It’s Monday, Tax Day, 2013…and if you’re unhappy about the check you’re strokin’ Uncle Sam, thank a Dimocrat!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, if the few remaining adults in the room don’t stand up and take charge soon, the Left’s unconstitutional effort at gun control is gonna get somebody seriously hurt:
It’s only a matter of time until police are ordered to invade the home and violate the rights of the wrong law-abiding citizen…and some of them go home in a body bags. Indeed, fatalities are not only inevitable, they’re desired; by Liberals not only dedicated to disarming America, but desperate to misdirect attention from their abysmal handling of the nation’s finances and economy.
After all, what are the lives of a few John Laws and/or John Q. Citizens compared to the prospect of perpetual Progressive power?!?
And as our next item, courtesy of Balls Cotton, relates, rank-and-file members of law enforcement don’t even share the Marxist viewpoints espoused by their politically-motivated superiors:
PoliceOne’s Gun Control Survey: 11 key lessons from officers’ perspectives
Never before has such a comprehensive survey of law enforcement officers’ opinions on gun control, gun violence, and gun rights been conducted
In March, PoliceOne conducted the most comprehensive survey ever of American law enforcement officers’ opinions on the topic gripping the nation’s attention in recent weeks: gun control.
More than 15,000 verified law enforcement professionals took part in the survey, which aimed to bring together the thoughts and opinions of the only professional group devoted to limiting and defeating gun violence as part of their sworn responsibility.
Totaling just shy of 30 questions, the survey allowed officers across the United States to share their perspectives on issues spanning from gun control and gun violence to gun rights.
Top Line Takeaways
Breaking down the results, it’s important to note that 70 percent of respondents are field-level law enforcers — those who are face-to-face in the fight against violent crime on a daily basis — not office-bound, non-sworn administrators or perpetually-campaigning elected officials.
1.)Virtually all respondents (95 percent) say that a federal ban on manufacture and sale of ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds would not reduce violent crime.
2.)The majority of respondents — 71 percent — say a federal ban on the manufacture and sale of some semi-automatics would have no effect on reducing violent crime.However, more than 20 percent say any ban would actually have a negative effect on reducing violent crime. Just over 7 percent took the opposite stance, saying they believe a ban would have a moderate to significant effect.
3.) About 85 percent of officers say the passage of the White House’s currently proposed legislation would have a zero or negative effect on their safety, with just over 10 percent saying it would have a moderate or significantly positive effect.
4.)Seventy percent of respondents say they have a favorable or very favorable opinion of some law enforcement leaders’ public statements that they would not enforce more restrictive gun laws in their jurisdictions. Similarly, more than 61 percent said they would refuse to enforce such laws if they themselves were Chief or Sheriff.
5.) More than 28 percent of officers say having more permissive concealed carry policies for civilians would help most in preventing large scale shootings in public, followed by more aggressive institutionalization for mentally ill persons (about 19 percent) and more armed guards/paid security personnel (about 15 percent). See enlarged image
6.)The overwhelming majority (almost 90 percent) of officers believe that casualties would be decreased if armed citizens were present at the onset of an active-shooter incident.
7.) More than 80 percent of respondents support arming school teachers and administrators who willingly volunteer to train with firearms and carry one in the course of the job.
8.)More than four in five respondents (81 percent) say that gun-buyback programs are ineffective in reducing gun violence.
9.) More than half of respondents feel that increased punishment for obviously illegal gun sales could have a positive impact on reducing gun violence.
10.) When asked whether citizens should be required to complete a safety training class before being allowed to buy a gun, about 43 percent of officers say it should not be required. About 42 percent say it should be required for all weapons, with the remainder favoring training classes for certain weapons.
11.) While some officers say gun violence in the United States stems from violent movies and video games (14 percent), early release and short sentencing for violent offenders (14 percent) and poor identification/treatments of mentally-ill individuals (10 percent), the majority (38 percent) blame a decline in parenting and family values.
Bottom Line Conclusions
Quite clearly, the majority of officers polled oppose the theories brought forth by gun-control advocates who claim that proposed restrictions on weapon capabilities and production would reduce crime.In fact, many officers responding to this survey seem to feel that those controls will negatively affect their ability to fight violent criminals.
Contrary to what the mainstream media and certain politicians would have us believe, police overwhelmingly favor an armed citizenry, would like to see more guns in the hands of responsible people, and are skeptical of any greater restrictions placed on gun purchase, ownership, or accessibility.
The officers patrolling America’s streets have a deeply-vested interest — and perhaps the most relevant interest — in making sure that decisions related to controlling, monitoring, restricting, as well as supporting and/or prohibiting an armed populace are wise and effective. With this survey, their voice has been heard.
There’s only two possible outcomes; either lower-echelon law enforcement exercises civil disobedience on a massive scale…or those antithetically opposed to the illegitimate purposes of their superiors suffer the ire and indignation of the unwashed masses with whom they sympathize.
As Edmund Burke so eloquently noted, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Put another way, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
In a related item, as the WSJ notes, most if not all Liberal gun control measures ignore not only the Constitution, but Supreme Court precedent:
Massive Gun Resistance
State rifle bans are in plain defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court.
As the gun debate rolls through the states and the Senate, we can’t help but wonder how Supreme Court Justices view the spectacle. What’s going on is nothing short of massive political resistance to the Court’s recent and historic rulings on gun control.
In 2008, a five-Justice majority found in District of Columbia v. Heller that the right to bear arms applies to individuals, not merely to militias. The ruling invalidated a Washington, D.C. ban on handguns. Lest there be any doubt, in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010 the Court applied Heller to the 50 states. That decision overturned a Chicago law that banned handguns.
These are landmark rulings, defining the Second Amendment with more specificity as the Court has done for other parts of the Bill of Rights. Yet judging by the laws now being debated and in some cases passed, you’d think those rulings didn’t exist. Liberal majorities are rolling over them as if they were op-eds from a third-rate think tank.
Consider the newly passed bans in New York, Maryland and Connecticut on “assault weapons,” which is the political term for semi-automatic rifles. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller noted that the Second Amendment does not protect ownership of all weapons, but his ruling explicitly held that the right to bear arms applies to guns “in common use.” When the Second Amendment was written, Justice Scalia wrote, “The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms ‘in common use at the time’ for lawful purposes like self-defense.”
About 40% of rifles today are semi-automatic, which means they fire a single round with each pull of a trigger. That sure sounds like a gun in “common use.” The new laws try to sneak around this standard by banning rifles with such features as pistol grips, flash suppressors and bayonet mounts. Connecticut’s new law bans 100 kinds of weapons based on such features. Yet none of these cosmetic changes relates to the essential semi-automatic nature or lethality of the rifle.
After Heller, the D.C. Council staged its own insurrection by limiting purchases of semi-automatic rifles and large magazines. The restrictions were upheld in an odd 2-1 decision by a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in which Judge Douglas Ginsburg conceded that semi-automatic rifles were in common use but that because they were especially dangerous, they could be restricted anyway.
Judge Ginsburg seems to have ignored Heller‘s finding that as a core individual right the Second Amendment is entitled to what lawyers call “heightened scrutiny.” Under that standard, the burden of proof shifts to the government to prove that any law infringing on the right advances a government interest.
The state has an interest in public safety, but Heller overturned a ban on semi-automatic handguns, which are used in far more violent crimes than are rifles. If banning handguns is unconstitutional, then surely banning rifles is too. As Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent at the D.C. Circuit, there is “no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles.” The Supreme Court didn’t take up the D.C. rifle ban, but the new state bans are invitations for the Justices to reassert Heller‘s core finding.
The new state laws also limit the number of rounds in a magazine—to as few as seven in New York. Yet high-capacity magazines are also in common use. A genuinely large magazine might be illegal under Heller, but a limit of as few as seven or 10 rounds becomes a practical barrier to the right to bear arms for self-protection. An experienced gunman needs only seconds to slam in a new clip, but such a limit disproportionately affects a nervous homeowner’s ability to take multiple shots at an intruder. Expanded background checks, by contrast, would not seem to violate the Heller standard.
This blatant challenge to the High Court’s authority is all the more remarkable given that its gun rulings are so recent. Yet the resistance is being cheered on without so much as a press corps whimper.
This is in marked contrast to the high media dudgeon that has greeted recent state laws narrowing the pregnancy time-window on abortions in North Dakota and Arkansas. Our guess is that these laws will also be overturned, but they are a less blatant affront to Roe v. Wade than an outright gun ban is to Heller.
Part of the liberal calculation here may be that Heller was decided 5-4, so only a single change of mind is needed to make a gun ban constitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a dissenter in Heller) has gone so far as to suggest publicly that a “future, wiser court” might reconsider the ruling. Her remark was highly inappropriate for a Justice, essentially inviting the kind of political resistance we’re now seeing. But in any case, Heller remains the law until it is overturned.
Governor Dannell Malloy calls Connecticut’s new law “the most far-reaching gun safety legislation in the country” and a model for other states. It’s a model, all right—of disregard for the Supreme Court, and not unlike the massive resistance in some Southern states that followed Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The main difference now is that the media are cheering on the politicians thumbing their noses at the law of the land.
As we told TLJ upon realizing the coronation of the Anointed One was inevitable, the question wasn’t if Liberals would attempt to annul the Constitution, but when. And more importantly, what right-thinking, patriotic Americans would do about it. Patrick Henry, and more recently, LCDR Montgomery Scott speak for us:
Speaking of obfuscation and misdirection, here’s a meaningless headline:
Pentagon: North Korea Could Launch Nuclear Missile
Which is simply another way of saying…
Pentagon: Odds Are Obama Will Knuckle Under and Give Kim Jong Un Everything and Anything He Wants
“I find your lack of strength disturbing, oh Cowering Kerry!”
After all, Mark Foster’s humorously accurate photo notwithstanding…
…the NoKo’s aren’t stupid; they just know how to play America’s “leaders” like Jascha Heifetz on a Stradivarius.
Next up, courtesy of US News & World Report, The Obamao’s latest attempt to spread the wealth…YOUR wealth!
Obama’s New Tax on Your Golden Years
“After all, YOU didn’t earn that!”
What President Barack Obama has planned in his upcoming budget, while not exactly a Cypriot-style, government-based raid on private savings accounts, comes too close for comfort. As widely reported Monday, the Obama budget document – which is already a month late – will include a new proposal to limit the total amount an individual can put aside in tax deferred retirement savings like 401Ks and IRAs to an amount sufficient to generate an annual income in the golden years of less than $250,000 per year.
Why do it? According to a senior administration official, The Hill reported, “wealthy taxpayers can currently ‘accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.'”
Who says? It is true that some people use retirement savings plans as a form of tax avoidance, but tax avoidance was, the last time anyone checked, still legal. Major corporations that have the imprimatur of approval from the Obama administration like General Electric and General Motors do it all the time.
What the White House may propose is not a matter of fairness, as the president and his allies are sure to cast it, but one that strikes at the heart of the right to keep for ourselves the product of our hard work.
“I’ve put in a hard day of travel on your nickel…which way to the Olympic Club?!?”
To Obama, that idea that some may have saved more than others for their retirement is unfair, So is the idea, apparently, that some people make more than others. It’s class envy at its most ugly, designed to appeal to the more than 40 percent of Americans who pay no income tax and who voted for the president in 2012.
It is not a legitimate function of government to determine when a person has saved enough for retirement. “Enough” is a nebulous word just like “rich.”If a cap is in the offing in the near term, can confiscation, a la Cyprus, be far behind?
What Washington should be doing is encouraging people to save more for the future rather than less, and promoting the idea that people should do their own planning for their own future rather than relying on government to provide it for them.
The savings rate in the United States is already the lowest of any industrialized country in the world. The president’s plan will only make that worse and drive people away from defined contribution retirement plans back into defined benefit plans of the sort that threaten to bankrupt California, New York, Illinois and other blue states.Instead, the budget bureaucrats that infest the White House these days are looking around for large piles of money that, in their view, are under-taxed so that the taxes on them can be raised in order to meet their objective of taking the tax burden to 25 percent of U.S. GDP.
“Hey, it’s not like MY retirement’s in a 401K!”
The social welfare state that Obama seeks is defined by an insatiable appetite for more revenue. Obamacare is expensive. The infrastructure trust fund he wants to establish is expensive. His whole agenda, as evidenced by the last four years, is expensive – more expensive than America can afford, now and into the future.
Not to put too fine a timely point on it, but Obama wants to remake America into what Britain was before Margaret Thatcher arrived on the scene: A nearly-bankrupt former global superpower whose best days were apparently behind it.Too bad he didn’t make that clear during the last presidential campaign, but, if he had, the results would have most assuredly been different.
He did; too many people were either not paying attention, or were already depending on the government to fund their retirement…following a fulfilling career of either disability or unemployment benefits. And who’s to say what’s sufficient for a particular individual’s retirement; not to mention what happens to the cash proceeds should rates of return decline? And since 401K proceeds are already taxed as ordinary income, isn’t this entire scheme robbing the future to pay the present…i.e., make The Obamao look better now at the expense of future retirees?
For more on the subject, might we suggest the following article from Human Events:
Since we’re on the subject of extenuating circumstances, in the “We Were Only Following Orders” segment, Kermit Gosnell’s trial reveals the Nazi excuse lives on in Philadelphia:
Workers at Philly abortion clinic saw few options
They say they were just doing what the boss trained them to do.But eight former employees of a run-down West Philadelphia abortion clinic now face prison time for the work they did for Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Three have pleaded guilty to third-degree murder. And Gosnell, 72, is on trial in the deaths of a patient and seven babies allegedly born alive.
In testimony at the capital murder trial this past month, an unlicensed doctor and untrained aides described long, chaotic days at the clinic. They said they performed grueling, often gruesome work for little more than minimum wage, paid by Gosnell under the table.
But for most, it was the best job they could find.Unlicensed doctor Stephen Massof, 50, of Pittsburgh, said he could not get a U.S. medical residency after finishing medical school in Grenada and went to work for Gosnell as a “backup plan” after six years running a bar. He admitted killing two babies by snipping their necks, as he said Gosnell taught him to do.
Eileen O’Neill, 56, had worked as a doctor in Louisiana but relinquished her medical license in 2000 to deal with “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” according to her 2011 grand jury testimony. She is the only employee on trial with Gosnell, fighting false billing and racketeering charges.
In yet another inexplicable irony, as Michell Malkin reports, though the Left has shed nary a tear over Planned Parenthood’s version of Buchenwald, they’ve sympathy aplenty for an utterly undeserving individual:
No Tears for Lynne Stewart
Michael Moore, call your mother!
The jihadists’ favorite American lawyer, Lynne Stewart, reportedly has stage-4 breast cancer. Her radical friends — ranging from the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” and “Workers World” to Pete Seeger, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal — want her freed from jail. There’s only one decent response to the Lynne Stewart Fan Club’s criminal-coddling demand:
No, hell, no.
The way the bleeding hearts tell it, this harmless grandma got thrown in the slammer by Big Bad Bush merely because she was “distributing press releases on behalf of her jailed client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.” Oh, the outrageous inhumanity! How could America the Cruel do this to an innocent little old lady serving the cause of “social justice”? How can they just let her suffer and perish behind bars? All she did was “distribute press releases.”
1960s leftover agitator Dick Gregory is now on a hunger strike until the feds order the “compassionate release” of the left’s sweetheart “political prisoner” and she “receives medical treatment in the care of her family and with physicians of her choice.” He and Stewart’s apologists claim she was prosecuted “to intimidate the entire legal community so that few would dare to defend political clients whom the state demonizes and none would provide a vigorous defense.”
Spare me the proglodyte pathos. Allow me to smash the world’s smallest violin to bits. Stewart is no martyr, no heroine. She’s a menace to peace-loving society who illegally conspired with killers. And there’s a very good reason why her client was demonized. He is a demon.
Refresher course for the clueless: Stewart was convicted in 2005 of helping terrorist Rahman — the bloodstained Blind Sheik — smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.
Rahman, Stewart’s “political client,” had called on Muslims to “destroy” the West, “burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air or land.” He issued bloody fatwas against U.S. “infidels” that inspired the 1993 WTC bombing, the 1997 massacre of Western tourists in Luxor, Egypt, and the 9/11 attacks.
Defying a judge’s communications ban, Stewart ferreted messages to the Blind Sheik from fellow jihadist Rifa’l Ahman Tara urging him to support a new wave of Islamic violence in Egypt — and then smuggled out a coded order to his followers lifting a ceasefire between his terrorist group and the Egyptian government. Stewart personally delivered one of the messages to a Reuters reporter.
The Middle East Quarterly also described how Stewart created “covering noises” for the Blind Sheik’s translator to evade the communications ban: “On some surveillance videos, Stewart could be seen shaking a water jar or tapping on the table while (the translator) and the sheikh exchanged communications that were then later disseminated to the sheikh’s followers…”
After receiving a paltry initial sentence of 28 months for abetting terrorism, the disbarred civil rights attorney was re-sentenced to 10 years in the slammer. A federal panel of judges excoriated her for her sickening arrogance. “From the moment she committed the first act for which she was convicted, through her trial, sentencing and appeals,” Judge Robert Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, “Stewart has persisted in exhibiting what seems to be a stark inability to understand the seriousness of her crimes.”
Stewart failed to understand “the breadth and depth of the danger in which” her crimes had “placed the lives and safety of unknown innocents, and the extent to which they constituted an abuse of her trust and privilege as a member of the bar,” the panel found.
This case remains a shining example of just how dangerous it is for America to give foreign-born jihadists the full panoply of American constitutional rights and all the attendant benefits of a civilian trial. Stewart’s treacherous collaboration with the Blind Sheik endangered — and cost — innocent lives.
Stewart remains unrepentant. She called 9/11 an “armed struggle.” Upon her initial sentencing, she boasted that she could serve the term “standing on her head.” After she was convicted of aiding and abetting Rahman, she told an interviewer she “would do it again.” Now she wants mercy, medical comforts and freedom? No, hell, no. This messenger gal for murderous barbarians made her prison bed.Die in it.
We take no joy in Stewart’s imminent demise; nor do we find any reason for her early release.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this bit of intra-service humor courtesy of Balls Cotton…
…along with Hank Murphy’s forward of the New York Post‘s observation on the recent Masters controversy:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter the MSM will never carry:
Home invasion suspects killed in gunfight with NC homeowner
Investigators say two men who attempted to invade a home early Friday ended up dead after a gun battle with the homeowner. One of the men, 20-year-old Xavier White, was found wounded on Martha Court. He was taken to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center where he later died. Police said the body of 25-year-old Dominik Lavon Council was found along the shoulder of the road in the 5400 block of South Sumac Circle around 5:45 a.m.
Police said the homeowner was also hurt in the gunfire. That person was not identified.
Saturday, detectives identified two additional suspects. They are 24-year-old Lamyer Gorminie Campbell and 24-year-old Derek Rashaun Hair (pictured above). Both Campbell and Hair have been charged with first degree burglary, robbery with a dangerous weapon, conspiracy to commit first degree burglary, and conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon.
The Daily Gouge has learned the homeowner in question dropped similar charges against Messrs. White and Council…along with their sorry asses.
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