Matt Dolan Voted Against Removal of "Duty to Retreat" (Ohio SB 175)

H/T Buckeye Firearms. It looks like good ol' wishy washy Matt Dolan wants to represent Ohio in the U.S Senate. And he is explicitly stating that he will be "championing gun rights".

Dolan kicks off the listening tour Tuesday at a luncheon to be held at Lake County Republican Headquarters. Over the next two weeks, he’ll move on to Trumbull, Mahoning, Cuyahoga, Franklin, Lorain, Lucas, Wood, Ottawa and Ashland counties.

In a statement, Dolan said his agenda would include championing gun rights, school choice, religious freedom and being pro-life.

Well, Matt, champion is a Strong (cough, cough) word. Luckily for Ohioans, there is a simple way to find out if you are serious. Did you or did you not vote for removal of the ridiculous "duty to retreat"? After all, Governor Mike DeWine signed it. Yes, that Governor Mike DeWine, the one with the gun control agenda which he calls "Strong Ohio". If you voted "no" then you are to his left on gun rights and should probably quit posing as a champion.

Oh welp.

Matt Dolan is against gun rights. Matt Dolan is against your right to stand your ground and defend yourself. Matt Dolan does not understand the Second Amendment.

Honestly I would not vote for Dolan anyway since he purports to believe that something really extraordinarily terrible happened on January 6 in our nation's capital, which is nonsense. That is basically a disqualifier in my book. But it is good to point out that he is just a rich(*) poser on gun rights.

I'm supporting Josh Mandel for Ohio Senate; he is obviously the best in my book. But I guess a slap fight between rich boys Bernie Moreno and Matt Dolan would be entertaining.

(*) - His family owns the Cleveland Indians.

Andy Nowicki asks a lot of good questions about Mark Shea

Andy Nowicki, with whom I have sparred numerous times (and with whom I have agreed numerous times), has posted a great video about Mark Shea and his ostensible derangement. I advise watching and listening to the entire thing.



Mark Shea definitely has some Trump Derangement going on now. Like Nowicki points out, this has been going on for a long time before Trump came into power. But it seems like Trump has given people like Shea a pretty huge target as a filthy rich philandering Republican it should be admitted.

I believe that the "dark energy" Nowicki mentions is simply the glamour of the left. The people who have become Shea followers in recent times are all on the left, and his beliefs mostly follow modern leftist orthodoxy.

(Nota bene: This is a real guy named Andy Nowicki, not me. Yes; I know we look alike.)

"God made men and women ... "

"... and that night, guns made them equal."

The Eagles of Death Metal front man speaks out, emotionally, on gun control.

H/T Louder with Crowder.

WHAT?! I CAN'T BUY FULL AUTO!?

Hilarious.

Byron York explains why there is no Surgeon General

The Ebola scare has raised awareness that there is currently no one serving as Surgeon General. Is it all the Republicans fault like some liberal pundits claim? Of course not; they don't control the Senate explains Byron York. Excerpt:

There is, however, an Obama nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who has not been confirmed by the Senate after more than a year of waiting. Why hasn't Murthy won Senate approval in all that time?

To hear some of the president's advocates tell it, it's the Republicans' fault. "GOP blocks Surgeon General nominee," tweeted Eric Boehlert of the pro-Obama group Media Matters. "After blocking surgeon general nominee, Republican blames Obama for surgeon general vacancy," added another pro-Obama group, ThinkProgress.

Before getting into the details, here is the basic fact about charges that Republicans are blocking the surgeon general nominee: There are 55 Democrats in the Senate. Since Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the rules to kill filibusters for nominations, it would take just 51 votes to confirm Murthy. Democrats could do it all by themselves, even if every Republican opposed. But Democrats have not confirmed Murthy.

Why haven't they confirmed him? It turns out that the guy is embarrassingly political and obsessed with guns. He's behind the whole "Guns are a health care issue" nonsense, you know, asking Jimmy where daddy keeps his revolver when he's getting a check-up.

In 2008 Murthy, a Yale-trained physician currently affiliated with Harvard, founded a group called Doctors for America. Actually, he first called the organization Doctors for Obama; after Obama's victory, Doctors for Obama became Doctors for America. The group devoted itself to lobbying for passage of Obamacare.

The organization's political focus continued after the Obamacare battle was won. In 2012, Murthy got a lot of attention when he expressed frustration with opponents of his preferred gun control policies. "Tired of politicians playing politics w/guns," he tweeted, "putting lives at risk b/c they're scared of NRA. Guns are a health care issue."

In January 2013, after the Sandy Hook shootings, Doctors for America sent a letter to Congress advocating an assault weapon ban, universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods, a gun buyback program, and other proposals favored by gun control groups.

If nothing else, the letter showed that Murthy's approach to his profession remained deeply political. In any event, Murthy's activism came back to haunt him in November of 2013, when the president nominated him to be surgeon general.

So this guy is poison to Democrats seeking re-election in "red" states.

The National Rifle Association took a strong stand against Murthy, a position that caught the attention not only of Republicans but of red-state Democrats seeking re-election.

"Murthy's previous statements about gun control being a public health issue made him toxic to Democrats in cycle like [Mary] Landrieu, [Mark] Pryor, and [Mark] Begich," says one senior Republican aide.

So the truth is that there is bi-partisan opposition to confirming Vivek Murthy, and anyone who blames the Republican minority — who cannot filibuster under the new Senate rules — is lying.

Thanks for making our point.

It appears that my hopes and suspicions about the effectiveness of Bloomberg's new anti-gun group might have been on target. Check this out. Excerpt:

The ad was released to coincide with a congressional hearing aimed at expanding federal firearm prohibitions pertaining to misdemeanor convictions and restraining orders. Yet the reaction to many who saw the ad makes clear that it does nothing so much as illustrate the limitations of those measures.

As the “ex” pounds on the door, he yells, “This is my house!” However unwittingly, the producers of the ad thus establish that the man would almost certainly be prohibited under current federal law from possessing a firearm, insofar as he cohabitated with the woman, and she had obtained an order of protection against him.

In any event, as far as the ad is concerned, the order appeared to provoke the man, rather than restrain him; the police could not respond in time to enforce it; and whatever legal repercussions the man faced for possessing a firearm illegally were manifestly not a deterrent. How this argues for the expansion of any of these measures is unclear.

On the other hand, the ad does make a rather compelling argument for the proposition that the only thing that could have saved the woman once the man burst through the door was her own exercise of the right to armed self-defense.

Reminds me of this Glock commercial. Which has sort of a silly ending. I'd much rather see the dude take a bullet and then bleed out while the ambulance was on its way. But that's just me.

The anti-gun lobby is purely political. They don't care about current laws on the books one bit, and their mindless followers don't even know what they are.

"It's not even close."

I feel somewhat like I'm waking up from a weird dream, an alternate reality. I've been driving to western Michigan and back every week for five months. It has kept me extremely busy. I wanted to spend every spare moment with my wife and kids and my weird hobbies which have nothing to do with scribbling on the internets. Now this contract is ending and I have all these thoughts in my head, like puddles after the rain, from the first half of 2014 which I never commented on here, though I wanted to. So forgive me if some of this stuff is "old news", old by our modern news-cycle standards at any rate.

Here's the first thing I wanted to remark on. Yes, Bloomberg is quite a thing. And obviously his new anti-gun project is something which I detest and I hope turns ultimately into a huge waste of time, money and resources. So I was going to opine that I suspect my hope is correct. There are plenty of Democrats who detest gun-grabbing and I believe this group is playing to a rather small gallery.

But when I got to the last two paragraphs, I thought I'd wandered into an amateur comedy club. The focus of my derision shifted as Bloomberg went full retard into religion:

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

Stand back, St. Peter! The former Mayor of New York is heading straight in!

Al E. quipped that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. Then he added the disclaimer that he wasn't sure about the universe. I'm wondering something. If you could earn a place in Heaven―and I don't believe you can―would you be able to if you weren't even sure Heaven existed? In other words, you weren't sure there was a God to be worshiped on earth? And if everyone in Heaven knows everything there is to be known as perfectly as each of their minds can grasp knowledge, will there be interviews at the Pearly Gates? Even with people as important as Michael Bloomberg? Possibly; journalists and video crews who make it there might not know how to do anything else.

I hope Bloomberg does go to Heaven, but I don't think he'll like it. There won't be any government and no ability to run anything or ban anything. There will be smokers there, no doubt, and obese people like St. Thomas Aquinas and plenty of firing of guns for fun, since they won't be able to hurt anybody. (Trust me on this last point.) But maybe Bloomberg's first meeting with G. K. Chesterton would be worth capturing on video.

Thirty caliber.... no wait... Thirty magazine clip in half a second

Thirty somethings worth of some kind of rifle gun bullets....



My kids say this kind of stuff all the time. "I got a nuclear bomb missile gun with infinity firepower and a force field." But it doesn't bother me since none of them are 12 years old yet, let alone senators.

Was he trying to get a viral video? Spewing this kind of nonsense is one way.

Biden Gives Advice to Perform Illegal Actions

Then someone actually fires his shotgun through the door and gets arrested for it. Can anyone make this stuff up?

What the Police Really Think

Results of the Australian Gun Ban

Armed Robberies UP 69%
Assaults With Guns UP 28%
Gun Murders UP 19%
Home Invasions UP 21%
...

And for some odd reason, there's a huge decline in the number of people who want to become policemen Down Under as well.

People who don't think this could happen here must think that America has more decent criminals than Australia. One of the reasons criminals don't break in to a house is that they think there might meet resistance. If they case a joint and see an old guy wandering around by himself they figure they can take him—unless there's a chance he has a gun. That chance will instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the criminal, which is not just a sales tactic. FUD is a way to control behavior. It's a psychological fence, if you will, which you wield to get people to leave you alone. In many ways it's a first line of defense which might never be penetrated. Actually using a firearm might be a last-line of defense, but the right to bear arms is not, because of these many implications.

The criminal who would undertake a home invasion cares more dearly for his own life more than the law-abiding citizen, and he cares less about everyone else's life. He is a coward in the worst sense of the term. He preys on those he perceives to be weak and defenseless. A society which outlaws guns cares nothing about elderly people, single mothers, or poor people living in bad neighborhoods, no matter how big the social security payments or assistance checks are. In such an unarmed society, calling these people "at risk" because they have less money than suburbanites is a mean joke. These people are at risk because they can't defend themselves with aluminum ball bats or expensive monitored alarm systems. A fat lot of good government assistance will do for them when they're lying in a pool of blood because they didn't have a first or last line of defense against the criminal.