Some People Will Believe Anything!

March for Our Lives, the children’s crusade against firearms, has just shown their gullibility and ignorance. If it involves guns, they will believe anything an anti-gun politician spews out.

They have retweeted an absolute lie told by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D-PA). He wants people to have the impression that it was the National Rifle Association that sued him after his autocratic redefinition of what constitutes a firearm. Shapiro knew that throwing the name “NRA”, the term “ghost guns”, and tying it into crime was red meat for your average ignorant anti-gunner.

Look at the first page of the application for an emergency preliminary injunction. That action is being brought by a Pennsylvania FFL, a New Hampshire FFL, a manufacturer and dealer in what are called 80% lowers, and the Firearms Policy Coalition. No where do you see that the NRA is involved in this case. Indeed, if you had attended the Meeting of Members at the 2019 NRA Annual Meeting, you know that that old guard had nothing but disdain for attorneys Josh Prince and Adam Kraut. Don’t forget that Marion Hammer has called Adam “the enemy within”.

Shapiro sent out his original tweet the day after the application was filed. He knew or should have known that the NRA had nothing to do with this case.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has consistently held that unfinished forgings or castings that are “completely solid and un-machined in the fire-control recess area” are not firearms and not subject to the Gun Control Act of 1968. See the attached determinations beginning on page 67 of the application for an injunction. Moreover, BATFE doesn’t even use the term “80% lower” or “80% frame” which is more of a marketing term than anything else.

As Josh Prince notes in his law firm blog, only the Pennsylvania General Assembly has the power to write law and it cannot be delegated. In other words, Shapiro’s “legal opinion” is making law and therefore invalid.

With regard to Shapiro’s claim that he is being sued by “companies that fund the @NRA”, only Polymer 80 exhibited at the most recent NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. Having a booth at a national show which attracts thousands of gun owners is smart business for Polymer 80. While the NRA does gain some marginal revenue, “funding the NRA” is not Polymer 80’s purpose in being there. Just like we are all the “gun lobby”, so, too, we are all “funding the NRA” through our memberships.

Politicians and their PR flacks will say anything to push their position. Sometimes it is true. More often it is either the shading of the truth or an outright lie. I’ll let you decide what Shapiro was trying to do with his tweet.

March for Our Lives’ tweet, on the other hand, is a demonstrable lie. Like naughty children, they should be sent to their room with no TV, no phone, and no Internet to think about the consequences of their lie.

What A Coincidence

The Gun Rights Policy Conference starts on Friday evening in Phoenix. It is certainly important that all the social media accounts of sponsor Second Amendment Foundation be up and running.

It is important but yet that hasn’t stopped some nameless gnome at Twitter from suspending their account.

Dan Zimmerman at TTAG broke the story earlier today. Dan quotes Alan Gottlieb as being shocked. Alan notes that their account has never been suspended and that the timing is ” interesting that it’s happened right before the Gun Rights Policy Conference this weekend.”

My talk on Sunday at GRPC is about how we are at the mercy of the big tech oligopolies. I didn’t expect Twitter to confirm it this soon in advance.

If you have a Twitter account, you might want to tweet @jack (Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO) asking him about it. I did.

Now this all could be just a big mistake and some anti-gun Twitter techie hacked the Second Amendment Foundation account. It could be. It could also be that @Jack who was one of the CEOs who signed the letter to Mitch McConnell demanding action on “gun violence” (sic) decided that pro-2A organizations didn’t need any extra publicity.

Law Abiding?

A friend pointed out a Twitter post by a Nathan Rubin. His Twitter bio says he’s an “award winning” author and Democratic activist. His book, Boomers to Millennials: Moving America Forward, does have some awards but it doesn’t look like it sold too many copies. Amazon puts it in the top 1.9 million best sellers.

Here is what Rubin wrote on Twitter:

So unless I am a compliant sheep and turn in my ARs and AKs, I will be considered (by him) to be an irresponsible criminal. Hmm.

David Burkhead gave the best response to this nonsense on Facebook.

You can’t call yourself a law abiding American if you don’t return fugitive slaves to their owners. You can’t call yourself a law abiding Chinese if you don’t report any disagreement with Mao to the authorities. You can’t call yourself a law abiding German if you don’t report the presence of any hiding Jews.


See how that works?

The only one I’d add is that you couldn’t call yourself a law abiding Soviet citizen if you didn’t report someone criticizing the Communist Party to the KGB. In Stalin’s time, that was enough to either get you an ounce of lead along with an unmarked grave or a trip to the Gulag Archipelago.

I think that is the dream in the back of the minds of the authoritarian gun prohibitionists.

Tweet Of The Day

It would be hard to top this tweet for a tweet of the day or even the week.

Just as a side note, how can you have a buy back when it was never owned by the buyer in the first place?

The Arrogance Of Youth

I saw a tweet today that just made me roll my eyes. It was from Lauren Hogg who is the younger sister of David “Camera ” Hogg.

I think if there is one thing that Wayne LaPierre and Revan McQueen might agree on, it would be that Miss Hogg and her older brother had nothing to do with the demise of NRATV.

Great Twitter Thread On April 19th

I didn’t get to post this on April 19th as I was helping take care of my granddaughters while their parents were away. If you turn your head on a one year old who has learned to crawl, they are into everything!

April 19th was the 244th anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world” or the Battle of Lexington and Concord. We should never forget that the battle began when authorities tried to confiscate firearms from men who decided they’d rather be citizens than subjects.

Anyway, this Twitter thread is brilliant. I’ll only excerpt a part of it but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

Sam Cooke Must Have Been Singing About This Guy

I came across a Tweet today from a rapper named Taleb Kweli Greene.

I’m kind of speechless over this abject ignorance of history. It made me wonder where he was edumacated.

According to his Wikipedia page, he started high school at Brooklyn Technical HS which requires an entrance exam. After being “academically dismissed”, he finished at Cheshire Academy which was founded in 1794. Cheshire boasts of a 6 to 1 student-teacher ration and class sizes of 12. The 10th oldest private school in the United States, Cheshire has a robust history department for a school its size.

All I can say is that Greene is either being intentionally obtuse or really is that dumb despite the best efforts of some of the best teachers that money could buy.

A New Word For The Political Lexicon – Feinsteined

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for Pres. George W. Bush, has come up with a new word for the political lexicon. It is Feinsteined. This is when an anonymous letter from an anonymous source with an unknown allegation is supposedly sent to the FBI in an effort to derail the nomination of a judicial candidate. In this case, the nominee is Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations may or may not be something non-sexual he did at a party with a girl when he and she were 17 years old.

In the interest of full disclosure, I may or may not have gotten drunk at a New Year’s Eve party when I was 17 and may or may not have kissed a girl at the stroke of midnight who was another guy’s girlfriend and may or may not have gotten in trouble with my mom for coming home drunk from a party.

Twitter Factoid Of The Day

John Tyler was born in 1790. He was both the 10th President and 10th Vice President of the United States. He served from 1841 until 1845 after assuming office on the death of President William Henry “Old Tippercanoe” Harrison.

Here’s where it get incredibly interesting. His grandsons Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the children of his son Lyon, are still alive. Lyon was born in 1924 and Harrison was born in 1928. Their father Lyon was born in 1853 to Tyler’s second wife Julia Gardiner (1820-1889).

As Matt Smethurst joked in a follow-on tweet:

Another way to think about this: There are people who could look at you today, in 2018, and say: “Yeah, my dad was 8 years old when the war started.”


“World War 2?”


“Ha, nope.”


“Oh wow, World War 1?”


“The Civil War.”

Think of it – you have three generations of one family spanning parts of four centuries. That is just incredible.