonly point to improvements in survival rates, the length of time between diagnosis and death. Survival rates for some cancers have indeed grown as a result of more widespread and higher-resolution testing, which detects cancer earlier. But as a 2015 analysis points out, in general people do not live longer as a result of early detection. They simply live longer with a diagnosis of cancer, with all its harmful emotional, economic and physiological consequences.
Using survival rates to promote tests is an example of what critics of mammography have called “tortur[ing] the data to make it confess to what one knows to be the real truth.” What the data on screening actually suggest is that millions of men and women have endured the trauma of cancer diagnoses and treatments unnecessarily. That strikes me as a case of monstrous malpractice.
The American approach fosters corruption. According to a 2019 essay in Stat News by oncologist Vinay Prasad, many cancer specialists accept payments from firms whose drugs they prescribe. This practice “leads us to celebrate marginal drugs as if they were game-changers,” Prasad argues. “It leads experts to ignore or downplay flaws and deficits in cancer clinical trials. It keeps doctors silent about the crushing price of cancer medicines.”
Last year The New York Times and ProPublica reported that top officials at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center “repeatedly violated policies on financial conflicts of interest, fostering a culture in which profits appeared to take precedence over research and patient care.” Sloan Kettering’s chief medical officer, Jose Baselga, “failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in dozens of articles in medical journals.” Baselga left Sloan Kettering to become head of cancer research at the drug firm AstraZeneca.
The desire of oncologists to produce monetizable findings might also compromise the quality of their research. A 2012 examination of 53 “landmark” cancer studies found that only six could be reproduced. The so-called Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology has examined 14 more recent highly cited studies, and has confirmed only five without qualification.
SOLUTION: GENTLE CANCER MEDICINE?
So what’s the solution to all these problems? Some health-care experts espouse “conservative medicine” as a way to reduce health-care costs and improve outcomes. In “The Case for Being a Medical Conservative,” a manifesto published last year, four physicians (including the aforementioned Vinay Prasad) urge colleagues to recognize the human body’s “inherent healing properties” and to acknowledge “how little effect the clinician has on outcomes.” Physicians will thus protect themselves “against our greatest foe—hubris.”
Medical conservatives happily adopt new therapies “when the benefit is clear and the evidence strong and unbiased,” the authors emphasize, but many alleged advances “offer, at best, marginal benefits.” Conservative cancer medicine, as I envision it, would engage in less testing, treatment, fear-mongering, military-style rhetoric and hype. It would recognize the limits of medicine, and it would honor the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.
Physicians cannot bring about a shift toward conservative cancer medicine on their own. We consumers must help them. We must recognize the limits of medicine and the healing capacities of our bodies. We must resist tests and treatments that have marginal benefits, at best. We may never cure cancer, which stems from the collision of our complex biology with entropy, the tendency of all systems toward disorder. But if we can curtail our fear and greed, our cancer care will surely improve.
A final note: I’d like to thank experts I’ve cited above—John Ioannidis, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Vinay Prasad, Azra Raza and Gilbert Welch—as well as Cochrane and theNNT.com for their blunt, courageous assessments of cancer medicine. People and groups like these represent our best hope for health-care reform. We just have to listen to them.
It’s happening again — exactly the warnings we’ve been warned about since last April.
Do you remember? Bill Maher shouting “death to religion” on national TV . . .
Monuments in Washington being whitewashed of God and prayer . . .
Religious crosses confiscated . . .
Lenten ashes on the foreheads of children in our schools being scrubbed off . . .
Prayer in school being ruled unconstitutional overnight.
Whether you do or don’t remember any of the above, please . . . keep reading.
If you’re a person of faith, this directly impacts you, your family, friends, and loved ones — and it’s terrifying.
Every day the writing on the wall becomes clearer.
Look at this . . .
Just recently, a gunman walked into the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, and opened fire.
Innocent Christians gathered in prayer, brutally attacked. Two killed.
Days later in New York City, another violent attack, this time against Jews — this just weeks after an attack on Jews in New Jersey. Three people and a police officer were fatally shot at a Jewish grocery store.
No, evil didn’t stop there . . .
During a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, five people were stabbed.
A Brooklyn man traveled more than an hour to a community of religious Jews.
He then randomly selected a home, entered it . . . and began a brutal attack.
This is serious stuff.
Listen . . .
Without a doubt we know there is a growing hatred in our nation toward Jews and Christians.
But why?
In his bestselling book, Dark Agenda, David Horowitz laid it all out . . .
The New York Times bestselling author detailed where it all started and with whom.
David Horowitz is Jewish. He planned to write a book about a possible, coming persecution against Christians.
But then he discovered it has already started!
Dark Agenda, coming from such a respected author, rocked the media and political world.
Tucker Carlson said he could not put the book down.
Mike Huckabee has urged every Christian to get and read this book.
And Glenn Beck said it revealed a “dangerous” situation we all face.
Horowitz uncovered the roots of this hateful, deadly movement and put it all in his new book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.
What’s occurring is so serious, we held a closed-door meeting in our offices at Newsmax. We unanimously decided we’regiving you this book for FREE.
Look, there’s no other way to say this . . .
If you’re a Christian or Jew or a faithful follower of God, you must read this book.
Folks, this is religious intolerance fueled by the left for 60 years. A deep-seated animosity inciting vicious hate crimes and gaining momentum fast. Just look at this . . .
The day after New Year’s, this headline appeared on NBC:
Anti-Semitism Grows in Jewish Communities in NYC Suburbs
Remember the Guardian Angels?
They’ve been placed on high alert, patrolling Jewish neighborhoods.
Anti-Semitism is growing along with a hatred for Christians. And it’s terrifying.
This is all part of the plan set in motion decades ago to rid God from public life.
Please, read this book.
In Dark Agenda, you’ll discover the plan that was set in place decades ago . . . and the series of events that have unfolded, allowing the plan to take hold.
Horowitz names names — Obama, Hillary, and the big media pushing this secular agenda.
You’ll discover who was responsible . . . how the Supreme Court failed Christian America . . . why school administrators are brainwashing our kids . . . and the names of those carrying out the plan in Washington today.
When you’re done reading Dark Agenda, you’ll understand the deep divide in America.
This is critical as we roll into election year.
As Horowitz explains, President Trump is at the very epicenter of this battle between the forces of good and evil right here in America.
We must fight back, or our children and generations to come will live in fear of expressing their faith.
It’s been hailed by Mike Huckabee, Tom Coburn, Rush Limbaugh, and Tucker Carlson, who insists, “Read this disturbing but vital book.”
Educate yourself on what is happening right before our very eyes! Do it now!
Democrat presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg (John Locher/AP)
By Jeffrey Rodack | Thursday, 20 February 2020 07:40 AM
President Donald Trump ripped Mike Bloomberg on Thursday, saying the former New York City mayor’s debate performance was perhaps “the worst” in history.
Trump’s comments came in a tweet after the Democrats’ presidential debate on Wednesday.
Trump wrote: “Mini Mike Bloomberg’s debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesn’t knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did!”
Bloomberg came under fire almost immediately after the debate started.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said: “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and no I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women.”
Bloomberg’s other rivals also confronted him during the debate for statements on minorities. He also was criticized for his backing of the controversial stop-and-frisk police practice in New York City.
Chelsea Handler Mocked After Misinformation About Trump Pardons
Chelsea Handler. (AP)
By Zoe Papadakis | Thursday, 20 February 2020 03:55 PM
Comedian Chelsea Handler is the butt of the joke after bashing Trump over his controversial clemency decisions on social media. Taking to Twitter, she accused the president of racism by granting clemency to just white people.
“While our president exonerates criminals and releases them from jail, notice what color they all are,” she wrote. Followers were quick to correct her, pointing out that not all those granted clemency were white.
Among them was Angela Stanton-King, who served a 6-month home confinement sentence in 2007 for her role in a stolen vehicle ring, according to a White House statement.
Among those granted clemency was Crystal Munoz, another black woman who spent the last 12 years in prison on a conviction for her role in a marijuana smuggling ring and was released per Trump’s order.
Tynice Nichole Hall, a 36-year-old mother who has served nearly 14 years of an 18-year sentence for allowing her apartment to be used to distribute drugs, was also pardoned.
Replying to the criticism, Handler claimed on Twitter that “the black people who were released from prison were never criminals to begin with. They had low level drug possessions. Trump just released real criminals and they are all white.”
THESE PEOPLE ON THE LEFT ARE CAUSING THIS PLANET TO SKID OFF ITS AXIS FER’ CRYIN’ OUT LOUD ALREADY ‘DERE’, HEY ‘DERE’.
Who Will Guard Against ‘Guardians’ When Trump Admin Enforces More Gun Laws?
“Attorney General William P. Barr announces launch of Project Guardian – A nationwide strategic plan to reduce gun violence,” a Nov. 13 Department of Justice press release declared. “Initiative emphasizes enforcing gun prohibitions based on domestic violence convictions and mental health denials.”
Project Guardian, we are told, “is based on five principles”:
Coordinated Prosecution.
Enforcing the Background Check System.
Improved Information Sharing.
Coordinated Response to Mental Health Denials.
Crime Gun Intelligence Coordination.
“NSSF applauds DOJ’s priorities: Enforce and prosecute gun laws,” Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) gushed in response. “We take action every day through our programs to promote safe, healthy use of firearms by law-abiding citizens. But we know more can be done to enforce existing laws and to prosecute those who break them.”
They’re so enamored of their position, they’ve service marked the term “Real Solutions.”
Allow me to take a contrarian approach: I warned you about Barr in a previous Firearms News article, and spelled out the reasons why I believe the Donald Trump choosing him to head DOJ was no favor to the gun owners who elected the president based on his campaign pledges. In the interests of full disclosure, I should also state I’m one of the plaintiffs suing Barr over the “bump stock” ban, a usurpation of executive power and reversal of the rules that you can bet Democrats will expand on and use against gun owners whenever they retake the White House. Forgive me if I can’t help taking it personally knowing that a “bump stock” is not just a firearm according to Barr’s Berserkers, they’ve declared the damn thing a machinegun.
So, what’s the big deal with enforcing laws?
While some informed gun owner rights advocates are appalled, there’s no shortage of “law and order” types sharing their “About damn time!” approval, NSSF being but the most prominent example. We still haven’t heard from NRA at this writing, but that’s hardly atypical: It seems every time something requiring the leadership attributed to them arises, Fairfax goes dark while its flacks wrestle with the best way to minimize negative exposure and risk.
Let’s start with asking where in the Constitution the feds are delegated the authority to involve themselves in any of this.
Oh sure, there will be no shortage of apologist pundits quick to point out how precedent has allowed for expansion of powers to where you can’t wash a fish in the wrong faucet without incurring the wrath of federal enforcers. I kid you not. Freedom Works came up with a list of 19 ridiculous federal crimes, citing “4,500 to 5,000 federal criminal statutes and as many as 400,000 regulations carrying criminal penalties,” and highlighting some of the more egregious absurdities, such as everything from calling turkey ham “ham turkey” and “tak[ing] home milk from a quarantined giraffe.” But I’m talking about looking at this from a Founding Fathers point of view, where, per the Crimes Act of 1790, 23 federal crimes were pretty much dominated by treason, counterfeiting and piracy. As for everything else, the Bill of Rights, ratified the following year, specifically mandates “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Then again, it also says “shall not be infringed,” and we see how well Barr, et al., listen to that.
In all this talk about reducing violence, nobody in power seems overly concerned with violence to the Constitution — and whether letting power-hungry government further slip its bonds may prove the greater danger.
Speaking of danger…
The first “principle” of “Project Guardian” says much in one small word. :
“Federal prosecutors and law enforcement will … consider potential federal prosecution for new cases involving a defendant who: a) was arrested in possession of a firearm; b) is believed to have used a firearm in committing a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime prosecutable in federal court; or c) is suspected of actively committing violent crime(s) in the community on behalf of a criminal organization.”
The use of “or” instead of “and” between “b” and “c” tells us you don‘t need to have a hit on all of the criteria. Any of the cited conditions can be enough to trigger the feds.
That was the case with a friend and patriot, the late Hollis Wayne Fincher, who attempted to demonstrate how the “supreme Law of the Land” invalidated federal citizen disarmament edicts and had his life destroyed for his efforts.
“The investigation was conducted under Project Safe Neighborhoods, the U.S. Department of Justice initiative that combines federal state and local resources to combat violent gun crime,” the DOJ crowed. That the only risk of violent crime introduced into the equation was initiated by the enforcement axis was left unsaid.
But what about proven results?
“Project Guardian draws on the Department’s earlier achievements, such as the ‘Triggerlock’ program, and it serves as a complementary effort to the success of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN),” the DOJ presser claims. It continues to sing PSN praises in its propaganda overview video, where one of its enthusiastic backers actually uses Hillary’s title phrase “It takes a village.”
As for lauded results, where the most recent “report” claims a four to 20% reduction in violent crime and a 42% reduction in targeted crimes between 2000 and 2006, the adage about “lies, damned lies and statistics” comes to mind, as well as the caution that correlation does not equate with causation.
“The United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) administers and promotes the Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative sponsored by the Department of Justice,” the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland claims. “Building on the Maryland EXILE Program and working with the Maryland Safe Streets Initiative, these efforts are having a state-wide impact.”
Stop what you’re doing right now and do a Google search for the terms “Baltimore” and “homicides.”
You have to wonder how many of Baltimore’s young worthies stand a chance of getting popped for violating “Principle 2,” as if they go to FFLs and through NICS when they decide it’s time for a new piece. But congratulations, AG Barr: You just gave the antis further ammunition for imposing so-called “universal background checks,” that is, for ending private sales of lawfully owned property everywhere, in Everytown.
And you’ll note it all goes back to Project Exile, or as some friends of mine liked to call it, Project Gulag.
NRA-endorsed ‘gun control’
“Let’s agree on this: Every American city, let’s put Project Exile, every time a violent felon, drug dealer, gang member touches a gun, let’s prosecute,” NRA’s Wayne LaPierre demanded in a CBS Face the Nation “debate” against then-Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. Disregard that the other Wayne, Fincher, the one I talked about earlier, was also caught in that net. The Association is all in on prosecuting “gun crimes” (talk about an invented, manipulative term) and theirs is the loudest voice.
“On the right, the National Rifle Association now stands with Handgun Control Inc. in vowing to put people like me behind bars,” writer Vin Suprynowicz quoted a Massachusetts gun owner who had written to him lamenting perceived abandonment by NRA. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard and seen the video recordings on the NRA website.
“‘You touch a gun in Colorado, and you’re gonna have five years in a state or federal penitentiary,’ says Wayne LaPierre, standing on the stage with HCI representatives,” his correspondent noted. “Under their Project Exile, anyone caught with an ‘illegal’ gun gets tried in federal court. What the NRA doesn’t seem to understand, or perhaps just doesn’t care about, is that here in Massachusetts, my guns were made ‘illegal. by the stroke of a pen.”
Some of us tried our best to raise that flag.
“We Condemn ‘Project Exile,’ A Coalition of American Leaders in the Firearms Movement” was a declaration signed by RKBA advocates including Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt, the founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, the late Aaron Zelman, and many others (including me).
“The current NRA management’s ‘Project Exile’ program demands ‘zero tolerance’ enforcement of all existing federal gun laws. But most—if not all—of these laws are unconstitutional violations of the Second Amendment,” the condemnation statement argued. “The NRA’s current management says that ‘Project Exile’ is aimed at convicting violent felons. But of course these laws can be—and will be—used against any citizen who breaks them.”
That includes every citizen who decides not to comply with an edict outlawing whatever it is the totalitarians decide to declare verboten. Forget “I will not comply,” and forget Thoreau’s grand testament to freedom, “Civil Disobedience.” As someone who has been chastised by self-styled “pragmatists” for being a “principles freak,” I can tell you from experience to expect no help from NRA and NSSF – their apologists will instead claim you’re “making us all look bad.”
Unfortunately, since his primary inputs for appealing to gun owners comes from NRA, Donald Trump has drunk deep of the Fairfax Kool-Aid while simultaneously failing to deliver on his promised Second Amendment Coalition. What’s clear from his campaign website is that he always intended to deliver on Project Exile (as did his first DOJ pick, Jeff Sessions).
“Enforce the laws on the books,” Trump argued. “‘We need to get serious about prosecuting violent criminals.
“The Obama administration’s record on that is abysmal,” he continued. “Violent crime in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and many others is out of control. Drug dealers and gang members are given a slap on the wrist and turned loose on the street. This needs to stop.”
So how does Trump and NRA define “getting serious”?
“Several years ago there was a tremendous program in Richmond, Virginia called Project Exile, he related. “It said that if a violent felon uses a gun to commit a crime, you will be prosecuted in federal court and go to prison for five years – no parole or early release.“ It’s just common sense,” Trump asserted, using the same term the antis do when they get ready to grab guns. “To make America great again, we’re going to go after criminals and put the law back on the side of the law-abiding.”
In other words, we need “gun control.” And you only remain “law-abiding” if you obey the order to “Turn ‘em all in, Mr. and Mrs. America.”
As for Exile’s vaunted success story?
In 2005, six years after Charlton Heston and assorted “dignitaries” launched the program in Philadelphia, daring criminals to “make my day,” the mayor declared the city’s violence “a crisis.”
“Richmond had the country’s fourth highest murder rate in 2003 and was ranked the nation’s ninth most dangerous city overall in 2004 _ beating out Miami and Compton, Calif. Richmond is the sixth most dangerous when compared to other cities with populations of 100,000 to 499,999.”
I’m not the only one who noticed the numbers weren’t all they were cracked up to be. And it’s pretty bad when you have to turn to anti-gun MSNBC for a dose of reality on “gun laws”:
“Crime went down nationally in the late ’90s [and] Richmond’s crime rates would have come down ‘even in the absence of the program.’ ‘Exile’ also gets the benefit of starting during a one-year spike in the violent crime rate… One of the primary concerns raised is the issue of Project Exile being heralded a success in the absence of evaluation.”
Whenever I see someone blathering about what a great crimefighting tool Project Exile proved to be, I can’t help remembering a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales: “Don’t p*** down my back and tell me it’s rainin’.”
So, you still don’t think that a nationwide Project Exile, inside of Project Guardian, will affect you?
That question was posed by my editor here at Firearms News, Vincent DeNiro. His decades long experience, in the firearms and defense industries, has given him some insights on specifics that could arise and cause us a world of hurt, stuff no one else is talking about and that you certainly won’t hear discussed by “gun groups” more interested in law enforcement than rights enforcement.
“Let’s say that you went out to a strip mine to shoot your SKS, a place which was never marked ‘No Trespassing,’ and you and your friends have shot there for decades with permission from the owner,” DeNiro supposed. “One day, while you are there shooting, a police officer arrives and asks if you have permission to shoot from the new owner of the property, and if you saw the new ‘No Trespassing’ sign.
“Not being aware of the recent sale of the property, and the fact that you did not see the sign, you say ‘No’ to both,” he continued. “You are then arrested for misdemeanor trespass with a firearm.
“The police department’s record department then sends the BATFE a copy of the arrest report in compliance with Project Exile and/or Project Guardian,” DeNiro elaborated. “The BATFE agents read that an SKS was used, so they stop by the department to look at it. They see that the semi-auto rifle has a plastic folding stock on it as well as a detachable magazine – the way you bought it from a gun shop. BATFE runs the serial number and discovers that the SKS was imported well after the ‘assault weapon’ import ban of 1989, and that this violates 18 USC 922 (r) by possessing a legally imported rifle which was illegally converted into an ‘assault weapon.’
“Now you are charged with felony for violating an unconstitutional law that the NRA and gun owners opposed in the first place – and it was Project Exile/Project Guardian which will ruin your life,” he explained. “That takes ‘enforce the laws we have’ to a new level that gun owners seem to be blind to.”
“This same situation can apply to countless unconstitutional technicalities which may be legal at the state level but illegal at the federal level,” he concluded. “These could include regulations dealing with AOWs (any other weapons) and concealed carry, ‘constructive possession’ whereby you could be charged for possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle for having an extra rifle stock and an unassembled AR-15 pistol parts set, or in dozens of ways related to the infamous ‘922 (r).’”
Those sure are a lot of ways to trap us into a world of hurt our “friends” are setting us up for.
But…but…but what aboutwife beaters?AndCRAZY PEOPLE??
“A wife tears her husband’s pocket during an argument. A daughter throws keys at her mom – and misses. Both `assailants’ are arrested, fingerprinted and booked,” Gun Owners of America documented over 20 years ago. “Welcome to Virginia’s new zero tolerance of domestic violence. And welcome to some of the most recent victims of the Lautenberg gun ban.”
If you weren’t around and fighting it back when this abomination was passed, it was another gun-grab designed to turn a misdemeanor domestic violence charge into a permanent prohibited person designation, that is, a lifetime gun ban.
“This marks the first time in history that a misdemeanor offense denies a constitutional right,” Alan Korwin of Bloomfield Press/GunLaws.com explained. “The law is retroactive [“ex post facto”], affecting an unknown number of people, and no provision is made for the firearms such women and men might already possess. Firearms possession by a prohibited possessor is a five-year federal felony.”
Expanding citizen disarmament edicts to include misdemeanor “crimes,” some of which may have been pled to in order to avoid the financially crippling legal expenses of trying to defend against a state with virtually unlimited resources, demonstrably allows for no shortage of abuses. True to form, not satisfied with disgruntled spouses scoring divorce proceeding points, the grabbers now want to add a “boyfriend loophole,” so that jilted, bipolar one-night stands can also lay claim to your rights.
Add to that so-called “red flag laws,” and “we” have allowed Alice in Wonderland absurdity (“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”) to replace a system of law intended to advance the goals of Liberty.
And speaking of lunatics, it would help if we knew what due protections equivalent to those provided in a jury trial are provided. Will decisions be made by boards or commissions that may harbor biases of their own?
What protections will exist to offset politically-connected anti-gun judges, politically-appointed boards, and “expert” adherents of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Position Statement on Firearm Access, Acts of Violence and the Relationship to Mental Illness and Mental Health Services.” It’s fair to ask because APA includes in its advocacy platform registration-enabling, background checks, “smart” guns, storage requirements, “gun-free” zones, doctor-patient boundary violations, tax-funded anti-gun “studies,” all outside the scope of the training and credentialing of those making these proposals. (Significantly though, even APA admits “Only a small proportion of individuals with a mental disorder pose a risk of harm to themselves or others.”)
Also of interest – or it should be – how will rights be restored when there is no longer a compelling mental health prescription to deny them? What universal appeal mechanism – affordable to all, not just to elites for whom money is no object – will exist to declare a person is once more “eligible” to keep and bear arms? What guarantees are there that the same biases that colored the disability ruling in the first place won’t reassert themselves in the “parole” process? And have we identified psychiatric evaluators, risk management administrators and insurers who will be willing to subject themselves to malpractice liabilities should a person deemed “fit” be misdiagnosed? Or will the pressure be to “err on the side of caution”?
Those are all irrelevant arguments anyway. Truth be known, anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian. For those proven disposed to violence, the only solution is to block their access to the potential victim pool until such time as they have demonstrated they no longer pose a danger. To do any less is equivalent to sentencing a man-eating tiger to a cage for a set period, and then releasing it when the time is up. Who would expect results to be any less than catastrophic?
What about the rest of DOJ’s disarmament initiative?
We’ve already noted how gangbangers just bypass the whole “background check” kabuki theater anyway. Perhaps that’s why NSSF is so gung-ho on incarcerating those who don’t even regard their vaunted “Fix NICS” as a minor inconvenience. Maybe, after seeing the remarkably predictable failures of “Prohibition” and “The War on Drugs,” those oblivious to the definition of insanity misattributed to Einstein really do believe third time’s a charm.
Then again, perhaps those behind prior restraints understand full well what the National Institute of Justice admitted, in its Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies, that “Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration…”
As for coordinated prosecutions, improved information sharing and crime gun intelligence coordination, we’ve gone over some of the dangers to federalism, the old data processing acronym GIGO (Garbage In/Garbage Out) comes to mind, and really – how many guns recovered from “crime scenes” end up snaring the original law-abiding buyer? More likely, this is just another hurdle to remove on the way to repealing the Tiahrt Amendment so gun-grabbers can use trace data for lawsuits and more bogus “studies.”
So why the rush to ‘compromise’?
NSSF, NRA and supposedly “pro-gun” Republicans are actually undermining one of the key tenets for refuting disarmament laws by advancing the wrongheaded premise that “good gun control,” works, and is a legitimate and effective response. So, the kind they approve of is fine, but if Gabby Giffords and Shannon Watts want it, it’s time for another “sky is falling” fundraising email?
It’s also a dangerous premise, because they’re encouraging everybody to not only think that “gun control” works, but to think this is about “crime control,” not citizen control.
It’s a trend we’ve seen repeated for years, typically after a mass killing in a “gun-free zone,” when the appeasement faction of the “gun lobby” decides “we” have to give up something or the grabbers will push something really bad through. So rather than use their bully pulpits to advance “shall not be infringed,” they decide what can be thrown under the bus to cause the least amount of damage, often to bottom lines.
It doesn’t work, of course, any more than throwing a scrap of flesh to a pack of circling jackals will sate them and convince them to retreat from prey they sense is desperate and vulnerable. That doesn’t happen in real life, does it? Their goal is to have it all, and anyone who thinks that’s not what the disarmers are after is whistling past the graveyard of history. They’ll take each incremental gain concession offered, then use it to launch their next incursion.
You can see that for yourself this time around: Take a look at the U.S. Attorneys Office “tweet” announcing Project Guardian. You’ll see no appreciation and praise from the antis – you’ll see cartoons of Barr being Trump’s leashed dog. You’ll see the AG attacked for other grievances. You’ll see insults.
Meanwhile, “businessman” Trump’s hard-core activist base will have yet another ember in their bellies doused by those whose primary concerns are profits and stock values. The communist adage about capitalists selling the rope by which they will be hanged comes to mind.
Many in the industry have yet to learn they can’t protect their businesses by throwing customers under the bus. And many in the rice bowl gun groups have yet to learn their first duty is to their members, not to their advertisers and sponsors.
When the emphasis is on law enforcement rather than rights enforcement, it’s a one-way street leading to tyranny. Without going too far afield, a project I worked on years ago to petition DOJ to enforce the Second Amendment in the states the same way it would were civil rights laws being violated went nowhere – despite a supposedly “pro-gun” administration. And don’t get me started on NRA’s deliberate indifference and outright hostility by some prominent apologists.
As for embracing this latest scheme by our “Guardians” to somehow protect us through infringements, there’s really only one principled response: “Enforce existing gun laws?” The hell with that. Repeal the damn things.
fox files 
Written
on 20.February.2020.