Liberal media’s bouffant coxcomb chattering class bemoans the fact most women elected to Congress are Democrats thereby suggesting Republicans are the party of sexist misogynists as claimed by bitter harridan Hillary Clinton. It is true most women in Congress are Democrats1 but what the princes of pompous pontification ignore is Republican women often lose to Democrat males in general elections. It’s not Republicans voting against them. Genitalia plays no part in my voting. I’d climb over a pile of limp celery stick Republican males like Kit Bond, John McCain, Jeff Flake, John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and Pot-Peddler John Boehner any day to vote for a Phyllis Schlafly.2 Female Republican candidates are likely to be conservative, a serious enough offense, but worse, some commit the unpardonable sin according to Leftist Holy Writ; they are Christians. Against this horrific threat, the Democrat Party Machine swings into action deploying its myrmidons; Hollywood’s Big Donors, spokesboob actors and actresses, radical environmentalists (Crypto-Marxists), feminists (Crypto-Marxists), radicalized college youth (Crypto-Marxists), liberal media, and union and race voters. Blacks and Hispanics in large urban areas typically vote against one of their own if she is a Republican. And who are the misogynists?
Liberals have accused conservative males debating liberal females of “picking on the girl” if they “come on too strong”. Just ask Rick Lazio who lost to Hillary Clinton in their New York Senate race (2000).3 Conservative males now face an additional quandary. Do they “go easy” on liberal males in political debates? After all, with liberals, you never know when ‘he’ might come out a ‘she’. Lest anyone consider this an attack against Democrats on behalf of Republicans, read on.
Conservative radio talk show host Joe Pags recently interviewed Texas Republican Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick (23 September, 2019) about the latter’s support for universal background checks. Patrick proclaimed fidelity to the Second Amendment with a ‘but’…an affirmation followed by an equivocation is a negation…as was the case. Sure enough, Patrick argued in favor of total, 100%, universal background checks (UBC’s). His rationale was, since 90% of guns purchased already involve a background check, what’s the harm in extending it to the remaining 10%? In support of his proposal, Patrick claimed the people now avoiding background checks, presumably his 10%, do so because they cannot legally buy firearms. He said UBC’s would end this practice.4
Next Patrick asserted “gun-merchants” are getting rich selling firearms to persons who cannot legally buy them charging $4000 dollars for a $2000 dollar gun. Because of their ineligible status, “customers” have no choice but to pay huge markups. Patrick said UBC’s would shut these gun merchants down. In addition, he declared UBC’s would also stop and end public mass shootings because they would prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Patrick believes suspects in recent mass shootings were legally able to buy guns even though health officials had adjudicated them to be mentally unfit. When Joe Pags (Pagliarulo) observed Second Amendment “hard-liners” might object to Patrick’s proposal, the Lieutenant Governor said the Second Amendment guarantees people the right to “bear” not “sell” their guns.5 Wow. Where to start? Trying to follow Patrick’s “logic” is like untangling twine after an explosion in a string factory.
If an unknown number of people are not subject to background checks, how does Patrick know what percentage are, let alone 90%? What is 90% of an unknown number? Is this the “new math?” He didn’t say. Private transfers between family members, friends, and acquaintances are not subject to background checks and hence not recorded. Again, how can Patrick quantify an unknown quantity? This is an important question because he grounds support for UBC’s on the claim since so many people are already subject to background checks, no one would notice if extended to the rest. Sort of like being covered with poison ivy and getting one more bump. Even if Patrick’s numbers are correct, when has the “everyone else is doing it” ever been a compelling argument? Would it be valid to argue, because government has suppressed 90% of American’s First Amendment rights, what is the harm in surrendering the rest? At the risk of being crass, would a rescuer tell the victim of a shark attack; “Well, he got most of your leg so, you might as well let him have the rest”? Imagine its pre-W.W. II Berlin. Jacob hears a harsh banging on his door. He opens it to find goons standing there dressed in black uniforms trimmed in ominous silver runes.
“Your guns, give them to us now!” barks one of the goons.
“But why, gun ownership is legal” responds Jacob.
“Ninety percent of the other Jews have handed theirs over. What could be the harm if you do too?” says the goon.
If the people surrender any portion of a right to the government, will government ever cede it back? Would not any rationale for the government to seize a portion of a right also be equally compelling with respect to it taking the rest? Ten percent of a bad idea is still a bad idea let alone ninety percent.
I wish Pags had asked Patrick how UBC’s would force ineligible persons to submit to background checks. If a person is ineligible, they are ineligible. Most criminals obtain firearms through the black and secondary markets. This includes theft and straw purchases wherein eligible individuals buy firearms on behalf of those who are not. Who are Patrick’s “gun-merchants”? If he knows, why doesn’t he alert the Texas Department of Public Safety? Those willing to break the law selling contraband, be it untaxed cigarettes, bootleg music CDs, drugs, guns, and so forth, have and always will regardless of prohibitions and legal sanctions. Experience, history, and the facts contradict Patrick’s arguments. How could the number two man in the Texas Republican Party make such an ill-conceived and dangerous argument?
Contrary to what Patrick believes, the law already prohibits individuals from buying or possessing firearms if the Courts and or mental health officials have determined them to be mentally “defective”. In addition, the law requires officials to report such adjudications to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Anyone purchasing a firearm through an FFL is required to fill out form 4473. This an affidavit swearing they do not fit in any prohibited class listed on the form (felons, domestic abusers, illegal aliens, drug users, mentally unfit, etc.). Lying on this form is a felony. The FFL then calls the FBI’s NICS who determine if the customer is eligible to purchase the firearm. How does Texas’ Lieutenant Governor not know this? If individuals, barred by law from buying firearms, resort to the black market already operating outside the law, how would they be stopped by universal background checks?
I like Joe Pags but have to ask; what is a Second Amendment “hardliner?” Are they people who believe in an individual right to keep and bear arms, that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that one cannot compromise rights endowed by G-d? ? I’m a homicide hardliner. I reject exceptions to laws prohibiting anyone from illegally taking my life. Am I extreme? Liberals use “hardliner” to cast opponents as unreasonable in order to soften up the rest of gun owners to accept compromises. With all gun laws, each compromise leads to a diminution of rights.
According to Patrick, although the Second Amendment guarantees a right to keep and bear arms, those arms are not your private property. If one does not have the right to sell his or her property, then someone else does. Who is that? Government? If the latter, your arms must belong to them. The Declaration states people have a right to life and it is a gift from G-D, not one created by man or his laws. Inherent in this right is also a right to the means to protect it. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments recognizes the individual’s absolute right to own private property and dispose of it as they see fit. Firearms are private property. Crypto-Confiscationists argue, however, because firearms possess an intrinsic potential for lethality, exceptions to Second Amendment and property rights are valid. Baseball bats, knives, ice picks, meat cleavers, hammers, hatchets, axes, arrows, staves, and so forth also possess intrinsic lethal potential. This is no facetious comparison. The FBI reports that murderers kill more people with knives, hammers, clubs, and feet each year than rifles. In 2018, 297 people were killed with rifles, 1,515 were killed by murderers using a knife, 443 were murdered by killers using hammers, clubs, and blunt objects, and 672 were killed with “fists, feet and other ‘personal weapons”.6 The law can impose harsh consequences for irresponsible behavior but government cannot abridge an individual’s 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendment rights based on potential lethality of property owned. More importantly, American government, constituted as “federal”, cannot pass “national” laws.7
James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” writing in Federalist #39 noted a national government has authority over the “individual citizens” along with “an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things.” Under this system, “supremacy is completely vested in the national legislature” that has total control over city, county, and state governments as well as all commercial and other activities within the states. However, the United States has a “federal” not a “national” government. Its jurisdiction extends only to powers delegated to it, and enumerated, by the states.8 In Federalist #45, Madison wrote; “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects such as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which the last, the power of taxation, will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concerns the lives, liberties, and properties of the people”9 [emphasis mine]. Oops, the “federal” government has no Constitutional authority to establish any form of “national” background check law in the first place! It is sad those calling themselves Republicans and conservatives know so little about the Constitution.10
Lieutenant Governor Patrick predicates his failure-doomed proposal on two false notions near and dear to liberals; 1) the mere existence of firearms “causes” violent crime and 2) Individuals engaging in “hate” or “hate-speech” are dangerous to others, mentally ill, and the ones who commit public mass shootings. In the first case, the solution is simple; eliminate firearms thus ending violent crime, so they say. In the second, “red-flag” and stop mentally unstable persons from possessing arms or have police seize those they possess.
First, there is no correlation between the degree of access to firearms and the degree of evil in a person’s heart. Intent to inflict pain, great bodily injury, and murder germinate from within the individual not from proximity to implements of harm. In addition, access to firearms, including by teenagers under 18, was relatively unregulated before the 1960s. People could purchase firearms through the mail. “Federal” (sic) background checks did not exist, yet public mass shootings, were rare. Each decade of the twentieth century, until the 1970s, “had fewer than 10 mass public shootings with one in the 1950s. The rise began in the 1960s with six, followed by 13 in the 1970s. This upsurge spiked in the 1980s with 32 public mass shootings jumping to an unimaginable 42 in the 1990s even though access to firearms was increasingly regulated and controlled by the government following the Gun Control Act of 1968.10 What changed?
It began in 1947 with Everson versus Board of Education (330, 1, 18, 1947) in which the Supreme Court illegally amended the Constitution inventing the doctrine of “separation of church and state”. Through the Court’s tortured interpretation, it granted Liberal Humanism the means to drive G-d, its greatest foe, from the public square.
In the 1960s, moral relativism, the notion that all values are “relative”, that there is no good and evil or right and wrong, or moral absolutes became the dominant philosophy in America. Books like, I’m Okay, You’re Okay and The Pathology of Normalcy became wildly popular along with the philosophy of “do your own thing”. Simon and Garfunkel’s prophets wrote, “G-d is Dead” on subway walls. The humanist left, the equivalent of cultural acid, declared concepts of right and wrong to be judgements and those holding to them to be judgmental. If notions of morality are relative, “who are you to impose your values on me” became the battle cry of those destroying Judeo-Christian based Western Society. In order to force cultural and moral relativism on everyone, liberal humanists worked through “modern” left teachers and the Courts to drive G-d and Judeo-Christian based values from schools. For decades, Public Dis-Education has taught notions of morality and even truth are merely social constructs. How then could the consequences surprise anyone? Religion’s decline in the role of people’s lives, disintegration of the family, loss of respect for law and order and spike in violent crime, massive drug use, wild promiscuity, murdering unborn babies, normalizing sexual perversion, school and public mass shootings, and a rise in suicides. And all this would be solved by more background checks?
Patrick’s claim that all public mass killers were/are known to have been mentally unstable and dangerous is problematic. Most recent mass killers, with exceptions, did not exhibit a “specific profile” that would have identified them as potential murderers. An FBI Study (2013) revealed only 25% of mass murderers had previously been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. However, many of the others had displayed behavior considered hostile and anti-social.11 Laws designed to prevent violent crime before it happens by nature must be anticipatory. They rely on “red-flags” triggering a response from the courts and police. Who and on what basis determines what constitutes a red flag resulting in the police seizing a person’s arms? Therein lies the rub. Short of actions requiring incarceration in the Puzzle Factory, what constitutes behavior triggering these responses? According to the “Left”, hate speech should be a “Red-Flag” because it is de facto “proof” of mental instability and potential for violence. But what is hate speech? The Left defines it as anyone holding to Biblical morality, opposition to the invasion of the US by illegal aliens, belief in limited government, and a demand government follow the original intent of the Constitution. In short, opposition to any part of the left’s agenda.
Criminals and the mentally unstable are already prohibited from buying and possessing firearms. Universal background checks will do nothing to stop the ineligible from obtaining them. Nor will they stop criminals from buying guns on the black market. UBCs serve two purposes. First, a misguided attempt to buy off Confiscationists through compromise. Second, when UBC’s fail in their intended goal, Liberals will argue it’s because gun laws didn’t go far enough and what is needed is total gun registration. This too will fail and again the Left will say it’s because “We didn’t go far enough”. Guess what they’ll call for next. Support no sell-outs regardless of political party.
11 Political Parity, “Where Women Win: Closing The Gap In Congress,” at https://www.politicalparity.org/research/where-women-win/
22 Phyllis Schlafly was a giant in the conservative movement. She led the battle against “me-too” males in the Republican Party, fought the radical feminist and homosexual movement, and worked to expose leftwing bias in schools. The Left, in conjunction were their useful idiots in the liberal media, pop-culture, and public diss-education, have done all in their power to flush her down Orwell’s Memory Hole.
33 Cheryl K. Chumley, “Hillary Clinton Gets Pity Party, For Rick Lazio, But Elaine Chao? Left to Fend…” The Washington Times at https://washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/27/hillary-clinton-gets-bully-card-rick-lazio-elaine/
44 Joe Pags Show, 980 Am KMBC, 23 September, 2019.
55 IBID.
66 Law Enforcement Staff, “FBI: More People Killed With Knives, Hammers, Clubs, And Even Feet Than Rifles, In 2018,” October 2, 2019 at https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/fbi-more-people-killed-with-knives-hammers-clubs-and-even-feet-than-rifles-in-2018/.
77 Teaching Government for years, I never encountered a student who knew the difference between a federal and national government or why it even mattered. Using primary sources, I addressed this ignorance for which I was summarily punished by Administration and colleagues in the SocialIST Studies Department.
88 Clinton Rossiter, Editor, The Federalist Papers (New York, N.Y., A Mentor Book from the New American Library, 1961), 244-245.
99 IBID. 292-293
1010 I explained the difference and significance between a “national” and “federal” government to self-avowed conservatives for years. All listened, few cared. To one in particular stocking up on supplies because Constitutional abandonment will lead to collapse, I supplied primary source and scholarly articles. He refused to read them and called me, and those like me, “deranged a**holes.”
1010 Dennis Prager, “Why So Many Mass Shootings? Ask The Right Questions And You Might Find Out,” June 4, 2019, Rear Clear Politics, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/04/why-so_many_mass_shootings_ask_the_right_questions_and_you_might_find_out_140486.html.
1111 Lisa Dunn, “Fact Checking 6 Myths About The Perpetrators Of Mass Shootings,” Guns And America, August 6, 2019, KERA NEWS at https://www.keranews.org/post/fact-checking-6-myths-about-perpetrators-mass-shootings/.
