NC Legislators Blow Chance to Pass Constitutional Carry

 Of concern to those of us living in North Carolina, Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms reports that NC Lawmakers Adjourned Without Taking Action on Constitutional Carry. While simply permitting the concealed carry of firearms by all qualified citizens was a necessary step, the ultimate goal has always been Constitutional carry.

You can never trust a government that does not trust you to have a gun. Keep in mind that criminals carry guns concealed wherever they go, despite being prohibited from even possessing a gun. Keep in mind that the gun-grabbers have always had the goal of confiscating all the guns from legal owners, and a permit system merely gives them a convenient database to start going after them. Oh, have I said the quiet part out loud. Sorry, but that is the way it is. So, yes, Constitutional carry was on the to-do list of Grass Roots North Carolina. We don't know that the Republicans will retain a veto proof majority and certainly Republican Mark Robinson's governorship is in doubt. So it would have been nice for the Republican majority to have taken this up and passed it.

SCOTUS Striking Down Chevron Makes the Marxist Government Harder To Achieve

At Bearing Arms today, Cam Edwards has the good news that ATF Rules in Trouble After SCOTUS Strikes Down Chevron Doctrine. The Chevron Doctrine was the court invented notion that the three letter agencies should be given deference in their interpretation of the law when challenged by citizens and corporations. There is no Constitution basis, of course, for either the three letter agencies or for giving them any special deference, or indeed for the whole administrative state.

The Supreme Court may not have delivered the opinion that gun owners were hoping for in the Rahimi case, but on Friday the justices gave Second Amendment advocates new ammunition to use in their fights against the ATF's rulemaking abuses by overturning the Chevron Doctrine.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, et al, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that the doctrine, which requires courts to defer to federal agencies so long as they offered “a permissible construction" of a challenged statute even if it was not “the reading the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,” is no longer operative.

Instead, the majority held that "The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous."

I will leave it to the lawyers among us to determine the intricacies of the ruling. Perhaps David Hardy of the blog Of Arms and the Law will have more on this ruling after he has a chance to chew on it.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, in its amicus brief noted:

"ATF often expects Chevron deference in litigation,which is extraordinary given that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental constitutional right. Such enumerated rights are “[p]remised on mistrust of governmental power.” Given that Second Amendment rights can be exercised only if individuals can lawfully obtain a firearm, it is astounding that the government would request or receive deference on laws regulating the exercise of such rights. But that is precisely what happens frequently with Chevron regarding federal firearms laws, often at the request of ATF."

"... Chevron’s outsized influence is witnessed when ATF interprets other federal gun-control provisions. Even when adjudicating immigration cases, some courts afford deference to ATF’s interpretation of who qualifies as an illegal alien under 18 U.S.C.§ 922(g)(5)(A), even though ATF has no expertise in immigration matters. On occasion, other federal agencies will receive the same deference under Chevron that ATF typically enjoys, such as the Board of Immigration Appeals regarding whether an alien here on a student visa falsified information when filling out a Form 4473to purchase a firearm."

We can hope that this ruling will tamp down, at least, the constant threat of the Biden administration to ban this or that formerly legal gun or weapon devise. I have seen threats to ban so-called "assault weapons," magazines with various cartridge capacities, even all semiautomatic guns of whatever variety. One of the latest is a ban on Glock firearms because someone has devised the "Glock switch" that makes them fully automatic, but, of course, also makes them less accurate.

If we had a Constitutionally based government, the sort of regulation the government would be doing would be specifying how many 5.56 NATO rounds each citizen militiaman should have on hand for his M4 or M16 rifle and how many 9mm he would keep for his Baretta 92 FS pistol. Not trying to ban such things. Furthermore, banning guns for the purpose of reducing crimes is like banning forks to reduce obesity. If a man is willing to prey on his fellow citizens, he will find a way, as he always has since man first walked the earth. No, the reason they are so desparate to ban guns is so they can ram down our throats the Marxist government they desire. We can not let them.

Telling the Truth Without Saying a Word

 I've got to get ready for work very soon, so let me leave gentle readers with this piece from the American Thinker by Lewis M. Andrews entitled How to Help Recovering Progressives. I have noted many times here that one should not repeat a lie that one knows to be a lie. It demoralizes you if you do, and that is the strategy of the Left. For if they can get you to tell the lie, they have you.  But if you have been telling lies, you can stop, repent, and begin to tell the truth. It is never too late. But you don't always have to call out the person lying to you, as Andrews makes clear:

It was Winston Churchill who once said, “You can always count on America to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other options.” I don’t know about all the other options, but when it comes to progressive ideology and its various manifestations -- net zero environmentalism, Critical Race Theory, anticolonialism, DEI hiring programs -- the country does seem to be gradually coming to its senses.

...snip...

More recently, it has become clear that a large number of voters have reevaluated just how much they want to sacrifice to end the use of fossil fuels. Not only has President Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 to provide hundreds of billions in electric car subsidies, failed to produce a demand for such vehicles, but is widely viewed as responsible for both the recent bout of inflation and the Federal Reserve’s unwillingness to lower interest rates. Tellingly few constituents complained in early June when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin determined not to abide by California’s Clean Cars II standards, which require 35 percent of new passenger automobiles sold in 2026 to be either electric or hydrogen fueled.

Even some liberal journalists have begun turning against their own colleagues for excessively hyping a woke agenda. On April 9, National Public Radio’s senior business editor Uri Berliner wrote "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust," in which he described NPR’s evolution from an institution founded to provide listeners with multiple viewpoints to an instrument of left-wing propaganda. And in May, former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles published Morning After the Revolution, which, among other things, details how young journalists are constantly pressured by their editors to attack conservatives and to treat any criticism of progressivism as “right-wing fascism.”

...snip...

Not that one had to be belligerent or confrontational to have a liberating impact. (Indeed, being too outspoken in the old Soviet Union could lead to arrest, a career demotion, or even a death sentence.) All that was necessary, Solzhenitsyn and his fellow writers believed, was to subtly acknowledge the other person’s own half-conscious doubts with a bemused smile, a blank stare, a cocked eyebrow, or some other gesture of disapproval. In effect, to magnify the authority of the unspoken against what was being said.

As Solzhenitsyn himself put it in “The Smatterers,” defeating a flawed ideology “doesn’t mean going around preaching the truth at the top of your voice.” It “doesn’t even mean muttering what you think in an undertone.” It simply means not allowing one’s passivity to imply consent. In other words, “don’t say or let stand what you don’t really think.”

So, there you have it. You don't always have to shout at the other person. Indeed, destroying him on the spot may just harden his heart toward your way of thinking. Don't ask how I discovered this.  A gesture of disapproval may be enough to set him thinking, and repenting. Try it today.

The Great Awakening Continues

 Kurt Schlichter has an article at Townhall.com today entitled Fake Conservatives and Status Quo Parties Are Falling In Britain and Around the Globe that acknowledges the fact that people around the world are waking up to the danger of the fascist far Left. The media use a term that needs explaining though, and Schlichter is on to this. The terms "conservative" and "right" are different here and in Europe. "Conservatism" here means conserving the values embodied in the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. A conservative in England would be for maintaining the monarchy. Clearly that is not what we generally thing of as "conservative." Where both types of conservatives may have similar goals is in terms of Christianity. On both sides of the pond, conservative Christians believe we should walk by faith and follow the commands of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The British Conservative Party, and I use the term “conservative” very, very loosely and solely because that is the actual name of the allegedly right-wing British party, is about to get destroyed in an election. And it should. It’s terrible. It’s conservative the way Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are, which is not conservative at all, and its target voters are tired of it. The Tories had a huge victory just a few years ago, a shattering triumph that turned previously Labour seats into Conservative ones. And, of course, the wets – that’s Brit for “RINO” - squandered the chance to re-Thatcherize Old Blighty. Now, the Reform Party, Nigel Farage’s populist crew, stands a chance of winning seats and could conceivably become the opposition party. This is important to Americans not because Britain is a particularly important power anymore – under the Conservatives, their military has shrunk to the point where the British army could fit comfortably within the Pasadena Rose Bowl – but because what happens over there shows what might have happened here but for Donald Trump and the populist movement taking over our Republican Party.

Some commentary describes this reversal of fortune for the conservatives as bucking the trend. After all, we see leftist parties failing all over the globe. The German leftists are about to lose the next round of elections while their allegedly hard-right party grows in popularity. The upcoming elections stand a significant chance of putting an allegedly hard-right government in power in France. Italy elected a right-wing government – their popular president was the one who had to wrangle Biden in when he wandered away at the G7. Trudeau’s communists in Canada are about as popular as a chancre sore at an orgy. And in America, it looks like our leftist party is about to lose to Donald Trump and his populist movement.

But it’s not correct to look situation at this in old-school liberal vs. conservative terms. What’s happening is not a move towards classic conservatism but a rejection of the status quo regardless of the label of the temporarily ruling party. The old parties on both sides become unresponsive to the needs of the people, instead taking diktats from Davos. In each of these countries, including our own, it’s an ossified, unresponsive, and exhausted ideology that’s being rejected in favor of a more energetic populist movement that is providing answers to the problems that the establishment parties refused to touch for fear of being called racist and not being invited to cocktail parties.

Frankly, I suspect that as the Davos bunch has taken off the mask and let the world see what they really want to do, that people discovered they don't like any of it one bit. The WEF claims that they need to get rid of 8.5 billion "useless eaters." So, they are encouraging children to geld themselves by "gender affirming care." They are encouraging people to abort their children. Was COVID part of this push to eliminate us too? Sure looks like it.  They also want to restrict the food supply presumably to starve us to death. Even people who are not attuned to such things can see that this is pure evil. Indeed, Klaus Schwab could have been the inspiration for Michael Myer's portrayal of Dr. Evil though Myers claims he was not.

The claim by the WEF that "You will own nothing and be happy" rings to the average person as completely hollow. For if a person literally owns nothing, he is at the mercy of the good graces of others. He becomes like a street side beggar, with no place to lay his head down at night, no place to raise a family. One thus lives day to day, depending on the help of others, who may not be so disposed.

All this is why they are so desperate to take guns out of the hands of the average person. If Biden believed that you would need F-15s to defend yourself from a tyrannous government, he wouldn't care that you had guns. But he knows what 300 million guns in the hands of Americans may mean, and he doesn't like those odds.

Let us hope that the governments of the West are turned upside down this year, including in the United States, and we begin to reverse the damage the fascist far Left has done to us.

These are dangerous times

Over at Bearing Arms, Cam Edwards has a post entitled Doctors For Responisble Gun Ownership Slams Surgeon General's Anti-Gun Activism. Biden's Surgeon General on Tuesday declared that "gun violence" is a public health emergency. First of all, I would question what difference is there between so-called 'gun-violence' and any other form of violence? After all, knife, sword and axe violence are just as deadly, or why did armies carry these implements into battle right up to the revolutionary war? The problem of violence is not treatable by doctors with their pills and surgery. And what is termed "gun control" which usually means banning certain target weapons is not the answer either.  The problem is both a criminal justice matter and a matter of the human heart, which is corrupt from birth.

Dr. Robert Young, director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, says Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's call to treat "gun violence" as a public health crisis is pure politics, but it's also part of a decades-long effort on the part of gun control activists to use the healthcare industry to push their agenda.

...snip...

That was Young's first reaction to Murthy's announcement on Tuesday. The head of DRGO says Murthy's been on his radar for well over a decade, back to the days when Murthy was heading up Doctors for America/Doctors for Obama.

"Doctors for Obama was vehemently anti-gun," Young reminded Bearing Arms, noting that even back then the group was calling gun violence a "public health epidemic". So why did Murthy wait until his second go-round as Surgeon General to use his bully pulpit and call on lawmakers to adopt gun bans, "universal" background checks, "red flag" laws, and more?

"He's been Surgeon General now for three years and not a peep out of him about this. Suddenly when, I suspect, the Biden campaign is starting to realize it has to pull out of all of their stops to get their recliner-bound candidate re-elected, it's time to make an issue of this and see if you can stir up the base this way."

It may be that this is Murthy's attempt to help Biden's campaign by stirring up Democrat voters to come out for Biden. Certainly nothing is going to originate in the House of Representatives to support his call to arms. But do not discount that Biden may put out an executive order, which he knows will be struck down by the courts. But he can still do a lot of damage with it while it is making its way through the courts. And they, and we for that matter, have discovered that a lot of Americans will obey even if they don't agree. These are dangerous times.

Another Liberal Mugged By Reality

 I've got to run some errands, but let me alert gentle readers to a post by Olivia Murray at the American Thinker today entitled 'Card' carrying liberal professor undergoes radical transformation and becomes a gun enthusiast. As I have been saying all along, the Second Amendment is not just for some, but for all of us. Democrats need it as much as Republicans. Liberals need it as much as conservatives. Which makes the Democrat push for the banning of all guns (yes, that is what they ultimately intend) so very dangerous.

David Yamane’s new book, Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture, hit shelves on June 1, and Robert VerBruggen writing a review for The Washington Free Beacon had a great lede:

"David Yamane is, by his own description, a ‘‘card-carrying liberal’ Asian American sociology professor from the San Francisco Bay Area who, for the first forty-two years of my life, never saw, touched, or fired a real gun.’ The first time he saw a deer stand, he remarked to his companion that it seemed like a ‘weird spot for kids to build a fort."

Now, I’d like to quickly point out that Yamane was seemingly voting (Democrat) this whole time—talk about an offense to the rest of us—despite not being able to distinguish a deer stand from a tree fort and having never even seen a firearm in person. Supreme ignorance, baseless confidence, and a zeal for using government to force agenda capitulation upon others into their agenda? A hubris known only by a modern leftist!

So, what changed this liberal anti-gun individual into a liberal pro-gun person? He had a run in with a potentially violent man with a knife. In a moment of clarity, he apparently realized that if the man with the knife wanted to hurt of kill him or his loved ones, he was totally helpless to stop him.

There’s a chasm of difference between how anti-gun “liberals” and leftists view firearms, and how those who exercise their right to keep and bear arms as a means of self-defense and security do—and I just partly gave it away. Historically, given their actions, the left views firearms as offensive tools of aggression and mayhem, or, to oppress and force compliance with a political agenda; conservatives on the other hand view firearms as defensive tools of protection. One group consistently misuses guns, while the other group consistently uses them appropriately.

Guns are the great equalizer, giving a smaller, weaker individual a level-playing field against someone bigger and stronger who wants to infringe on the former’s unalienable rights...

Gentle readers are encouraged to read the rest of Murray's short post. It is enlightening. My personal reading list is getting very long, but I will consider getting David Yamane’s new book, Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture. If I do get it, I will share my further thoughts.

Are the Voters Fed Up Enough?

 Today at the American Thinker J. B. Shurk has an article taking a broad look at the question: Will Voters Turn the World Upside Down?. He is not only looking at American voters, but voters in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Interestingly, the "deep state" in each of these countries is poised to blunt the effect of these voters, who are fed up with what their self-appointed "elites" have been up to.

So the Great Awakening continues apace. All over the West, men and women who simply want to be left alone are concluding that their governments will not let them live in peace. Woe to any Establishment hobgoblins who believe they can sabotage their home nations without paying a price.

After having failed to implement Brexit or curtail mass illegal immigration during their last decade and a half in power, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives appear destined for extinction-level losses in the U.K.’s July 4 general election. This regrettably means that Labor’s champagne socialists will seize Parliament’s suicidal reins and drive that once great nation deeper into the ground. But in the background of Great Britain’s self-immolation is the resurgence of Brexit champion Nigel Farage, who enjoys unprecedented support for his Reform Party. Because the U.K.’s Deep State has refused to honor the terms of Brexit, the British people are ready to overturn the whole system. July 4 — what a lovely day for a revolution!

Emmanuel Macron, the Rothschild banker and diminutive king who married his grandmotherly schoolteacher, will likely suffer electoral humiliation of his own in France’s legislative elections over the next two weeks. The Napoleon wannabe — who speaks snobbishly of European empire and prefers to be photographed while kitted out in the latest boxing fashion — called for snap elections in a stompy-foot hissy fit after the French people handed him heavy losses in the European Parliament vote earlier this month. Just as Le Petit Fromage seems to believe that he can convey strength by staring menacingly at stationary punching bags, Macron thinks his political hubris can transform almost certain defeat into chance victory. The French people, on the other hand, are fed up with mass illegal immigration, rising crime, and deteriorating standards of living (common complaints throughout the West) and are not particularly enthused about the growing prospect of a hot war with Russia. It is difficult to persuade French citizens that they should rally around their tricolor flag and defend Ukraine’s borders when French aristocrats continue to lecture the peasants that national borders are so passé (another common complaint throughout the West).

Of course, the granddaddy of imminent political earthquakes is the (cross your fingers, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder, turn around three times, and whisper, “MAGA-MAGA-MAGA”) likely return of President Trump to the White House. Oh, I know the Democrat Deep State will continue to do everything it can to rig the election in November (even if it has to throw the MAGA Man in prison and wake up half the dead people in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Phoenix to “vote”), but political polling in the United States continues to show Iron Trump with substantial leads over Horse-Glue Biden. If the United States didn’t have a third-world election system devoid of voter identification and rife with mail-in-ballot fraud, the propaganda press would already be grudgingly admitting that Biden’s re-election hopes are as dead as a doornail. Since Dementia Joe is the president for dead voters, though, and because he managed to “win” fifteen million more votes than the progressive demigod Barack Obama did during his re-election campaign, the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation and the Department of (in)Justice are still telling everyone, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” As Hans Gruber would say, “You ask for a miracle? I give you the FBI.”

Shurk points out that the COVID pandemic (which was real, but not as bad as the government made it out to be, and which the evidence indicates came out of the Wuhan lab) was a dry run to determine how much the totalitarians can get away with before people begin to balk. Americans failed that test.  They should have revolted right away.

The chief purpose of the West’s COVID police state, after all, was to give the Establishment’s technocratic totalitarians several years to hunt around for things in society that looked free-ish, so that any residual safeguards against their authoritarianism could be promptly euthanized. In Marxist globalism’s build back better dystopia, it’s kill or be killed. And if the West’s obsession with war, economic devastation, unreliable electric grids, unrestricted immigration, assisted suicide, vulnerable food supplies, abortion, and experimental “vaccines” has proved anything, it is this: the Establishment Blob really enjoys killing things.

Right now Deep State assassins throughout the West have set their sights on free speech. As the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab would readily tell you, it is incredibly difficult to be a successful Bond villain when ordinary Westerners are allowed to say mean things. Americans, Brits, and Germans cannot be permitted to express outrage when politicians allow dangerous illegal aliens to rape and murder their children. Farmers cannot be permitted to protect their nations’ food supplies from rabid “green”-energy fanatics intent on delivering global famine. Voters cannot be permitted to vote out all the Marxist globalists dedicated to foisting biometric surveillance and central bank digital funny money upon the masses. Don’t the little people understand that the important people must protect “democracy” by censoring dissent, abrogating property rights, rigging elections, and subverting popular sovereignty?

Gentle readers are urged to read the whole article. As usual, Shurk packs a lot of information in a small package. I could quote the whole thing, but of course you could also just go read it for yourselves.