The Smallest Minority

That’s gonna draw eyeballs, you’d think.

Over at Quora, some person asked: How can abortion be seen as a government issue? It’s a reasonable question, so I answered it:

Per our Constitution, everyone has certain inalienable rights. The right to life is one of those.

Regardless of your position on the topic, some time during gestation, an embryo becomes a human being. The argument seems to be whether this occurs at conception, at birth, or some point in between.

Most of the European nations seem to feel that the point is at about 12 weeks, where most of those polities set a limit on unregulated abortion.

Medically ending a pregnancy after that point is, quite literally, homicide – the taking of a human life. If it is for legitimate medical necessity, it is justifiable homicide. But if not, well, then it is at minimum manslaughter, but more likely borders on premeditated murder. Even Leftist Bill Maher understands:

That is a “government issue”.

There are three answers to that question at the time of this posting. The other two are… well, uninformed. Mine has received a whopping 54 views in four days.

I put up my first blogpost at the old Blogger site May 14, 2003. One year later I posted “40 Things about Me and This Blog.” I decided to update that list for this auspicious anniversary.

1) I started this blog on Wednesday, May 14, 2003.

2) I’m 61 years old.

3) I’m male, white, married, and overweight. I drive a different pickup. (4WD. Still no gunrack, though.)

4) I have an IQ somewhere in the 130’s, and my Meyers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. (My wife says I should frame that description for future reference – it’s that accurate.) Supposedly INTJ’s make up only one or two percent of the population. That would explain a lot.

5) I have a BA degree in General Studies after spending 5½ years in college studying Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering.

6) The Arizona Board of Technical Registration says I’m a qualified, registered Professional Engineer, (Electrical). I had Nevada registration but let it lapse after my medical issues.

7) I had a rare genetic enzyme disorder that causes a condition known as Acute Intermittent Porphyria. My case was relatively mild and did’t affect my mental balance, but it hurt pretty bad when it occurred and it required me to sustain a carbohydrate-heavy diet – just ONE reason I’m fat. It also turns out I had Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, another liver disorder. This one cost me my liver and kidneys in 2018. I guess I just won the genetic Gold Medal. The new liver doesn’t have Acute Intermittent Porphyria or Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. I’m much better now. But still fat.

8) I do not smoke, I do not drink, and I’ve never taken an illicit substance. I’ve never been intoxicated and never wanted to be. I don’t understand the attraction and don’t want to. But I don’t believe it’s the business of government to tell me that I cannot.

9) I’m a shooter and a reloader. Those are two of my hobbies. My blog is another, though it has consumed the majority of my time, spare and otherwise, over about 18 years. I also owned a 1967 fastback big-block Mustang that I sold many years ago when the wise words of Mr. Spock came to mind: “Having is not as pleasing a thing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

10) I have two siblings; a brother five years older who is now semi-retired, and a sister four years older who is fully retired. I don’t get to retire. I get to work until the afternoon of the day of my funeral.

11) My mother passed nine years ago. My father turned 90 this year. He still lives here in Tucson.

12) I was pretty much apolitical for the first half of my life. I was 12 years old when Nixon resigned, and I was quite happy when Jimmy Carter won the Presidency. THAT was short-lived. I turned 18 in 1980 and voted for Ronald Reagan for President. It was quite obvious to me that Carter was a nice man, but a lousy President. He’s still a nice man, but he should have stuck to building houses and stayed the fuck out of policy.

13) Since that time there has not been a single candidate I was happy to vote for but quite a number I was more than willing to vote against. In almost every case, my vote has been against the Democrat running.

14) In 1992 I voted against G.H.W. Bush AND William Jefferson Clinton by casting my ballot for H. Ross Perot. I did not make that mistake a second time, though by then it didn’t matter. I didn’t really want Dole either.

15) In 2000 I cast my vote against Al Gore. On Sept. 12, 2001 I was very glad I had. I’m not quite as content with my decision today, but I still believe that Gore would have been an unmitigated disaster. (G.W. Bush is merely a mitigated one. His domestic policies are a mess. His prosecution of the war is not.) I believe the same to be true of any potential Democrat candidate for the seat this year. As I note below, I don’t think Kerry will be the name on the ticket come November.

15a) In 2016 I cast my vote against Hillary Clinton, and damn was I surprised when she lost. Trump turned out a couple of orders of magnitude better than I ever expected. All I’d hoped for was complete gridlock, but we got three very good Supreme Court Justices that, had Hillary been able to nominate, would have basically ended the Constitution in this country.

16) In general, my politics are those of a pragmatic libertarian (small “L”). I believe in maximum freedom and personal responsibility. I recognize that those are relatively rare traits. (Remember my Meyers-Briggs personality type. “Does it WORK?”)

16a) I have since concluded that Henry Louis Mencken was right when he wrote, “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.“

17) I had an AR-15 “post-ban” “assault rifle” custom built for me in 1997, specifically because of the 1994 AWB. And that sucker shoots. It STILL shoots. But it’s still the pipsqueak .223 varmint cartridge. I have since purchased / built two more, one I call my M4gery and another chambered in the thumping .458SOCOM loading.

18) After the AWB sunsetted, I had a custom M1A clone built. Top-of-the-line everything. Beaucoup bucks. Shoots 4MOA no matter what I feed it. Feeds and functions perfectly, but it patterns rather than groups.

19) I’m a shooter, not a collector. I don’t like overly fancy guns, but functional ones. I like hitting small things from a long way off, so most everything I’ve got is rifled. I have one shotgun, a Mossberg 590 model 50665. It is not a Sporting Clays gun. I still have this shotgun.

20) I used to be primarily a handgun shooter, though I have learned to embrace rifles. I was the match director for the local International Handgun Metallic Silhouette matches at the Tucson Rifle Club, but I gave that up over a decade ago.

21) I haven’t been the Tucson Rifle Club’s Pistol Director, in over a decade.

22) My favorite target pistol is still my Remington XP-100 center-grip chambered in 7mm Benchrest.

23) I’m a shooter, not a hunter. I understand the appeal that hunting has for some, but for me hunting is “taking your gun for a walk.” If you do it right, you only pull the trigger once, and then things get messy.

24) I prefer shooting steel to punching paper. I like reactive targets. Exploding targets are good, too.

25) I have shot clay pigeons in the air with my sporterized 1917 Enfield in its standard .30-06 chambering, shooting Korean military surplus 147 grain FMJ ammo. I hit three out of the first ten. I have witnesses. (I missed all of the next ten, though.)

26) I want to do it again, but I never have.

27) My favorite handgun is still my First-Gen Kimber Custom Stainless 1911 in its John Moses Browning intended caliber of .45 ACP. My favorite load (Disclaimer: Use At Your Own Risk) is a 200 grain Speer Gold Dot hollowpoint over 7.0 grains of Unique. Out of my pistol it pushes 950fps, hits with a 6 o’clock hold at 25 yards and with a dead-on hold at 50. It feeds and functions with complete reliability. I still wonder if I could hit a clay in the air with it.

27) When it comes to bolt-action rifles, I’m a cock-on-close enthusiast. My first bolt gun was a No. 4 Mk I Lee Enfield, my second a 1896 Swedish Mauser. Now that I’ve acquired a 1917 Enfield, I’m even more convinced that cock-on-close is the way it ought to be. Your mileage may vary. I don’t give a shit.

28) I’m also convinced that recoil, at least to some point, is something you can simply learn to ignore. When I started shooting rifles, my .303 No. 4 kicked pretty damned hard. Now I can sit at a bench and put 100 rounds through my 1917 with essentially no discomfort. I’ve fired a couple hundred rounds of .30-06, .303, and 12 gauge high-base in a single afternoon and had barely a bruise and just a tiny bit of stiffness the next day. I now have a .300 WinMag Remington 700 with a brake. I can do 100 rounds in a session, but I’m a little tender the next day.

29) Flinching, on the other hand, requires a LOT of practice to overcome, and it comes back if you don’t keep up your practice. Intentionally setting off an explosion a few inches from your face is not a natural act. It takes a while to convince your subconscious that everything is copacetic, and I don’t think it remains convinced long.

30) I think I preferred handguns because shooting a handgun well is more difficult than shooting a rifle well. I like the challenge, but hitting at 700 yards with a rifle is actually tougher than 300 yards with a handgun.

31) I like reloading because it requires concentration and precision, just like shooting does. Loading my own ammo adds that much more control over the entire process. It doesn’ hurt that it costs a lot less than buying commercial, either. But I won’t load for someone else, and I won’t shoot someone else’s reloads.

31a) Holy sh!t have component prices shot up! There was a period there of about five years when I just didn’t feel up to it (liver failure takes a while), so I accumulated stuff, but didn’t reload. I recently got back into it again. I could probably retire on my primer stash.

32) Back to politics: I think our political system has degenerated from “loyal opposition” to out-and-out “the other side.” I think this bodes ill for our future as a nation. The polarization affects about 10-15% of the population, leaving 70-80% in the middle pretty sick and tired of all the crap they have to put up with. Unfortunately, very few in that middle bother to vote much. Fewer bother to think.

32a) The polarization has expanded to perhaps 33% of the population and gotten wider and deeper in the last 20 years. The Other Side™ has dropped its mask and is proceeding apace. I’m currently working on an überpost on this topic.

33) I’m registered as a Republican but not a member of the “Republican Party.” By that, I mean that I believe our Founders had it right in that Democracy was a quick path to Hell. As one local op-ed columnist put it recently

“The Electoral College stands as an elitist and blatant reminder that the founders of this nation believed the rabble – that’s us – couldn’t be trusted with the task of directly choosing our president.“

And they were right. About that and a lot more. But we’ve managed to (mostly) overcome the safeguards they built in, and the rabble – that’s us – has managed to do what DeTocqueville warned against:

“The American Democratic experiment will succeed until the people realize they can vote themselves money from the public treasury… then it will collapse.”

That’s what a Republic is supposed to prevent. It failed. It was supposed to be foolproof, but we keep making better fools.

34) I have a stepdaughter, about to turn 46, who is a product of Tucson’s public schools. She’s done OK in spite of that.

35) I have two grandchildren, one 25 and one 26, who were also exposed to that system. I was unable to intervene, but my wife definitely mitigated the effect. I am not, regardless of my sister’s chosen profession, a public school enthusiast. I am still convinced that the public school systems are a tool, deliberately crafted twisted by the left to produce mindless, unthinking, compliant, obedient proles. And they have been wildly successful in spite of the efforts of teachers like my sister.

36) I no longer wonder about the effects of 20+ years of public school systems ON my sister.

37) I hoped that the world my grandchildren would grow up in was a bright, cheerful, and safe one. So much for that hope.

38) I intended for them to be able to think for themselves and stand up for their rights. I’m ambivalent about my success there.

39) I concentrated in this blog on the right to arms because, to me, it is the litmus test of the politician’s faith. If you do not trust the populace with arms, you should not be a leader. A Republic needs to be lead by leaders, not people courting popular support. Always understand that some will not be worthy of that trust, but that’s not reason to strip all of their rights. Government is supposed to be there to protect the rights of its citizens, not parent them. Instead, ours has decided to oppress them.

40) In a Democracy, the majority rules. If 50% +1 decide that all left-handed redheads should be exiled, then it’s law and that’s all there is to it. A Constitutional Republic has a basis in law that says “Government may NOT DO” and “Government may ONLY DO” and when it strays from those rules, its citizens lose. That system WORKS, as long as we let it. But once we start bending those restrictions for personal advantage, it begins to fail. Our system began failing almost from inception, but for over 200 years it has worked better than any other government in history in making the United States of America the most free, most productive, and most hopeful nation on Earth. But 225 years of entropy “by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding,” opportunists who chip, chipped away at the foundations, and a few with malice aforethought has brought us to this point.

Some times I wish I did drink. Happy 21st Birthday, TSM!

Play this back at 1/2 or 1/4 speed for best effect. It was cold and wet this year, but for a second, it was toasty warm!

…that the German for “Civil War” is Bürgerkrieg. I think I want this on a T-shirt:

Isn’t this interesting?

In an interview that’s equal parts amusing and alarming, Indiana’s Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears recently lamented an increase in self-defense shootings in Indianapolis.

Mears complained to reporters that shootings involving self-defense claims are challenging to prosecute. This “mean[s] that someone lost their life” and “that case might ultimately be cleared” without the shooter being charged, he said.

Yes, that’s how self-defense is supposed to work.

From the link in the above excerpt:

“What’s upsetting to me is, if you look at the month of January, I think we had 18 homicides during that month,” said Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears. “Fourteen of those were being investigated for self-defense, meaning that someone lost their life, and that case might ultimately be cleared. But that doesn’t do anything for that family who lost someone.”

That ratio is 14/18 or 77.7% of homicides in January being possibly self-defense. I doubt strongly they all were, but still….

A man was shot and killed in a reported family disturbance on New Year’s Day. On Jan. 3, a man allegedly wrestled a gun away from an intruder in his home, then shot and killed the man. On Jan. 5, a woman shot and killed her boyfriend who was allegedly attacking her. Several more shootings occurred that month in a violent start to 2024 where the circumstances and culpability were even less clear.

Someone died, but no one was ever charged with a crime.

Because defending your own life is understandably legal, and the person who is dead was killed committing a criminal act. Amazing how that works, isn’t it? And they won’t be recidivist!

So far most gun laws that have been passed have concentrated on disarming the law-abiding, making them defenseless in the face of aggression. In my opinion, this is a net good. Obviously not in the thinking of Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears.

Sorry I haven’t been posting. Still mostly burned out. The blog turns 21 next month, after all.
I’ve got what promises to be a epic mega-überpost sloshing around in my skull, but it’ll take a long time to ferment. No promises.

Thanks for coming to check.

I ran across this yesterday, but forgot to post it when I got home. Mea Culpa: I Was Wrong About 2020 by Capt. Seth Keshel from his Substack.

I’m going to quote the whole thing here for future reference:

Humility is never an easy thing to display.  No one likes to admit fault, and that task gets increasingly more difficult as time marches on especially if you’ve invested countless hours, interviews, speaking appearances, and conversations into a cause.  As you’ve surely noticed, very few medical personnel who invested so heavily in the COVID-19 lies and propaganda have set aside hubris and come out with their own mea culpa.

Given that five out of every eight American likely voters distrust the results of the 2020 presidential election, my previously expressed positions don’t exactly put me in rare company; however, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR, and an endless list of assorted global, national, and regional publications have done everything in their power to run me off the road since 2021.  I’ve spent plenty of time ripping them in return, correcting their careless and novice mistakes, and rubbing their faces in their perpetual misery, even though they control practically all levers of power in our governments, federally and in the states.  Even though this has brought about cause for fun and camaraderie, it is important for me to finally own it…

I was wrong about 2020.

Sure, there are always some issues with elections, and with over 150 million ballots counted, it is inevitable that someone somewhere will vote twice – but no state was decided by closer than 10,457 votes.  At some point, we must move on.

For enabling distrust of our government and its election systems from her own citizens, I owe a great debt I fear I cannot repay.  After all, government officials would never preside over a system of elections that would potentially oust them from their positions of power, which provide prestige, access, and a career of notoriety.

Pennsylvania may have voted for Trump in 2016, after three decades of not backing GOP presidential nominees, and in its first evaluation of him as president seen the Republican Party out-register the Democrat Party by a ratio of 21:1, but clearly it was time for Joe Biden, five decades into his political career and as sharp as ever, to overtake Barack Obama’s record vote total in the Commonwealth the same year Donald Trump did the same.

In Wisconsin, we were only convinced something was wrong by our own desires to see Trump win.  It is perfectly normal, after watching Trump cruising to what appeared to be an inevitable landslide win on Election Night, for a ballot dump 85/15% in favor of Biden at 3:45 a.m. to take place, affording Biden a narrow victory after mail voters were allowed to get around identification requirements if they belonged to a category of voter called “indefinitely confined,” which just happened to be four times larger in 2020 than it had been in the previous election.

Election workers in Detroit were most likely impaired from tabulating ballots by some sort of glare pouring in through the windows of the TCF Center, requiring them to put up obstacles that supposedly blocked the operation from view of an unruly mob outside the facility.  Even though one of the Republicans tasked with certifying Wayne County’s results reported being coerced to sign off on them, it doesn’t mean we can just raise holy hell for three years and never take strides to get over it.  We were so unruly, Attorney General Dana Nessel had to threaten to use the police against those who were upset over the way the people expressed their political will.  That is not what the Republican Party is about.

Nevada has it in the law that they don’t need to count drop box ballots for a week after elections, and not only did those two counties who are most effected by that ruling provide the margin of victory for Biden, they did it again in the 2022 midterm U.S. Senate race, even providing the exact percentage split Adam Laxalt found unlikely and went to great lengths to advise his social media followers of.  We must accept laws that provide counties that contribute a disproportionate percentage of a state’s vote an opportunity to overcome small counties, or we are no better than the left who cries “foul” at every turn.

Georgia was primed for a blue turn, especially after the largest Republican gain in two decades in a state that Biden didn’t campaign in.  While Barack Obama gave it his best shot and came up short twice, it was Biden who truly motivated Atlanta’s black vote to get out to the polls in numbers that overcame a deficit of more than 300,000 votes near the end of Election Night.  Mistakes happen, and Brad Raffensperger is allowed to make them, too – even if it meant saying Georgia had 4.7 million votes cast on live TV the morning after the election, just weeks before it certified 5.0 million.

Arizona perplexes many, but just because every Republican but one had won the state since 1952, including Trump in 2016 when he won Maricopa County with fewer votes than Romney had in 2012, doesn’t mean that the Republican incumbent setting single-cycle record vote gains in both the state and in Maricopa County is going to hold it.  All it took was a gain 2.5 times larger than the largest Democrat vote gain in one election ever to pull off, and our friends at Fox News knew it with less than 1% of the vote counted.  Arizonans simply missed the normalcy that comes from not having John McCain in the Senate lobbying for the next place to send young Americans to valiantly serve their nation.

I could go on and on.  The case was there, and in some cases, it was made in front of courts who have affirmed Joe Biden’s half century of public service was honored with 81 million legitimate votes.  That ship has sailed now.   Just because it takes weeks to count votes in some states, but only hours in others, doesn’t mean we need to discourage others from participating in our democracy.  Instead of being selfish and wanting people to leave their homes to vote, we should deliver the disenfranchised the ballots ourselves – or better yet, lobby the government to allow everyone to text in their ballot choices.

If Republicans want to win – then the choice is clear…

Ballot harvesting will clearly change the game.  Government may close down the economy to alter the rules to win elections, use large pools of funds on personal largesse, promote diversity over real skill, crack down on some forms of speech but permit all others, weaponize the agencies of government against political opponents, and destroy every financial setup that is created in the name of security, but they will certainly tabulate ballots accurately for candidates who seek to vanquish everything they have ever created.  To believe anything else is un-American, and quite frankly, un-Democratic.

All the Republican votes you ever dreamed of lie just beyond the gated entryway of a secluded, upper-middle class neighborhood in Lampeter, Pennsylvania.  Sure, they couldn’t be bothered to vote with the fate of the country on the line in 2016 or 2020, but they are there, damn it.  Just because ten activists harvesting a single project for two hours in Philadelphia may net hundreds of votes in Democrat margin doesn’t mean we shouldn’t redirect our efforts elsewhere to find a dozen members of a sleeping Republican voter base that will surely be ready to vote now that Automatic Voter Registration has taken the headache of registering to vote away from them.

It’s not the system that needs an overhaul.  It’s us.  Why complain about Joe Biden winning Automatic Voter Registration states 18 to 2 (243 electoral votes to 9), when we can rub it in their faces that they’ll never have West Virginia, and will need to wait at least a decade to have a crack at Alaska?  We need to stop finding negative in everything and look for how to see the glass as half full.  The left has their loud voices, sure, and we tend to paint all of them with the same brush.  Imagine this situation:

Joe Biden is President in 2020, up for reelection, instead of Trump.  He wins 18 of 19 counties nationally that have perfectly aligned with every election winner since 1980, wins four states that, when won together, have gone to every winner since 1896 (thirteen times), and by virtue of having the fourth highest share of party primary vote of all time, clearly possesses the full support of his party, destroying any narrative that there is a mutiny from within the party that will doom him.  From coast to coast, his base is organizing miles-long car parades and spontaneous boat parades in even the reddest of states.

He romps to an apparent massive victory, not only grabbing up the swing states, but giving Trump a run for his money in Texas, Ohio, and South Carolina, of all places.  Suddenly, after Americans have gone to count sheep expecting another four years of building back better, they wake up to find that it was Trump who miraculously turned the tide in Michigan and Wisconsin, flipping them immediately.  Within days, Trump also reversed his deficits in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, winning them narrowly.  When the counting is done, despite a gain of more than 20% in total votes, Biden becomes the first incumbent president to gain votes from his previous election and lose since Grover Cleveland in 1888.

The left would accept this, just like they peacefully accepted George W. Bush’s eyelash margin in Florida in 2000, which had to be greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Despite their palpable anger over every hot-button issue, such as the George Floyd riots in 2020, no American cities would be burned to the ground in protest of Trump assuming the controls at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Why?  Because of our democracy.  Trump may have had the yard signs, the boat parades, and the rallies that filled entire stadiums and left a nearly equal population outside the stadium watching on overflow screens, but 2020 was just the perfect storm in that Americans were hungry for Biden’s third presidential run and enthused by his list of accomplishments in the Senate and Vice-Presidential offices since 1972. Never has China had such access to our leadership before – now that is building bridges, not bombing them.

If you’re reading this, I hope you understand why I’ve decided to walk back three years of commentary and own it.  You may be shaking mad, or maybe you’ve come to grips with how we are finally going to turn the tables and win these elections if we beg the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors not to shut down our voting machines on Election Day, and perhaps prepare for it like hostages by voting early. 

But most sincerely, I wish all of you a…

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS’ DAY!

Let’s do it again THIS YEAR!

In the 1980’s Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov gave a series of lectures and interviews where he warned what the Soviet plans were to basically overthrow the West. One of them is here. I recommend you watch the whole thing, but the key of it starts at 1:08.00. It’s the four stages of Ideological Subversion to defeat a nation from the inside.

As he put it, Ideological Subversion is “To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, that no is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it’s divided in four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of their enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.”

Note that in the 1980’s he put the timeline as already having brainwashed “at least three generations,” or 45-60 years. Here we are 40 years further on, and as he says, you can see the result.

So step one: Demoralization – to literally destroy the moral foundation of the target nation through its children. He said that this process was basically complete at that time. We’re five or six generations along, now. When this began the “useful idiots” went for the movers of culture – entertainment and education – where they could spread their ideology into those soft heads. It has spread exponentially until they control the newsrooms, universities, school boards, and Tinselgrad.

Step two: Destabilization – It takes 2-5 years to destabilize a nation, he says. “What matters is essentials: Economy, Foreign Relations, Defense.” What he left out was cultural division. This has been achieved. We’re $34 trillion in debt and climbing rapidly. Our allies don’t trust us, and our enemies believe us weak. Our defenders have been demoralized and severely weakened, but are constantly spread thinner and thinner, not to mention all the frontline weapons we’re shipping to a foreign nation with little willingness to replace or upgrade it. We pulled disastrously out of Afghanistan without even informing our ally Britain. Under Obama, officers that showed patriotism, excuse me, extremism, were purged. Under Biden the enlisted class has suffered the same. Our military leadership is more concerned about transphobia than being able to fight a war. The U.S. military cannot meet recruiting goals, and for the first time in history a significant percentage of military families are telling their children that the military is not a good career choice.

Step three: Crisis – a violent change in power structure and economy. And here we reach Election 2024. A significant portion of the population – the real victims of the demoralization stage – are convinced that 100 million Americans are their enemy and want to vote for a dictator they’re doing everything short of assassination to keep off the ballot. And failing. The 100 million Americans in question are finally beginning to recognize that the brainwashed can’t be reasoned with, and literally want to “fundamentally transform” America into “Their Democracy” – unchallenged rule by Democrats. At a minimum, they believe that some very hinky things happened in 2020, they’ve seen the blatant Lawfare against Donald Trump both civil and criminal, and listened to the wild rants accusing Trump of everything from (literally) sucking Putin’s penis to his desire for “a bloodbath” if he loses. They’re learning that the Democrats really do hate America and want to “fundamentally change” it. And not in a good way.

Assuming Trump lives that long, when the polls close Tuesday, November 5, 2024 it’s going to get interesting. I certainly don’t expect the contest will be decided that night. The Left has already figured out how to delay the counting as long as it takes to “find” enough votes to win. The question is, what happens when the dust settles? Regardless of who wins? Will either side accept a win by the other? Or will we get a crisis that precipitates that “fundamental change”?

I’ve concluded that what we’re approaching is what the Left has patiently pursued since the 1960’s – destruction of our Constitutional Republic. And they very well might get it.

So Illinois passed Public Act 102-1116 that went into effect January 1, 2024. Basically, the convoluted language of the bill requires Illinois gun owners to register their “assault weapons,” any .50 caliber rifle or cartridge for said .50 caliber rifle, and “attachments” for their assault weapons which include:

(i) a pistol grip or thumbhole stock;
(ii) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the non-trigger hand;
(iii) a folding, telescoping, thumbhole, or detachable stock, or a stock that is otherwise foldable or adjustable in a manner that operates to reduce the length, size, or any other dimension, or otherwise enhances the concealability of, the weapon;
(iv) a flash suppressor;
(v) a grenade launcher;
(vi) a shroud attached to the barrel or that partially or completely encircles the barrel, allowing the bearer to hold the firearm with the non-trigger hand without being burned, but excluding a slide that encloses the barrel.

Anyway, all Illinois FOID holders who own said weapons or accessories were to register them online by January 1, 2024. Failure to do so is a Class 2 felony, punishable by 3-7 years in prison.

According to this YouTube video, here’s how that’s going:

So compliance seems to be about 2% at best.

Good on ya, Illinois. I wonder how soon there will be an arrest and prosecution under this law?

And I note, if you don’t possess an Illinois FOID card, but do possess a firearm, you won’t be punished under this law. So the gang-bangers who are doing almost all of the shooting are unaffected by this latest “gun control” measure.

Typical.

I pulled the trigger, so to speak, tonight and reserved site 57 on the berm for Boomershoot 2024. This will be my third trip. My first was 2009 and second 2016. I’ll be taking the .300WM Remington 700 5R, and probably my Ruger Precision in .308. Possibly the Power Tool again, too.

I’m right next to a friend on site 58, so we can spot for each other, but there’s space available if you want to join me.

The shoot is May 3-5 in Orofino, Idaho, and it starts off with a BOOM!