Cook County commissioners voted Thursday to amend a guns and ammunition tax that was found unconstitutional by the Illinois Supreme Court, aiming to give the measure another lifeline by designating that money for violence prevention.
In a 12-2 vote, with three commissioners absent, the county board approved the amendment, which states all revenue from the firearm and ammunition tax must go toward programs or operations geared toward gun violence prevention. The passage follows an Oct. 21 ruling from the state’s highest court that found the levy was unconstitutional.
Chicago Murders By Area, IMG 2008 Chicago Tribune Data And Map
Moreover, the reason why those statutes preempt handgun regulations, not handgun taxes, is obvious—the Illinois Constitution only allows the legislature to preempt regulations, not taxes. And taxes that infringe the right to keep and bear arms are already precluded by the Illinois Constitution. See Ill. Const. 1970, art. I, § 22; id. art. VII, § 6. Moreover, even if the statutes mentioned by the County did intend to specifically preserve for home rule units the power to tax handguns in the manner under consideration here, that would not show that the framers of our constitution intended to authorize a home-rule unit’s discriminatory taxation of firearms, where the text of that constitution clearly prohibits taxation that infringes on the right to keep and bear arms.
A new challenge to the amended tax seems likely. It is too early for a lawsuit to have been crafted and filed in court. A visit to the Guns Save Life.com website did not reveal any announcement of their response to the amended tax.
The Supreme Court decision on October 21 was unanimous with Chief Justice Anne M. Burke abstaining. It is not known why the Chief Justice did not participate in the decision. Her husband Edward Burke is a power broker in Chicago politics, an Alderman of the 14th Ward.
There’s no evidence to suggest that Anne Burke, who is about to become the state’s highest-ranking judge, deliberately swung cases to benefit her husband’s clients. But one thing is indisputable: Some of the Supreme Court decisions Justice Burke helped shape spared some of her husband’s clients from significant financial and legal risk.
Chief Justice Burke avoided any appearance of impropriety in the gun tax case by not participating in it.
This correspondent predicts the words of Justice Michael J. Burke will appear in the next lawsuit challenging the gun and ammunition tax. From the decision:
Again, I believe that the majority’s analysis wrongly leaves the door open for a municipality to enact a future tax on firearms or ammunition that is more narrowly tailored to the purpose of ameliorating the cost of gun violence. The only problem with that approach is that it would still violate the Illinois Constitution.
Will Justice Burke continue to abstain in a new gun tax lawsuit? No one knows. No reason was given for her abstaining in the recently decided case.
The last lawsuit took nearly six years, from December 17, 2015, to October 21, 2021 to work its way to the Supreme Court, and for the Court to find the gun tax unconstitutional. The Cook County Board took two weeks to re-institute the amended tax. Will it take another six years for a new lawsuit to go to the Supreme Court again? Will the people of Illinois be continually subject to an Illinois legal game of whack a law?
The gun tax in Cook County is premised on a flawed assumption, The claim is: More guns equal more illegitimate violence. The evidence does not support this assumption. There is more evidence the number of guns does not make a difference in the level of violence, and the number of legal guns does not affect the number of illegal guns.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
We Drive Late at Night, and Trouble is Waiting- More Self Defense Gun Stories.
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- The mainstream news media sells shock and revulsion to keep us watching through their many advertisements. Politicians lie to us so we will vote for them. Both have told us that guns are frighteningly dangerous and that we’d be safer if more honest citizens were disarmed. We’re tempted to believe them if that is all we know. Now, we have data that calls their story into question. We confirmed something we’d long suspected about good men and women who legally carry personal firearms in public. Now we know that concealed carry and armed defense are common.
The mainstream media tells us about crime all the time. What the news media seldom bother to tell us are the many stories where good guys stop crime with a personal firearm. We don’t see that news article even though armed defense happens several times for each time a criminal uses a gun during a crime. (Criminals only use a firearm in about 8% of violent crimes.) In contrast, our neighbors use a firearm for self-defense about as often as criminals commit any violent crime, either with or without a gun in the criminals’ hands.
Anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was “half-right” when he told NBC’s Jimmy Fallon that there is “scant coverage” of other firearms news, because there is virtually no coverage of self-defense uses every day
One claim that the media and anti-gun advocates use is that good guys don’t carry a firearm in public. They claim that if armed defense happens at all, then it is extremely rare. That would be odd because we already know there are more than 20 million of us who have a license to carry a concealed firearm.
That doesn’t mean that 20 million of us necessarily carry every day. Until now, we didn’t have solid proof that honest citizens with a license to carry concealed in public leave their homes with a gun at all. In many states, you can carry concealed in public and the license is optional.
Now that we know they are out there in public, do good guys and gals with a gun make us safer or less safe? We’ve looked at criminal records, so we know that private citizens who have their concealed carry license are extraordinarily nonviolent and law-abiding. It is no surprise that police officers are dozens of times more law-abiding than the average citizen. What surprised me is that citizens who have their carry permits were several times more law-abiding than even the police. We can’t find a group of people who are more law-abiding and less violent than concealed carry permit holders.
When they do have to use their firearm, licensed concealed carriers are both more accurate and several times less likely to shoot the wrong person than the police. That is old news, and we were told it didn’t matter since no one except the police and criminals actually have a gun in public. We might have suspected that wasn’t true, but now we know. Now we know the media’s claims were false.
We don’t see our neighbors carry their gun because concealed carry is concealed. We don’t ask our neighbors if they are carrying a personal firearm with them in public. Maybe you ask them, but I don’t. Now, someone did.
The 2021 National Firearms Survey asked if people carried a personal firearm in public. On-duty police and security guards were considered separately. Over 50 thousand of us answered the survey.
We learned that guns and gun owners are everywhere. Two of the largest anti-gun states, California and New York, also had some of the most firearms owners compared to other states.
Where the state permits it, many gun owners carry a firearm in public for personal protection. That happens in some areas even in “anti-gun” states. There are many counties in California and in New York where ordinary citizens with a clean criminal record will get their carry permits if they ask for them. That isn’t the portrait the media paints of gun owners in those red states.
Having a personal firearm can make us significantly safer. Examples, where the armed victim defended themselves, dwarf the number of firearms accidents. Being armed increases the gun owner’s safety, the safety of their family, and the safety of their neighborhoods. About a third of all gun owners in the survey reported using a firearm for personal defense, though most of those self-defense events were at or near their home and not necessarily in public.
As you would hope, our armed neighbors were wonderfully reluctant to use lethal force. More than 80 percent of armed defense incidents ended without the defender having to fire a shot. The victim saying he was armed, showing the firearm, or threatening to shoot was enough to stop most attacks.
That is good news, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone. You don’t want to shoot someone, and neither do your neighbors who own a gun.
We also learned more from this year’s firearms survey. When we asked them, many of our neighbors said how often they go armed in public. They were offered several choices to describe how often they carried; always or almost always, often, sometimes, only in dangerous situations, and never. That created four broad categories for those who carry in public. I narrowed the end categories to 20 percent, and gave the categories of “often” and “sometimes” a range of 30 percent each.
Shown below, I estimate that over 17 million of us legally carry a concealed firearm in public every day. That works out to between one in 12 and one in 13 of the adults over the age of 21 are carrying in public each day. In round numbers, call in one-in-a-dozen adults on the street.
Of course, there are more gun owners in some states than in others. We suspected that when we found that over 50 percent of adults in some counties had their carry permits. In contrast, the state of Hawaii hasn’t granted a single concealed carry permit to an ordinary citizen this year.
In general, the fraction of carry permits issued is much lower in some deep-blue cities in deep-blue states. The obvious examples are New York, New Jersey, and California. In cities like Los Angeles, in New York City, and in Trenton, police chiefs and judges only gave concealed carry permits to their friends. Politicians and judges get permits, but ordinary citizens like us can’t.
What isn’t well known is that concealed carry permits are issued in some rural counties in California and New York. Those permits allow ordinary citizens to carry in every county in that state.
We assumed that there were no good men and women with guns on the street because we didn’t see them. Now we know they are there.
Good men and women carry their personal firearms near us even if we can’t get a permit from our sheriff. Armed Americans are at our coffee shop in the morning. They are on the road with us as we drive to work. They work next to us. They are sitting at the restaurant, and they are in the store where we shop on the way home. They are our neighbors, and they use a firearm to defend themselves over a million times each year. Good for these honest citizens, and it is good for all of us that they protected themselves and their families.
Gun ownership is common and one out of a dozen of us are carrying in public today.
Now we must ask why in some counties half the adults have their permits, yet that right is denied to all the ordinary citizens in some states.
DC: Pay More for “Ghost Guns”; Get More “Ghost Guns”?
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- In Washington, the District of Columbia, the murder rate is soaring. The DC leadership has a scapegoat for their political problem – blame guns! Especially blame homemade guns!
They have a political solution: pay people more for snitching on people with guns, especially guns the DC politicians have banned in one way or another.
A significantly increased reward has been offered for anonymous information leading to the confiscation of guns and the arrest of people illegally possessing those guns, for a period of just over a month. The increased reward – of up to $7,500 – was announced on November 22, 2021. From wtop.com:
As homicide rates remain worryingly high in the District — up 12 percent compared to this time last year, according to D.C. police data — the city is raising the monetary incentive to get illegal guns off the street.
While the District offers up to $2,500 for tips that lead to the recovery of illegal guns, the city is partnering with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to raise that reward to $7,500.
(snip)
Contee said that tips that lead to the recovery of any illegal weapons will still receive a partial reward.
The triple-level reward will only last until the end of 2021, or five weeks and three days. The DC police department guidelines do not mention the increased reward yet. Here are the guidelines from the DC Metropolitan Police Department:
Providing a gun tip anonymously is easy and safe. The tipline is open 24 hours a day. Note the following guidelines:
Calls to the anonymous Firearm Tip Line will be checked for veracity prior to rewards being paid.
Callers do not need to identify themselves to be eligible to receive a reward.
The process is absolutely anonymous — calls cannot be traced to identify the source of the call.
Rewards are paid for tips that result in a firearm recovery and/or arrest. Reward amount varies depending on the number and type of firearm(s) recovered and whether any arrests are made as a result of the tip, not to exceed $2,500.
Tips are assigned a unique AMS Tip Number. To receive payment, callers must retain this number. After seven days, callers may contact the Public Information Office at (202) 727-4383 to check on the status of the tip. If the tip has been deemed reliable, PIO staff will provide additional instructions.
Payment will be made through a single-use debit card through the DC Office of Finance and Treasury. Instructions on how to obtain the debit card will be provided at the time a tip is verified and payment is approved.
No identification necessary.
It appears “ghost guns” are near the historical percentage of guns that do not have serial numbers found in DC. From nbcwashington.com:
Officers have taken more than 2,000 guns off the street and, as the city works to curb gun violence, there is growing concern over ghost guns, which are sold as parts and then assembled by the customer.
Ghost guns have no serial number, require no background check and can sometimes even evade a metal detector. The Metropolitan Police Department has found them at murder scenes and on kids as young as 13. The I-Team tracked the numbers and found a record number of ghost guns already recovered in the District this year.
In 2020, they found 282 “Ghost Guns”. In 2021, by mid-November, they had found 313. That is about 16% of the guns confiscated in DC.
128. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Analysis of Operation CUE (Concentrated Urban Enforcement), interim report 133-34 (February 15, 1977).
In 2010, over 12% of firearms in the DC and Prince George’s had no serial numbers, in a study done by the Washington Post.
How a “ghost gun” is defined in DC is uncertain. From x99news.com:
Last week, the DC Council voted to amend the city’s law banning ghost weapons in response to a federal lawsuit filed in September that alleged the law is “too far-reaching.”
Under current law, a ghost rifle is defined as “a firearm which, after removing all parts other than a receiver, is not as detectable… by metal detectors that are traverse.”
When all parts except the receiver are removed from a gun, only the polymer frame remains – which is not metal. For example, the suit alleges that the city “apparently unwittingly… made existing polymer-framed pistols illegal.”
Dick Heller filed a lawsuit. The DC Council has moved to amend the law:
However, the council approved an amendment to the law that would require weapons with attached barrel, trigger and firing mechanism to be detectable, even if the receiver is polymer-based. It would also add legal process for residents to possess homemade firearms.
The amendment has not gone into effect, as the change has to be approved of by the Mayor, Muriel Bowser (D).
It seems the amendment would exempt nearly all firearms.
Over the last two years, police have made more than 60 arrests for illegal guns resulting from tips. They paid out nearly $80,000 in rewards, or about $1,333 each arrest, at two to three arrests per month.
The program does not seem particularly popular. The rules make it clear a tipster has no idea how much they may actually get paid when a gun is confiscated or a person arrested.
How many of the arrests were for the victimless “crime” of someone exercising their Second Amendment rights? The process to obtain a permit to own or carry a firearm in the District is long and difficult.
When you are willing to pay more for something, you will typically get more of it, all other things being equal.
Increase the top award from $2500 to $7500 for five weeks, you would expect to get a few more tips. The short duration of the program and the uncertainty of the award means the effect will be very limited.
Perhaps Dick Heller will receive recompense for the time and trouble of his lawsuit used to inject a little sanity into the DC mess.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Just seconds after a Kenosha jury of five men and seven women found that Kyle Rittenhouse used his AR as it was intended, for self-defense, the anti-gun zealots went bonkers – crying, wailing and gnashing their teeth – nearly apoplectic with rage and disbelief.
When the other side is screaming, babbling incoherently and imploding on the national stage, it’s best to just leave them alone. Pop some corn, sit back and enjoy the show. Sun Tzu said that, probably.
No one in the entire country went more dinky-dau than Congressman Jerry Nadler, who represents Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Nadler wants to further weaponize and politicize the Justice Department by forcing them to investigate Rittenhouse for civil rights violations. There is, however, a major problem with Jer’s lawyering: Kyle didn’t violate anyone’s civil rights. Three convicted felons did, which is why they got shot. Besides, the FBI is far too busy wiretapping parents who disagree with their local school boards to get involved in a state case that’s already concluded, especially one without a clear federal predicate. The gavel has come down, Jerry. Time to move on.
“Law enforcement – including a department known to cover up its own lawless acts of violence – seemed to give cover to Rittenhouse from the get-go,” Reid wrote.
Cover? They charged him with multiple felonies including several counts of murder – to give him cover? Okay, Joy, now I see why you’re paid $1.5 million and Maddow makes $35 million.
Cliff Schecter, whose day job is running a public relations and political strategy firm, wrote for the Daily Beast that Rittenhouse “just killed our right to peacefully protest.” How Schecter arrived at this political strategy I do not know.
“We’ve now lost our guaranteed First Amendment right to peacefully assemble to a half-cocked, cocaine-cowboy version of the Second Amendment,” Schecter wrote. “Mix that together with a witch’s brew of right-wing propaganda and white power, and the result is that any time you march for your rights you have to accept that any dime store Kyle Rittenhouse can point a weapon of war at you and pull the trigger.”
To be clear, Kyle Rittenhouse pointed his weapon at no one until they pointed a weapon at him. There is no evidence whatsoever that future protests will be impacted by the jury’s verdict unless of course, the peaceful protesters try to murder someone else.
On Sunday, CBS News’ senior national correspondent Mark Strassmann repeated the debunked lie that Rittenhouse “drove in from Illinois armed for battle.” The truth is, and it was confirmed during the trial, which somehow Strassman must have missed, that Rittenhouse’s AR was already in Kenosha. Any senior national correspondent should have known this. CBS declined to comment about or fix the error, which comes as no surprise, especially for this trial, especially for CBS.
There are dozens if not hundreds of other examples: NPR painted anyone who supported the verdict as a right-wing extremist, and CNN is still trying to come to grips with the 15 months’ worth of fiction they disguised as news before they’re hit by defamation lawsuits, but the most extreme silliness is coming from the usual we-need-another-law crowd.
To be clear, Kyle Rittenhouse exercised his right of self-defense. I believe self-defense is a God-given right, but feel free to insert the name of whatever deity you bend a knee to on Saturday or Sunday. (Atheists I know refer to self-defense as a natural or inherent right). The point is this, a divine right cannot be revoked by any new legislation, and it’s certainly immune from one of Joe Biden’s executive orders. Governments and authoritarian presidents come and go, but our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones remain, as long as we safeguard it more zealously than those who want to take it away.
This story is presented by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and wouldn’t be possible without you. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support more pro-gun stories like this.
About Lee Williams
Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.
United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- The news that some states are punishing big banks who engage in corporate gun control is good news. But I hope loyal Ammoland readers will forgive me for only offering one cheer. Why?
Because we should not be celebrating half-measures against an existential threat. The cold, hard, truth is that financial deplatforming is an existential threat to our Second Amendment rights and needs to be treated as such.
Losing the chance to underwrite a $3.3 billion bond offering might sound impressive, but JP Morgan Chase has a net worth of just over $475 billion – almost 144 times the size of the bond issue discussed. It has over $2.6 trillion in assets. That bond offering that Chase lost is a shot glass compared to a 55-gallon drum just in terms of money. Let’s face it, if we want to stop financial deplatforming, we need more than sub-pinprick consequences.
When you have companies willing to engage in corporate gun control, abuses like Operation Chokepoint are not that necessary – at least for a while. So, Second Amendment supporters need to come up with ways to make redlining the Second Amendment more painful than going along with anti-Second Amendment extremism.
For starters, Second Amendment supporters should push for their state legislatures to pass state-level versions of the Freedom Financing Act, with larger civil penalties, adding a private course of action to allow those targeted to sue and recover damages, and disqualifying those banks from doing any business with state governments.
The next step is to take on the tech companies like PayPal, Square, and others who engage in corporate gun control. Again, a mix of civil penalties and allowing for private causes of action would be a way to deter such discrimination.
A third step will be to also go after those who incite such corporate gun control. In this case, there is a federal statute that can help. Under 42 USC 1985, there is a civil cause for action for “conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.” State legislatures could pass resolutions that call financial deplatforming a form of interference with the right to keep and bear arms, which is protected by the Heller and McDonald rulings.
Much of this centers around civil litigation. This may be seen as a long shot by some loyal Ammoland readers, but a large enough civil litigation campaign could be enough to force the big banks to reconsider going along with corporate gun control. The Tampa Bay Times wrote of how a civil litigation campaign beat the IRS. Anti-Second Amendment extremists like Andrew Cuomo once tried a similar plan to coerce gun manufacturers into going along with gun control. Turnabout is more than fair play.
Second Amendment supporters need to recognize the reality about the existential threat that financial deplatforming poses to our right to keep and bear arms. They need to work hard to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists via the ballot box at the federal, state, and local levels as soon as possible, but they also need those they elect to address this existential threat head-on without settling for half-measures.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.
By Major Van Harl USAF Ret
This article was first published on AmmoLand News in March of 2014, fast forward to 2021 and once more it looks like the Russians are on the march.
Ukraine has suffered at the hands of the Russians and the Germans and it is going to happen again.
Wisconsin –-(Ammoland.com)- The Russians are warming up their human content, sausage-making equipment once again. The below column was written in 2014 and sadly I believe it needs to be re-read.
Putin wants Ukraine back and he is massing his troops and military hardware on the Russian / Ukraine border. Back when the old Soviet Union fell apart and Ukraine got its independence from the Soviets, they owned a very large stockpile of nuclear weapons, including ballistic missiles.
The US and the UK convinced Ukraine to give up their Nukes to the Russians in exchange for an agreement that the US and the UK would come to the aid of Ukraine should it ever be attacked. Well, it would appear the US and UK sort of failed Ukraine when Russia moved in and took the Crimean away. As I recall O’bam sent blankets as a source of military supplies to help Ukraine try and stop the Russians. It did not work.
It is believed that the entire Russian military is being readied to go to war. This includes the calling up of all the reserve forces that Russia has. Not an inexpensive task if the entire mission is to “just” scare Ukraine. I would suggest Putin is not going to waste all his petrol dollars on a bluff.
If we have to shift US military assets to the European theater and weaken our position in the Pacific, do you really think China would pass up this golden opportunity to make a “play” in their backyard?
We in the US may find out a lot sooner than expected how our old military draft system will work when we start calling up our young women folk.
As a private citizen you need to think long and hard about how you will function if, during this potential conflict, the US power grid goes down in the middle of winter, as well as all of our online capabilities.
Ukrainian Swamp Sausage making in 2022 could be very ugly and very painful for a lot of unprepared people.
Have You Ever Seen Sausage Made?
First, you have to kill something, a cow, a pig, a lamb, or even a chicken. Then you have to butcher the carcass into smaller manageable chunks of meat. Next, you get out the meat grinder and push the chunks of meat through, to grind it into the consistency of a hamburger. Now you add the spices and other ingredients to flavor the meat to your liking. Once the meat is coated with your choice of flavoring you push that meat back through the grinder again.
This time the meat is injected into tubes (pig guts) and re-formed from a living animal to a shape and consistency you, the sausage maker, and consumer want.
Now think of the Ukraine as sausage. In the 1930s Stalinist Russia systematically starved the Ukrainian people. Those who attempted to escape a slow death would try to hide in the swamps of North West Ukraine. But when you are hungry you do not move very fast and Soviet troops would run the Ukrainian people down on the edge of the Pripyat Marshes.
Some were shot, but to save Mother Russia the cost of bullets many were beaten to death in the swampy waters of that marsh. Beating these emaciated people to a bloody pulp was sort of like the meat being prepared to make sausage. Those few who survived were then re-formed like good little sausage links in the image of their Soviet masters.
Thus was born Ukrainian Swamp Sausage, the living, and the dead kind. In August of 1941, the Germans invaded Ukraine. Many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Soviets.
Unfortunately, the German SS under Heinrich Himmler had actually taken to heart the previous efforts of the Soviets. The Germans started to chase down the fleeing Ukrainians who, like their forefathers had done for many generations, ran to the Pripyat Marshes to try and escape and survive. German soldiers wanted to save their Fatherland the cost of bullets (how thoughtful) so they too would beat the Ukrainians to death in the swamps, a sort of German blood-sausage version of Ukrainian Swamp Sausage.
In most cases the Germans were not interested in re-forming the surviving Ukrainians into “new” sausage links. It was much easier to beat them to death and leave to bodies in the swamp.
The 22nd SS (Death-Head) Cavalry Regiment would drive the women and children into the swamp. When the water was not deep enough to drown them outright, more bloody beatings-more “swamp sausage”. You can find WWII film footage of German army artillery firing into the swamps and their air force dropping bombs onto the Pripyat swamp. Artillery and aerial bombs would be mechanized meat grinders for the sausage makers.
The systematic starvation of Ukraine by Stalin in 1932-33 was the cause of death for approximately four million Ukrainians. It was called the Holodomor, meaning man-made famine.
What you need to understand was the west quietly knew about the Holodomor but still allowed Soviet Russia to join the League of Nations, because it was all about trade. Stalin starved Ukraine so he could take the grain and sell it for hard currency. He then turned around and used the western money to buy western manufactured goods that he could not get made in glorious communist Russia because their quality of production was abysmal.
And yes, for the sake of money, the west, to include our then progressive president Roosevelt, looked the other way. The fact he had numerous communists within his inner circle [sound familiar] of advisers may have had some influence in this area.
Ukraine has suffered at the hands of the Russians and the Germans and it is going to happen again.
Putin will not give up Ukraine to the west. Also like the grain Stalin sold to the west for hard currency, Putin must sell his oil for today’s petrodollars, or in this case German petro Euros.
When Putin finally sends tanks into Ukraine and starts grinding up the locals into fresh new Ukrainian Swamp Sausage do you really think Western Europe is going to rise up and stop him in the name of humanity? Winter is still on in Europe and the easy living socialists do not want their central heating cut off, due to the lack of Russian oil and gas. What are a few less Ukrainians anyway, especially if it means the lights of Berlin and Paris stay on?
I am sure there is someone in Western Europe who owns a body-bag or casket business, which will prosper in this time of strife. Or I am sure some western company will be happy to sell a large shipment of bulldozers and backhoes to the Russians so they can dig the mass graves that will be needed.
In the US we really do not understand the strategic importance of Ukraine to the Russians but we will start to (maybe sort of) understand as the body count rises. Ukrainian Swamp Sausage production is sadly fixing to commence yet again.
Major Van Harl USAF Ret
About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.:
Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret., a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Infantry School. A retired Colorado Ranger and currently is an Auxiliary Police Officer with the Cudahy PD in Milwaukee County, WI. His efforts now are directed at church campus safely and security training. He believes “evil hates organization.” vanharl@aol.com
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- Extreme Risk Protection Orders, also known as Red Flag Laws, are created specifically to confiscate guns without the hindrance of due process getting in the way.
The idea behind Red Flag Laws is to make it as easy as possible for people to accuse acquaintances of being mentally unfit or dangerous to themselves or society. The process begins with a simple accusation from a friend, family, former spouse, ex-roommate, or member of law enforcement. As in H.R.2377, this process has been streamlined to make it as easy as possible for accusers to submit their accusations. Often with Red Flag Laws, just an affidavit is necessary. The result of the accusation is the forceful confiscation of the respondent’s firearms. The respondent is afforded no court hearing or legal representation prior to the unconstitutional confiscation, resulting in a blatant violation of due process rights clearly listed in the fifth and fourteenth amendments.
Red flag laws are created under the guise of mental health safety. In other words, the actions taken and the primary focus of all the text within the laws focuses on the justification of confiscating guns, but mental health is the excuse that is used. The interesting thing that we find when we look at the 17 states which have enacted Red Flag Laws, is that only one of them even mentions mental illness and none of them require that a mental health expert be involved in the process.
Zero provisions have been included within the proposed national HR 2377 red flag law or of the 17 state Red Flag Laws to actually address the mental health of the respondent.
Nothing in any of these laws refers to help for the supposed sufferer of mental health issues and victims of this unconstitutional gonna grab. What makes it obvious that red flag laws are more about confiscating guns than they are about dealing with mental health issues, is that all states have laws that are commonly referred to as the Baker act statutes. These allow for the 72-hour hold and mental health observation of someone who may have mental health issues. So the laws are already in place to address the issues that red flag laws claim to address but completely ignore.
The intent of red flag laws in conjunction with universal background checks will result in a massive government database of firearms and the ability of law enforcement directed by local judges to go to these locations with a simple accusation and confiscate the guns. In order to enact red flag laws, the government needs to know where the guns are. This is where universal background checks come in. This is why we see Democrats desperately pushing for these two laws in tandem.
When you take away guns from people with mental health issues and do nothing to solve the underlying problem of mental health, you still have the issue of mental health. in other words, you’ve done nothing to help the person. But that’s not what this is really about. Red flag laws show us that the intent here is not to fix mental health issues but rather simply confiscate guns at will. Red flag laws also allow for anyone to determine the mental health of others by way of giving their accusations validity. HR 2377 would allow your former roommate, whose education and training is focused specifically on pizza delivery, to determine your mental health and activate a gun confiscation upon you.
If there was any intent within these laws to actually resolve mental health issues and protect people, there would be provisions to include mental health experts such as psychologists and psychiatrists in the process. There are none, indicating that the real intent behind these laws is to create an easy path to gun confiscation.
The 2nd Amendment is not a privilege.
It’s your right.
Dan Wos is available for Press Commentary. For more information contact PR HERE
Dan Wos is a nationally recognized 2nd Amendment advocate and Author of the “GOOD GUN BAD GUY” series. He speaks at events, is a contributing writer for many publications, and can be found on radio stations across the country. Dan has been a guest on the Sean Hannity Show, NRATV, and several others. Speaking on behalf of gun-rights, Dan exposes the strategies of the anti-gun crowd and explains their mission to disarm law-abiding American gun-owners.
