#semi assault rifle ban now

[elfwreck]

Hello!

I'm not sure if this is a bit odd to ask, but I saw your post about living in rural arkansas as a teen- and the note at the end about gun rights, and how rifles are different than handguns in that legislation and all-

do you have any sources you could link so I can look into that more? I live in rural Kentucky so hunting is very ingrained into just how me and my family and our neighbors live. (also a poor county- I didn't actually know other cities had kids pay for their lunch because I was so used to everyone in my county getting a free lunch- it seems like such a basic thing).

I've never heard anyone mention not banning hunting rifles when they talk about banning guns-

The gun bans being asked for are assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. Rapid-fire guns intended for military use against multiple human targets - not hunting rifles at all, and not the kinds of pistols that are good for self-defense. (...Not that pistols are good for self-defense in general. Shotguns are good for self-defense. Nobody's trying to ban shotguns.)

The NRA is invested in convincing hunting-rifle owners and pistol owners that the various proposed weapons bans are aimed at them, and not at the tiny number of people who want the ability to shoot up a whole bar or classroom in under a minute.

The NRA has also fought hard against any kind of gun safety requirements.

Bill from last year to ban/restrict assault rifles:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/25/text

The gun safety bill Biden recently signed:

Doesn't ban any weapons. Puts restrictions on who can get weapons - people convicted of most types of domestic partner violence will not be allowed to buy guns. It makes it harder for people under 21 to buy guns. It closes some loopholes about selling guns, so sellers will need to be registered and licensed. Sets up new funding for gun crisis intervention.

Doesn't do anything to restrict hunting, other than possibly adding to the bureaucracy for people under 21 getting new guns.

Most people in urban areas are oblivious to hunting as a Real Thing that People Actually Do For Good Reasons, rather than a kind of cruel sporting event. They are vaguely aware that hunting rifles are not assault rifles, are not semi-automatics, but only as an abstract concept. Might or might not be able to tell a hunting rifle apart from a semi-automatic if they saw them. (I am not sure I could; I am very much not a gun person.) (I have shot one gun, once in my life. It was loud and hurt my hand and I had no interest in doing it again.)

I don't know how much I think we need to ban or restrict certain weapons. I am absolutely certain we need to keep certain weapons out of the hands of certain people, because the current system of "I guess 10-year-olds should all get training on what to do if some teacher's ex-boyfriend decides to shoot up the school" is ridiculous.

Given how hard it is to identify the "certain people" who should damn well NOT have access to automatic weapons, I'm okay with "it gets harder for anyone to get them," because I don't see how heavy assault rifles are a "but I neeeeed it this weekend!" kind of thing. (Not sure I see that hunting rifles are a "need it now" kind of thing, either; seems like those are a hefty enough purchase that the buyer should be doing some planning in advance. So filing for it like you would for car registration - another expensive piece of tech that kills people if you use it wrong - shouldn't be too big a burden.)

The idiots who include hunting rifles in their talk about banning guns - I won't say there aren't any; all sorts of politics gets plenty of idiots - have no idea how those guns actually get used. And the people writing actual policies and trying to get the laws changed are not those idiots.

The "ban guns" movement has two main parts:

Remove general access to guns that can kill a dozen people in under a minute, and

Remove gun access from specific people who have a history of getting angry and violent, especially those who have a history of shooting other people when they're angry and violent.

Side note: Some of us want that second point to include cops. That faction is getting nowhere.

None of it is trying to remove access to hunting rifles or reduce the amount of hunting in places that need it. (Basically, all of the South; I am near San Francisco and nobody anywhere near me "needs" to hunt; I don't care what they do with hunting rights in the greater SF Bay Area).

The focus is on preventing gun violence, not preventing gun use. And that means restricting access to guns that have no purpose other than anti-human violence, and restricting access to all guns from people who are likely to use them as weapons instead of tools.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Herb Block Foundation]

* * * * *

Americans want gun control.  :: May 1, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

MAY 1, 2023

         Americans mourn for the victims of the weekend gun violence in Texas and the Texans forced to live in a society that glorifies guns above public safety. The details of two shootings over the weekend are horrifying. In the first, neighbors asked a man shooting an assault rifle in his front yard at 11:00 PM to stop because he was waking sleeping infants in the neighbors’ home. The man with the assault rifle then executed five of the neighbors in their home—including an eight-year-old boy. The gunman remains at large. Governor Abbott said nothing for 24 hours (other than releasing a photo of his golden retriever). When he finally commented, he tried to diminish the horror of the executions by describing the victims as “illegal immigrants.” See Business Insider, Gov. Abbott Calls Texas Mass Shooting Victims 'Illegal Immigrants'.

         In a second killing, a man on a date was scammed out of $40 by someone pretending to be a parking valet. When the man learned he had been scammed, he shot and killed the scammer, then returned to the restaurant to finish his dinner with his date. He has been arrested.

         When everyone is armed, the temptation to solve every disagreement by resorting to arms is overwhelming. The killings are sickening, and the lawless situation is dispiriting. But . . . there is reason to hope. All Americans are tired of the senseless killings that are the inevitable result of an armed populace. Fox News conducted a poll that confirms that a majority of Americans—including Republicans—now favor enhanced regulations of firearms. See Mom’s Demand Action, New Fox News Polling Confirms Popularity of Gun Safety Laws Among Democrats, Republicans, and Gun Owners.

         Moms Demand Action summarizes the key points of the Fox polls as follows:

87% of Americans support requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers, including 83% support from gun-owning households.

81% of Americans support improving enforcement of existing gun laws.

81% of Americans support raising the legal age to buy a gun to 21, including 76% of gun-owning households.

80% of Americans support allowing police to take guns from those considered a danger to themselves or others, also known as Red Flag laws, including 76% of gun-owning households.

61% of Americans support banning assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons, including 50% support from gun-owning households.

         But Republican legislatures are not able to restrain themselves. They are captives of the NRA and the minority of Americans who value guns above all else. The Fox poll suggests that Republicans are vulnerable on a core issue going into 2024. They have picked the wrong side on guns and reproductive liberty. And the economy.

         The fact that Republicans seem hell-bent on creating the worst platform possible for 2024 does nothing to reduce the sting and sorrow of the latest mass shootings. But there is a path forward for Democrats as Americans come to understand the dark future that Republicans are plotting.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[beardedmrbean]

The Liberal government has withdrawn a series of controversial amendments to pending firearms legislation, Bill C-21, that some firearms owners say would have unfairly targeted hunters and farmers.

Faced with fierce opposition from Conservative, NDP and Bloc MPs and firearms rights groups, Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed said Friday the government is withdrawing a long list of guns that would have been classified as "prohibited" as part of a push to ban "assault-style" weapons.

The amendments, which were quietly tabled by a Liberal backbench MP in November, would have banned these weapons under the Criminal Code, rather than through regulation. That change would have made the prohibition much more difficult for future governments to reverse.

The government is scrapping clauses that effectively would have banned any rifle or shotgun that could accept a magazine with more than five rounds — whether it actually has such a magazine or not.

The government also intended to ban long guns that generate more than 10,000 joules of energy, or any gun with a muzzle wider than 20 millimetres — two rules that would have rendered many firearms illegal.

These amendments would have had the effect of banning a number of long guns in wide use by hunters.

C-21, as originally drafted, was designed to ban handguns. The amendments expanded its scope.

Because the amendments strayed so dramatically from how the bill was initially written, opposition parties questioned whether the changes were even admissible under parliamentary rules. Those concerns are moot now that the government has backed down.

The government will still push ahead with C-21, which enacts a handgun sales ban, cracks down on gun smuggling and automatically revokes firearms licences held by domestic abusers.

While backtracking on some of the more contentious elements, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said Friday the government would try to revive some parts of the now-defunct amendments package.

Among other changes, the withdrawn amendments would have defined "assault-style firearm" — a term often used by the government that has no definition in law.

In an interview with CBC's Power & Politics, Mendicino said the government will pursue some sort of ban on firearms "designed for the battlefield that have no place in our communities."

What's needed in this minority Parliament, Mendicino said, is support from either the NDP or Bloc — parties that withheld support in the face of backlash from rural dwellers and some Indigenous peoples.

Mendicino conceded the government bungled the process.

"We've got to accept responsibility from where we're at. The step we've taken today is about resetting the narrative," he said, promising the Liberal government still intends to ban firearms used in mass casualty events, like the semi-automatic weapon used in the Quebec City mosque massacre.

Mendicino had defended the amendments before Friday, saying the changes were necessary to reduce gun violence in Canada.

Critics said a ban on popular hunting rifles would do little to make Canadians safer when many crime guns are handguns illegally smuggled over the U.S. border.

Mendicino said the proposed amendments prompted "considerable discussion about the best way to move forward" and "legitimate concerns" were raised by critics "about the need for more consultation and debate."

"We hear those concerns loud and clear, regret the confusion that this process has caused and are committed to a thoughtful and respectful conversation that is based on facts, not fear," he said.

Mendicino said the government didn't draft the amendments to punish rural Canadians, hunters or Indigenous people who rely on these firearms.

"As we've said time and again, the government's intent is to focus on AR-15s and other assault-style weapons. Hunting isn't just a proud Canadian tradition, it's a way of life for communities across this country. Bill C-21 isn't about targeting hunters. It's about certain guns that are too dangerous in other contexts," he said.

PolySeSouvient, a gun control group, said it was "shocked" by the government's decision.

Some guns used for hunting may still fall under firearms ban, Liberal MP says

How Bill C-21 turned from banning handguns to hunting guns

"It is clear that the misinformation propagated by Conservative MPs and the gun lobby has won," said Nathalie Provost, a spokesperson for the group.

Provost said she wants the Liberal government to work with the NDP and Bloc Québécois to table legislation to deliver on its promise to ban assault weapons.

The Liberal government has already banned what it calls "assault-style" firearms through an order-in-council — a directive from cabinet enacted in May 2020 after the Portapique massacre in Nova Scotia.

The intent of the now-withdrawn Bill C-21 amendments was to codify that assault ban in law (an order-in-council can easily be revoked by another government) and add many more makes and models to the list of illegal firearms.

Government House Leader Mark Holland said the government "needs more time" to consult with the firearms community before reviving some of the amendments that were scrapped — including a section that would have banned "ghost guns," which can be bought online and assembled at home.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, a firearms lobby group, called the Liberal reversal "a small win in a bigger battle."

"It's imperative we crush #C21 in its entirety. The Liberals are retreating, now is the perfect time to push forward and #ScrapC21 altogether," Tracey Wilson said. "Good work. Now, let's refocus and scrap it all."

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Friday he "forced Trudeau into a temporary and humiliating climb down."

"He desperately wanted to ban hunting rifles — it was a sucker punch to our lawful and licensed firearms owners," Poilievre said of the amendments. "He's doing this because he got caught. We will not let up. Conservatives will never allow Justin Trudeau to ban hunting rifles."

Poilievre said he described the Liberal backtracking as "temporary," adding he expects Trudeau will be back with another plan to target rural Canadians, Indigenous peoples and sport shooters who used these firearms.

"God forbid if he ever got a majority — he'd ram it through," Poilievre said.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he supports both a national handgun ban and a move to restrict "assault-style" weapons, but he described the government's management of the file as a "failure."

"It is clear that the Liberal government did not do the necessary work and they mismanaged the entire issue. That is clear," Singh told reporters, adding the government bungled Indigenous consultation on the issue.

"They endangered the work we need to do to protect our communities."

[merunair]

Okay I'm mad about this now so I'm just going to spit this out into the ether so I don't need to seethe about it for the rest of the day:

People are using the exact same arguments for the use of generative AI that people use against firearm regulation/bans.

"It's not the technology, it's the people using it!"

"What if we use it ethically and don't hurt anyone?"

"The government shouldn't be allowed to regulate/ban it because it's an infringement of freedom."

And none of this would upset me as much as it does if it wasn't coming from a lot of people who either provably or more than likely argue FOR firearm regulation/bans without actually fucking seeing the hypocrisy.

Also as an aside, the arguments surrounding both also involve people using the wrong terms for things. All rifles are made for assault, they are all supposed to kill things, ergo there is no such thing as a specific 'assault rifle' and the semantics here are important because most of law is arguing semantics. AR is the company name: Armalite Rifle. The most common guns used in mass shootings are semi-automatic rifles, or (much rarely) automatic rifles. Automatic rifles are illegal for civilian usage, semi-automatics are largely legal with restrictions varying between states. If you were to ban 'assault weapons' you'd be simultaneously banning all weapons and no weapons at the same time. It's like saying 'fixing tool', the adjective is implicit to the noun.

In a similar vein, 'Artificial Intelligence' is a misnomer because there's no intelligence involved on any level.

[rhyslucia]

Copied from a user on reddit:

Fifteen thousand five hundred forty-three.

Here it comes yet again: "No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Happens Regularly"

Are we not tired of this? I sure as fuck am.

"The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face."

We live now in a country in which our children are randomly put to death in public, so that our congressmen can pose with weapons of war, by Right Wing Terrorists. We live in a country where the amount of stickers in the back of our lifted trucks equates to how many rounds of AR ammunition are stockpiled in our closet.

We live now in a country where we ban books, where we ban drag shows, where we ban doctors from helping kids in crisis, where we ban women from making choices with their bodies. We ban people from voting because some don’t like how they might vote, we ban representatives from state legislators for how they have voted, we ban immigrants, we ban some stem cells, and we ban transgender athletes, we even ban water bottles on planes.

BUT WE DO NOT BAN ASSAULT RIFLES (or assault-like or lite rifles or especially Semi automatic ones as some ammosexuals like to point out) DO WE?

Our children are randomly put to DEATH in public. Our Teachers, our friends. Our Family. Some of them just want to go and enjoy an afternoon at a mall together. Never to return. To protect somebody's right to randomly put another innocent person to death, once a month, once a week, once a day, once AN HOUR.

Well since my last update, a 14-year-old was shot in the head. What did this child do? She was playing hide and seek.

When it becomes unmistakably obvious with each death, a little piece of us dies inside, and within 10 years, or 1 year, or 1 month. The pain of that is too large to process, so we simply pretend that it doesn’t hurt anymore. We simply pretend that it doesn't hurt to think of the horror and the terror of those children and those adults in their final moments. We simply stop dealing with it. Or fighting back against it. Or recognizing that the gore and brains on the sidewalks outside the malls of this country and our streets might as well be our own.

And it turns out the good guys with guns can’t stop it. And the responsible gun owners can’t stop it, and the politicians won’t stop it and insist that thoughts and prayers are working and if you disagree with them you are one of those who doesn’t believe in an almighty god who is absolutely in control of our lives?

That translates insanely as the solution to all of these nightmares. God and we want the Fifteen thousand five hundred forty-three people shot to death in this country already this year? Did God want them dead?

I say bullshit.

Now we have news conferences, and without emotion, it’s read off the number put to death this TIME, and the number transported to the hospital and how badly they feel. Do you realize they now treat the public execution of more people, as if it was…BAD WEATHER?

Gun massacres are not bad weather.

So we ban licenses to carry handguns in Texas, give the ability for open carry all over the United States, and Ban mental health care by cutting the budgets. Ban abortion because we are pro-life, and ban books because the children are too precious to be indoctrinated, and ban drag shows because we must protect kids from grooming and we must make sure those kids are happy and fit so SOMEBODY CAN GET A WEAPON OF WAR AND EVERY OTHER DAY PUT GROUPS OF OUR CHILDREN TO DEATH.

But at least those kids were not taught something as terrible as CRT.

80 percent believe in banning assault weapons. 80 PERCENT. 81 percent believe in raising the age to buy guns or at least keeping the age at 21. 81 percent believe in enforcing existing gun laws, and 87 percent want background checks for all gun purchases and these numbers are from 2 WEEKS AGO in a poll done by FOX NEWS.

And yet non of this can pass our elected officials? BULLSHIT.

It is time for a change. Spread how you feel far and wide. Copy this, put in your story (how many of us now have been personally affected or know someone at this point), and let your representatives and the whole goddamn Country know, the whole damn planet!

NO MORE!

So now to boost the signal on some actual honest to god things that could be done about this never-ending nightmare?

For starters, the next generation is tired of this shit and is planning a sit-in at the capital on June 6th. Here is a relevant link:

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1655293349245452289

And also this goes without saying this group has some amazing ideas:

https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/

This website is dedicated to having the media stop reporting the perpetrator's names to prevent glorifying mass murderers

https://nonotoriety.com

The Gun Violence Archive is also a really useful source on shootings. Their statistics are highly accurate and they have an up-to-date list of all that occurred in the last 72 hours

https://gunviolencearchive.org

@Emilyinyourphone on Instagram shares scripts and other resources for calling your local representative, it even has a campaign right now for mothers to get their loved ones to call instead of flowers for Mother’s Day.

Copy this post or take their info but please. Take a minute and boost the signal.

Some stats to back up this rant because Credible Hulk always comes angry and with sources.

Guns deaths by state

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-deaths-per-capita-by-state

and just because it’s becoming increasingly relevant by the day

Texas Mass Shootings Up 62.5 Percent Since Permitless Carry Bill

https://www.reformaustin.org/public-safety/texas-mass-shootings-up-62-5-percent-since-permitless-carry-bill/

This WaPo article on the damage that an AR-15 does to a body is sobering but important reading.

THE BLAST EFFECT | This is how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body/

And finally, Check out

https://www.everytown.org/

They’re pushing to end gun violence. The more people who make their voices heard the bigger difference we can make.

[detroitammoco]

Illinois sheriffs say they will not enforce law requiring gun owners to register ‘assault weapons.

Sheriffs from Winnebago, Ogle, Stephenson, Lee, DeKalb, Boone and other counties across the state announced Wednesday that they will not enforce Illinois’ recently passed law that requires current owners of “assault weapons” to register with the state.

The Protect Illinois Communities Act bans the future sale of about 100 different semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, and rifles because they are now considered assault weapons. Long-gun magazines with more than 10 rounds and handgun magazines with more than 15 rounds are also now illegal in Illinois.

[efangamez]

So with the need to regulate guns both in the public and with police, I wanted to do a lil summary of what type of mechanisms weapons shoot with so that, when talking with others, you'll know what types of guns exist AND give a better reason for banning of assault style weapons.

Also, this will not be a perfect article, as I am not an educator not getting paid to write this. I'm simply giving my best shot to explain these differences so hyper pro-gun people won't call you out for terminology misuse.

TW // Gun talk, Harm

1. Muzzle Loader / Black Powder

These guns use the typical civil war / revolutionary war type of loading where people have to use raw gunpowder as the propellant. This type of weapon is solely used for hunting and recreation as of now because of its pitiful fire rate, which is about 3 shots in one minute (if you're, like, a marksman), but the bullet size is TREMENDOUS, leaving holes the size of fists in bodies. It does a lot of damage, but is slow, and lots of times can be inaccurate and fail often.

2. Bolt Action

Bolt action weapons cycle a bullet using a sort of lever on the side. It is MUCH faster than the previous type of gun, BUT it is painfully slow in today's world. These weapons typically only have at MAX 15 bullets per magazine, with most being around the 7-10 range. The rounds shot here are typically even more deadly than the assault style semi-autos, but they shoot much slower (yes you can have like .22 caliber bolt actions but those are usually only used for varmint hunting and/or youth firearms users)

3. Pump-Action / Break Action

These weapons are typically used in shotguns, but can be used for rifles as well. Pump action guns, well, pump bullets into the chamber for firing. It's the typical "chik-chik" gun loading that we all use for guns today, with someone pulling the pump backwards and then forwards. Now, pump action CAN be as quick as semi-auto with certain techniques, but is usually slower. Break Action is simple: it's when you snap the gun open and you can load or unload the weapon. Typically, this is used for side by side shotguns, like the typical double barrelled shotgun, or an over-under style where it's one barrel on the top and one barrel under. These are also mostly used for hunting and recreation, but they are also used for home defense because of their inexpensiveness and their simple make. They do a ton of damage, typically, but have low ammunition capacity.

4. Semi-Automatic / Automatic

So, here's where the fun begins. Semi-auto guns are complicated, and are the quickest-firing legal weapons to own without special licenses. These weapons work as simple as pressing the trigger and a bullet comes out, over and over and over until you press the trigger and the clip/magazine is empty. Now, semi-autos have the highest capacity for ammunition, MUCH higher than ANY of the ones listed previously. You can buy clips for handguns that allow for 30 bullets abled to be fired one after the other, and rifles that allow for 60+ bullets. Typically, handguns run about 7-12 bullets per clip, and rifles are 30. Automatic guns have the same capacity, but can simply be fired by holding down the trigger and spraying bullets everywhere. As said before, unless a bump stock is involved (which allows artificial automatic firing of semi auto guns), automatic weapons are NEVER used in mass shootings (in recent years) due to a ban on them for public use (thank fucking god). Semi-auto and auto weapons are used, and have been used, mainly to kill humans. Point blank. Their ammunition, for the most part, is designed for killing humans only, like the .223 AR-15 style guns use. These weapons, when given the SAME magazine size and the MILITARY, leads to these deadly, horrific shootings.

Last Point: What do I do with this info?

It's simple. Ban assault-style weapons, or have their ammunition capacity limited to 5 or less bullets. Also, more gun safety courses to teach the dangers of guns, how to defend against them (like knowing to attack the shooter when they are reloading) and so much more.

Gun ownership, especially in these tyrannical times, are a touchy subject, but one thing is certain: ammunition capacities for semi-auto weapons we have now kills kids. Nothing else.

[mariacallous]

For nearly thirty years, whenever gun-rights activists have reached for data to defend their arguments, they’ve cited the work of the economist John R. Lott, Jr., who has argued that guns make Americans safer and that restrictions put them at risk. “He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true,” Mike Spies details in a riveting and rigorously researched story, published in partnership with The Trace. “But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.” That influence has extended far beyond supplying talking points to the likes of Senator Ted Cruz or the pro-gun musician Ted Nugent: last year, when a federal-court judge overturned California’s ban on semi-automatic AR-style rifles, he referred specifically to sworn testimony offered by Lott, who said that there was no credible evidence that such bans “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.” Through meticulous reporting, Spies examines the dangerous flaws in Lott’s research and reveals just how intertwined his arguments have become with those of the pro-gun lobby.

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.

In 1957, the small-arms manufacturer Armalite created the AR-15—short for Armalite Rifle—at the invitation of the U.S. Army, which was seeking an effective lightweight combat weapon. When the Department of Defense reviewed a version of the rifle in 1962, during the early stages of the Vietnam War, its report stated that the gun’s “lethality” and “reliability” were “particularly impressive.” From forty-nine feet away, it noted, an Army Ranger fired a round into a Vietcong soldier’s head and “took it completely off.”

In recent years, gun companies have aggressively marketed semi-automatic AR-style rifles to civilians. Manufacturers now produce as many as two and a half million such firearms per year, and they routinely show up in the country’s deadliest and most horrifying acts of mass violence, such as the rampages that occurred, less than two weeks apart, in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in May.

Last year, a federal court addressed the question of whether California could ban such guns. The state was one of eight, along with the District of Columbia, that had a prohibition in place. Multiple plaintiffs, including a handful of gun-rights groups, argued that the California statute was useless, relying on the statistical expertise of an economist named John R. Lott, Jr. Lott, who is sixty-four, with wispy gray hair, authoritatively delivers blizzards of empirical conclusions in an unthreatening Midwestern monotone. In a sworn statement to the court, Lott summarized his research on assault-weapon bans, writing that there is “no credible evidence” that such laws “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.”

After a brief bench trial, the judge reached his decision in June, 2021. He overturned California’s ban, and quoted Lott’s assessment verbatim. Afterward, Lott published an op-ed in The Hill. The ruling “primarily concentrated on public safety,” he wrote, and “the judge relied on my research.”

For almost thirty years, Lott, who has a doctorate in economics from U.C.L.A., has provided the empirical backbone for the gun-rights movement. Virtually every statistical argument against regulation—made by lobbyists, Republican lawmakers, and National Rifle Association members alike—is based on his research, which reaches two conclusions: guns make Americans safer, and gun restrictions place them in danger. He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true. But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.

Lott’s first and most famous book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, one of the country’s most prestigious academic publishers. The book has been republished multiple times, and offers one seemingly irrefutable statistic after another. It specifies that when states relaxed laws restricting the concealed carrying of handguns, counties saw a roughly eight-per-cent drop in murders, a five-per-cent reduction in rapes, and a seven-per-cent decrease in aggravated assaults. The text is the basis for arguments blaming “gun-free zones” for mass shootings, and the notion, popularized by the N.R.A., that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. “Overall,” Lott writes, “my conclusion is that criminals as a group tend to behave rationally—when crime becomes more difficult, less crime is committed.”

Eight books have followed “More Guns, Less Crime,” including “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” and “Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, the Media, and Botched ‘Studies’ Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control.” Lott has also produced a steady stream of scholarly articles published in academic periodicals, along with op-eds that appear in regional newspapers and the Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has had appointments at Ivy League schools, and his work is touted by leading Republican politicians, including Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. “What makes him so invaluable,” Cruz has written of Lott, “is his ability to go beyond philosophical arguments and to engage opponents of gun ownership on the facts.”

Lott’s findings and methods have generated scathing criticism from prominent academics, who have questioned his veracity and exposed flaws in his work. But the critiques have not diminished his stature. Instead, they have fed the conspiracy-oriented mentality of the gun-rights movement. In the eyes of its adherents, and in the messaging of the gun lobby and trade groups, attempts to discredit Lott are really attempts to suppress the truth.

In 2013, Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit to support his research. He takes pains to stress his and the organization’s independence. In his statement in the California case, Lott wrote that the C.P.R.C. “does not accept donations from gun ammunition makers or organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) or any other organizations involved in the gun control debate on either side of the issue.” The same language also appears in his books, on his Web site, and in other legal filings.

Yet Lott is a mainstay at the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, where he typically conducts multiple seminars on his research and hosts a table on the tradeshow floor. In 2015, during the group’s convention in Nashville, Tennessee, he held one of the C.P.R.C.’s first fund-raisers at a hotel around the corner. One of the speakers, a conservative celebrity author and radio host named Dana Loesch, would soon be a face of the N.R.A., alongside its leader, Wayne LaPierre. At the C.P.R.C. fund-raiser, she said, of Lott, “We don’t have anybody else on our side that does what he does.”

Lott did not grow up in a family with a fondness for guns. “I know my grandparents and stuff would be shocked to see how my research has changed my views over time,” he said in a deposition taken during the California case. Lott was born in Detroit, and his family later moved to Florida, where he attended a Catholic high school. His mother and father were churchgoers, and he was close to his maternal grandparents, who were Democrats. Lott now owns two shotguns, a semi-automatic rifle, and two semi-automatic handguns—a Smith & Wesson M&P .40-calibre, and a Ruger 9-millimetre. He has a concealed-handgun permit because, he has said, “I didn’t think that it was proper for me to go and be telling people about these benefits if I didn’t actually kind of walk the walk myself on it.”

Lott received his bachelor’s degree in economics from U.C.L.A. in 1980, and then spent another four years at the school earning his master’s and Ph.D. in the same subject. According to a former classmate, Jon Karpoff, Lott did not stand out in “unusual or unique ways” at U.C.L.A.

Starting in 1988, Lott served for eighteen months as the chief economist on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which helped inform his views on firearms restrictions. During his deposition, he claimed that the “very people that supply illegal drugs are the same ones that sell illegal guns,” and if the U.S. can’t stop the flow of drugs, then prohibiting firearms would be useless, too. When asked if he had an empirical basis for his assessment, he said that, at the commission, he read through “hundreds of cases,” and was “convinced” that “these guys not only have weapons but they’re entrepreneurs.”

“Would you present yourself as an expert in criminology?” Lott was asked at one point.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Lott—who has never been granted tenure at a university—returned to U.C.L.A. for another temporary teaching appointment before being hired, in 1991, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. He kept in touch with Karpoff, who was at the University of Washington, and in 1993 the two co-authored a paper on corporate fraud. “He really was one of the best economists that I knew,” Karpoff said. “He was very thorough, creative in how to test—genuinely test—rather than just seek to confirm ideas.”

Lott says that he was teaching a class on white-collar crime at Wharton when his students asked him if he might turn his attention to gun policy. He agreed, and began to “read through a number of papers,” Lott said in his deposition. “And I would have to say I was pretty shocked how poorly done the existing research was.”

In 1994, Lott arrived at the University of Chicago, where he eventually became a fellow at the law school. The country was in the early stages of a significant shift. Historically, local and state authorities decided whether to issue permits to people who wanted to carry concealed handguns. But between 1987 and 1991, eight states had enacted “shall-issue” laws that allowed applicants who could legally purchase a firearm to automatically receive a concealed-carry license, as long as they paid a fee and completed a rudimentary training course. Lott and a doctoral student named David Mustard, who is now an economics professor at the University of Georgia, collected and analyzed fifteen years of data from some three thousand counties. In January, 1997, they published their findings in the Journal of Legal Studies, concluding that the new laws had caused violent crime to drop precipitously in the states that adopted them. The study provided the empirical support for the “shall-issue” statute—and justified its continued expansion to other states.

The study was extensively covered in the media, and featured in a congressional hearing on guns. Within a year, multiple statehouses held debates on concealed-carry permits, with Lott serving as the lead witness in four of them. But scientists soon challenged his conclusions. One paper, published in the American Journal of Public Health, warned that “the flaws” in Lott’s article were “so substantial, and the findings so at odds with criminological theory and research, that any conclusions about the effects of “shall-issue” laws based on this study are dubious at best.” David Hemenway, ​​an economist and a professor of health policy at Harvard University, said that Lott’s paper “created a cottage industry of scholars analyzing the same data sources and largely refuting” its results.

The next year, Lott published “More Guns, Less Crime.” The Wall Street Journal called the book “compelling,” and said it was filled “with enough hard evidence that even politicians may have to stop and pay attention.”

In the beginning of 1999, Otis Dudley Duncan, who is regarded as one of history’s most important quantitative sociologists, wrote the first of a number of letters to Lott. He was especially skeptical of a sentence in Lott’s book that stated, “If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” Lott had not specified which surveys, but, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published around the time of the book, he attributed the figure to polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates. The number, he wrote, was a percentage of the “at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year.”

Duncan determined that Lott’s assertion was simply wrong. In May, Duncan informed Lott he was writing an article about what he would call the “rogue number,” and later that month sent him a draft. One sentence summarized his assessment: “The ‘98 percent’ is either a figment of Lott’s imagination or an artifact of careless computation or proofreading.”

Tallies of defensive gun use are inherently problematic. They depend on surveys that rely on a respondent’s memory and perception of threat, as well as one’s willingness to tell the truth, all of which can be influenced by politics, world view, and other biases. The Department of Justice attempts to track defensive gun uses through a twice-yearly survey that tries to mitigate some of the issues. For instance, participants only answer questions about self-defense if they first state that they were a victim of a certain crime, such as burglary or larceny. As a result, the government finds that there are around seventy thousand defensive gun uses per year, making them much rarer events.

The government’s figures seemed to undermine Lott’s argument. If Americans were rarely using a firearm to protect themselves from criminal acts, how could more guns equal less crime? And if Lott’s surveys really did present a more accurate picture, why were such incidents so seldom documented? Lott said that “brandishing” addressed both questions. “The media understandably play up graphic gun attacks by outlaws,” he explained in The American Enterprise. “They can’t easily show us the vastly more common cases—numbering in the hundreds of thousands to millions each year—where law-abiding citizens brandish a gun and cause criminals to flee.”

After Lott received a draft of Duncan’s article, he sent him a letter. He now said that the brandishing number was based not on the polling data but “upon survey evidence that I have put together involving a large nationwide telephone survey conducted over a three month period during 1997.”

In the second edition of his book, published in 2000, Lott attributed the brandishing claim to this three-month study. That year, in a piece for The Criminologist, Duncan had laid out his concerns. Lott, who was now in a temporary research position at Yale, responded in the same journal, providing some new specifics and an explanation for the confusion. “The survey that I oversaw interviewed 2,424 people from across the United States,” he said. “I had planned on including a discussion of it in my book, but did not do so because an unfortunate computer crash lost my hard disk right before the final draft of the book had to be turned in.”

In September, 2002, James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University who has a Ph.D. in quantitative sociology, offered to examine the matter. Lott told Lindgren that the calls for the survey were made by University of Chicago undergraduates, who volunteered for the work and used their own phones. Lott did not have phone records, but the students could confirm whether the survey was conducted in the first place. When Lindgren asked for the students’ names, however, Lott said that he did not remember. Later, he explained that he was “horrible at names.” Lindgren told me, “After all these years, no one has come forward to say they worked on the survey.” Two people, however, claim that they were respondents; one of these, David Gross, is a former N.R.A. board member.

Lindgren also harbored grave doubts about the math. Lott’s figures, Lindgren noted in a report, implied that twenty-five or twenty-six survey respondents had reported defensive gun uses. Lott had said that of the two per cent of respondents who had fired their weapons, three-quarters dispatched warning shots, while only a quarter attempted to hit another person. “If these figures were accurate,” Lindgren explained, “only 1/2 of a person (2% of 25 people) reported firing a gun—and that 1/2 of a person breaks down further into 3/8 of a person firing warning shots and 1/8 of a person firing at someone.” Lott said that he had “always acknowledged” that the samples were small.

In September, 2001, Lott became a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C, where he worked on a new book, titled “The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong.” When it came out, in 2003, it included details of a follow-up survey on defensive gun use, with results that more or less aligned with his earlier conclusions. This time around, the numbers indicated that “brandishing a gun stops crimes 95 percent of the time.”

To prove that the survey was real, Lott made his data publicly available. But the figures showed that there were only a thousand and fifteen respondents, and reported thirteen incidents of self-defense gun use, only one of which involved firing a weapon. David Hemenway, the Harvard economist, wrote at the time that the survey was “not nearly large enough to provide precise estimates of the percentage of self-defense gun users who merely brandish a firearm.” For another thing, the thirteen defensive episodes were confined to just seven people; four of these said that they used their firearm twice, and a fifth person claimed to have used it three times. In his own surveys on defensive gun use, Hemenway had asked participants to tell the story of what transpired when they used a firearm for self-protection. The respondents often described using their guns in an aggressive manner. “It turned out they were actually using their guns illegally,” Hemenway told me.

Lott’s emphasis on brandishing has not diminished. In a recent interview, he said, “People have the perception” that guns are not used in self-defense. Lott suggested that the media ignore such stories. “So you’re missing almost all the cases that are out there.”

On February 1, 2003, the day “The Bias Against Guns” was published, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics.” A staffer at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, had become suspicious of Mary Rosh, a woman who regularly showed up on Web sites to defend Lott from his critics. In one post, she described herself as one of his former Ph.D. students at Wharton, and said he was “the best professor that I ever had.” She added, “There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught.” Rosh even explained why it made sense for her to carry a gun. “If a woman is being attacked by a 200 pound man, is she just supposed to wait until the police arrive?” she asked. “I am 114 lbs. and 5’6”. What should I do in that situation?”

The Cato staffer tracked Rosh’s I.P. address to Lott, who admitted that he was behind it. “I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” he told the Post.

In the California deposition, Lott said the purpose of the pseudonym was to “keep people from being obnoxious and threatening.” Lott also contended that he was not the sole author of Rosh’s comments. One relative had “begged” him to “protect them from the firestorm that was occurring at the time.”

The episode damaged Lott’s reputation, which was further harmed in 2005, when the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released a book-length report called “Firearms and Violence.” One chapter assessed Lott’s finding that relaxing concealed-carry laws had caused a decrease in crime. The N.R.C. had tried to replicate Lott’s model, concluding that “it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link” between the two events.

By that point, Lott’s research had been influencing legislation for nearly a decade; a majority of states now had “shall-issue” laws, a number that would grow to nearly forty by the following year.

For half a decade, Lott was confined to the margins. He briefly held a teaching position at Binghamton University, and then spent two years as a researcher at the University of Maryland, his last stint at an academic institution. He wrote for the Washington Times and Fox News’ Web site.

In 2012, a national tragedy presented a new opportunity. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed watchman in a Florida neighborhood, stalked and then fatally shot an unarmed Black teen-ager named Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was not arrested for weeks, a delay that drew attention to the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows citizens who fear for their lives to use deadly force anywhere they have a right to be. (In 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder.)

The following year, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on Stand Your Ground laws. The model statute, created by an N.R.A. lobbyist, was less than a decade old, and until Martin’s death few Americans were familiar with it. Lott was called to serve as an expert witness. “These laws help allow individuals to defend themselves,” Lott told the lawmakers. “This is particularly important in high-crime areas.” He went on, “In the third edition of my book ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ I provided the first published peer-reviewed study examining Stand Your Ground laws using national data. I found that they lowered murder rates by about nine per cent and that overall violent crime rates also declined.”

Lott’s prepared testimony was not subjected to deep scrutiny. It contained footnotes, and the one concerning Lott’s study simply cited the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime,” without any page numbers. But the book does not mention Stand Your Ground.

When I questioned Lott about the discrepancy, he referred me to a section of his book that deals with Castle Doctrine laws, which, he said, “are a type of Stand Your Ground law.” Lott told me that the section accounts “for the full spectrum of Stand Your Ground Laws,” even though “those words are not used in the book.” But the Castle Doctrine is different from Stand Your Ground. Lott correctly defined the former in his book. “This is the first study to look at the Castle Doctrine,” the text reads, “which eliminates the requirement that people in their own home have to retreat as far as possible before defending themselves.” Stand Your Ground, on the other hand, removed the duty to retreat in public.

The Castle study’s sample period ends in 2005, the year Florida enacted the N.R.A.’s model Stand Your Ground statute. The law largely spread to states across the country from there. Those include Ohio, where in 2021 Mike DeWine, the state’s Republican governor, initially indicated that he would veto the bill, urging the legislature to instead take up a package of gun-safety reforms. He then abruptly reversed course, with his press secretary stating that the decision relied on one of Lott’s op-eds, which argued that such laws reduced murders. This year, a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Network Open found that Stand Your Ground was associated with up to an eleven-per-cent increase in monthly gun-homicide rates.

Almost a year after Trayvon Martin was killed, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, galvanized gun-control advocates. For the first time since the early nineties, tighter federal-gun regulations, including universal background checks, were in play.

The Sandy Hook-inspired proposals failed to get through Congress, but they served as an effective fund-raising tool. Lott launched his nonprofit, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which received its tax-exempt status in August, 2013. The C.P.R.C. has studied gun-free zones and rates of mass shootings across the world, and it publishes an annual report—extensively covered by conservative media—on the number of concealed-handgun-permit holders in America. According to Lott’s research, the number now exceeds twenty-one million.

The C.P.R.C. never takes in more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and Lott has always drawn a salary of less than a hundred thousand dollars. He frequently emphasizes that his research is untainted by the gun industry or by special-interest money, and points to the C.P.R.C.’s policy of refusing donations from all manufacturers or groups that have a stake in the gun-control debate.

But, during Lott’s deposition, when asked if the C.P.R.C. receives contributions from individuals who may be affiliated with the gun industry, he admitted, “I’m sure we probably get some donations from people that are in those things. But I don’t go and screen them.” He went on, “I draw the line in terms of banning an individual with their own money.”

Lott said that the C.P.R.C.’s integrity was further guaranteed by the group’s academic advisory board. “I think we’re a relatively unique organization in terms of having people with strong views—or views on different sides of the issue about what’s right or not. The reason why we do that is, like with any good academic-type organization, you need to have critical people who disagree with you to give you comments before you put out research.” He added, “You want to make sure it’s right.”

Lott named several of the C.P.R.C.’s advisers who hold either neutral or supportive views on gun control. One was Scott Masten, a business-economics professor at the University of Michigan, and another was Karpoff, his U.C.L.A. classmate. When I asked Masten about his role at the C.P.R.C., he said, “The sum total of everything I did with respect to the center was agree to be an adviser.” When I asked Karpoff what he did, he said, “Literally nothing.”

On April 10, 2015, Lott held the C.P.R.C.’s fund-raiser at a Hilton Hotel in Nashville, during the N.R.A.’s annual meeting there. In addition to Dana Loesch, who was on her way to becoming one of the N.R.A.’s most recognizable names, several other right-wing celebrities spoke, including the musician and gun activist Ted Nugent, who was both an N.R.A. and C.P.R.C. board member until 2018. Dressed in a camouflage shirt and a cowboy hat, he advocated for the extrajudicial killing of criminals and told the crowd that the C.P.R.C.’s work was just as important as the N.R.A.’s. “John works his ass off,” Nugent said, “and he needs to be paid more.” For the movement to succeed, he declared, Lott’s “almost Mr. Rogers-like delivery” was a necessity. He explained, “the juxtaposition between Ted Nugent the Second Amendment guy and John Lott the Second Amendment guy is dynamic. And we need both.”

As if to underscore the point, Lott delivered a fifteen-minute slide presentation with charts and graphs. Without the C.P.R.C., he said, the public would be exposed only to a “tidal wave” of research that was dishonest, overwhelmingly biased against firearms, and funded by President Barack Obama’s Administration and such insidious billionaire philanthropists as George Soros. Less than two weeks later, Lott pressed the same case on the conspiracy show Infowars, during a period when its founder and host, Alex Jones, was telling his listeners that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged by the government in order to justify new gun regulations. “He didn’t raise the claim while I was on [the] show,” Lott told me, by e-mail. “If he had, I would have corrected him.”

Around this time, Donald Trump was launching his Presidential campaign. He spoke at the N.R.A.’s convention, and, as the election drew closer, Lott began to campaign for Trump in numerous op-eds and radio interviews.

A month after Trump took office, Lott began corresponding with a top official at the Department of Justice named Ryan Newman, who now serves as general counsel to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In an e-mail in February, 2017, Lott wrote, “There were a number of ideas that I hope can be dealt with by the D.O.J.” He brought up the D.O.J.’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which, he said, “gun control advocates use” to “claim that guns are rarely used for self defense.” He asserted that “it needs to be fixed by changing a couple survey questions,” such as the poll’s screener about being a crime victim, which, by reducing subjectivity, weeds out potentially millions of unreliable responses.

Eventually, Lott compiled his recommendations into a document titled “A Partial List of John R. Lott, Jr.’s Ideas on Empirical Work That Could Be Done by the Department of Justice.” He circulated the list on multiple occasions to Newman, and, under a slightly altered title, to another D.O.J. official named Gary Barnett. In an e-mail to Barnett, he wrote, “As we discussed, we need new research to advance the Trump agenda and pull indefensible studies done during the Obama administration.”

After Trump took office, one policy that was on the table in Congress was “reciprocity,” which would require states to recognize one another’s concealed-handgun-permit holders, allowing individuals to carry their weapons anywhere in the country. Lott wrote, “Everyone knows the types of claims that will be made during congressional debates about how dangerous permit holders are, so before the various reciprocity bills come up, it is extremely important that [the D.O.J.] do a study on this issue.” He clarified, “It is one thing for myself to do studies on how law-abiding concealed handgun permit holders are. It is something entirely different for the Department of Justice to do it.”

In cities around the country, police chiefs were critical of licensed gun carriers who were driving into metropolitan areas and leaving firearms in their parked cars. Thieves, the police said, were breaking into the vehicles, stealing the guns, and distributing them through the illegal market. Lott wanted this narrative put to rest. “There is one item that I could use your help quickly on [getting] some data before the reciprocity debate that is coming up in September,” he wrote to Newman. “The claim coming out from gun control advocates is that concealed handgun[s] are being stolen from permit holders and then being used in crime.” Lott then appears to ask Newman to do something illegal. “As I suspect you already know, there is a database for this information,” he said, “but unfortunately only law enforcement are allowed access to it.” Lott was referring to the National Criminal Information Center, which is strictly off limits to the public; a violation of the policy can be prosecuted as a federal crime. A week later, he followed up with Newman: “Just so you know, I believe that I was able to get a hold of the data that I had asked about.”

When I asked Lott about these e-mails, he wrote, “I have no memory of anyone ever mentioning anything to me about the data not being accessible to the public.” He went on, “In any case, while I was waiting to hear back from Newman, I talked to a Congressman about my interest in getting that data, and he offered to get the data for me. So that is how I got it.”

This summer, John Donohue, an empirical researcher and Stanford law professor who also testified in the California case, published a study in the National Bureau of Economic Research examining “shall-issue” laws in forty-seven U.S. cities over a forty-year period, from 1979 to 2019. The statutes, the study found, were linked to a twenty-nine-per-cent increase in violent gun crime. One of the driving factors: a thirty-five-per-cent jump in firearm theft.

In late 2019, John Dillon, the plaintiffs’ attorney in the California assault-weapons case, asked Lott to join his team as an expert witness. During Lott’s deposition, he said, “I have a rule that I won’t take a case if I’m going to be paid by anybody who is involved in the gun industry or the N.R.A. or somebody else who has a dog in the fight.”

It was a strange answer, given that multiple gun-rights organizations were listed as plaintiffs in the case. When asked if he was aware of their involvement, Lott said, “I have no doubt that that’s true. I have no connection with them, and have had no contact with them about it.” The attorney pressed him further. “Do you know which particular organizations are plaintiffs in this case?” he asked. “I haven’t tried to look that up,” Lott said. “It isn’t relevant to me.”

One of the plaintiffs was the Second Amendment Foundation, a group that focusses on litigation to expand gun rights. The month Lott joined the case, the organization held a conference in Phoenix. Dillon, the plaintiffs’ attorney, was one of the speakers, and he discussed the case on a panel. Another speaker was Lott, who delivered a lecture at the event, and was named Scholar of the Year. He told me, “When the case was in process, I never talked to anyone at the Second Amendment Foundation about it. I didn’t even know that they were involved.”

I asked Lott if he was paid for his work on the California case. He replied, “I was not paid by the plaintiffs.” During his deposition, he had disclosed that he was earning four hundred and fifty dollars an hour to serve as an expert. When I followed up, he wrote, “I was paid by a private individual who doesn’t work in the firearms industry and does not run nor hold a position of any type in any self-defense oriented organization.” He added, “I will not go into further detail out of respect for their privacy.”

In June, 2020, under the direction of the Trump White House, the D.O.J. offered Lott a job, pending a background check. It was an exciting time for him. Lott was moving to Missoula, Montana, after David Strom, a seventy-nine-year-old who had recently died, left him money and a two-bedroom house with a view of the mountains. Strom was a veteran, a police officer, a gun enthusiast, and a lifetime N.R.A. member; according to an obituary, he supported organizations that “defended the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Before his death, records show, Strom had made Lott a beneficiary of his trust, which held the home. It is unclear how Lott and Strom were connected. But Lott once told Karpoff, his former classmate, that he had received the house from a fan. Lott has never publicly acknowledged Strom, but, according to court documents, he sued the trustee for more cash. “There was ten thousand dollars in the trust,” Lott wrote me, “and as soon as the trustee disbursed the cash in accordance with the will, the lawsuit was dropped.”

It can take months to clear a government background check, and, by the time the D.O.J. was finished looking into Lott, the Trump Administration was near its end. Before taking his position as a senior adviser, ethics rules required him to relinquish his role at the C.P.R.C. On October 9, 2020, the organization put out a press release announcing Lott’s replacement, Robert F. Turner, a national-security specialist in his late seventies who was a law professor at the University of Virginia for more than thirty years.

Lott started at the D.O.J. on October 20, 2020. Two days later, one of the most prominent national-security think tanks in the country, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released a report titled “The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States.” Its key finding was not surprising: “White supremacists and other like-minded extremists conducted two-thirds of the terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in 2020.” Turner said that “Dr. Lott was anxious to have me respond” to the study. “It was my understanding,” he told me, that the C.P.R.C. “wanted me to write something challenging or refuting” it. Turner did not know why, and declined to do so. “I did not want my name associated with anything that might imply that I was other than outraged by such monstrous behavior,” he said.

In a matter of weeks, Turner, a cancer survivor who was struggling to write op-eds—one of his core responsibilities as president of the C.P.R.C.—left the organization. Lott does not dispute Turner’s recollection of the report, but said that Turner’s departure was not related to it, and instead pointed to his lack of productivity.

Lott’s three-month stint at the D.O.J. was unremarkable. He compiled data relating to the background-check system, and reviewed F.B.I. reports he found problematic. Lott left the day before Joe Biden was sworn into office.

In June, 2021, after the judge struck down California’s assault-weapon ban, Lott turned his attention to other matters. In the past few years, a flurry of states have passed laws abolishing their concealed-carry permit systems. Known among gun-rights advocates as Constitutional Carry, the new statutes allow anyone who can legally purchase a firearm to carry a concealed handgun in public, with no license required. It is the logical evolution of the “shall-issue” concept, and Lott has embraced it. In December, he co-wrote an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel arguing in favor of the law with Anthony Sabatini, a Republican state representative in Florida who was sponsoring a Constitutional Carry bill there and had the first byline. A month later, Lott co-wrote an op-ed in the Omaha World-Herald with Tom Brewer, a Republican state senator in Nebraska who was sponsoring Constitutional Carry legislation in his state. The column’s language was virtually identical to that of Lott and Sabatini’s op-ed in the Sentinel. In February, the column was published again, in Yellowhammer News, an outlet in Alabama. Lott’s co-writer was Shane Stringer, a Republican representative who was sponsoring the Constitutional Carry bill there. Finally, Lott published the op-ed on his own in March, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, replacing the names of the other states with Georgia, which was considering similar legislation. The bills in Florida and Nebraska stalled, but passed in Alabama and Georgia. Half of all states now have a Constitutional Carry law in place.

Brewer’s office said that it had asked Lott for help with the senator’s bill, and that Lott had suggested he could either co-author or ghostwrite an op-ed. After the office agreed to a shared byline, Lott e-mailed text, which Brewer’s staff accepted without making any changes. Lott, the office said, did not disclose that he was publishing the same language with legislators in other states. None of the other lawmakers who supposedly co-authored those op-eds responded to requests for comment. “What I told any of the newspapers or others such as Brewer’s office was that I wouldn’t submit a similar piece to any other newspapers in that state,” Lott wrote to me. “State newspapers only require exclusivity within their state.”

Recently, in an interview after the Uvalde shooting, Senator Ted Cruz cited Lott’s research to argue that such incidents are rare in the United States relative to the rest of the world. Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, had closely inspected Lott’s data, and discovered that Lott had inflated the world’s figures by including “attacks by terrorist organizations, genocidal militias, armed rebel groups, and paramilitary fighters.” The data even contained a slaughter directed by the President of Nigeria, in which soldiers killed as many as two hundred civilians. These were not comparable acts of violence to Uvalde, Buffalo, or, say, the 2017 music-festival shooting in Las Vegas. Lott disagrees. “We do not exclude incidents of public mass shooting just because we think we know the motivation of the shooter or shooters,” he and a co-author wrote in Econ Journal Watch.

Without Lott, there would be no counter-narrative for those who have come to need one. Gun rights represent a way of life, an identity tied to ideas about individualism that, for many Americans, fill a void. Republicans like Cruz recognize the potency of the issue, and use it to mobilize voters, reinforcing the notion that they are protecting society by arming themselves—a noble calling. During the pandemic, Americans have bought more firearms than ever before, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun homicides have surpassed their previous all-time peak, reached in 1993. In Philadelphia, the number of permits issued rose from seventy-four hundred, in 2020, to fifty-two thousand, in 2021. Last year, there were five hundred and sixty-one murders in the city—the highest number ever recorded there. The violence has been normalized. In October, a fifteen-year-old boy shot to death four adults and a teen-ager in a middle-class neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event hardly registered. ♦

[generallemarc]

"Semi-automatic assault weapons". Something tells me that, once this case is actually sent to the Supreme Court and isn't still tied up in a lower court, this ban won't be long for the world.

[dankusner]

NRA Big D

NRA convention coming to Dallas this week with Trump, Abbott: Here’s what to know

The event is billed as the largest gathering of Second Amendment supporters.

People in the audience wait for the start of the National Rifle Association's Leadership Forum at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on Friday, May 4, 2018, in Dallas.

The conference returns to Dallas this week and is expected to draw more than 70,000 attendees

Tens of thousands of gun rights supporters will head to Dallas this week for the National Rifle Association’s annual conference, which will feature appearances by former President Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Here’s what to know about the conference:

Largest Second Amendment gathering

Billed as the country’s largest gathering of Second Amendment supporters, the event runs Friday through Sunday at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas.

This year marks the organization’s 153rd annual meeting.

Seminars will cover tips for concealed carry, school security and how to interact with law enforcement.

Roughly 650 vendors with guns and gear will cover 14 acres of exhibit space.

More than 70,000 people are expected to attend.

“This is the place to be for anyone who is an NRA member or a Second Amendment supporter,” NRA spokesperson Nick Perrine said.

Dallas last hosted the event in 2018, and Houston hosted in 2022.

Trump to address members

Trump, who will give the keynote address Saturday afternoon, has been a frequent fixture on the NRA stage since his first address to the organization in 2015.

Trump has repeatedly promised to protect gun owners’ rights, even as the U.S. grapples with an epidemic of gun violence.

In February, the former president told NRA members gathered for the Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Penn., that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he returns to the White House.

Trump also bragged that during his time as president, he “did nothing” to curb guns.

“During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield,” he told the crowd.

Trump did, however, ban bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

The ban came after a gunman in Las Vegas killed 60 and injured hundreds more at a 2017 country music festival using assault-style rifles, many of which were equipped with bump stocks.

The U.S. Supreme Court is now weighing a challenge to that ban.

Admission to the event is free, but attendees must belong to the NRA.

Are firearms allowed?

Attendees can carry guns at the conference with one notable exception.

Firearms, gun accessories and knives are forbidden at the event where Trump and Abbott are speaking, per a requirement of the Secret Service, Perrine said.

Attendees will be screened before entry and subject to searches.

Also banned are backpacks, laser pointers, mace and pepper spray, toy guns, selfie sticks and umbrellas.

NRA strife

This year’s meeting comes as the NRA is mired in turmoil. In February, a jury in New York found Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the organization, guilty of misspending millions of dollars of NRA money.

He was accused of using the funds to pay for an extravagant lifestyle that included exotic getaways and trips on private planes and yachts.

LaPierre is required to repay almost $4.4 million to the NRA, which jurors found had failed to properly manage its assets, omitted or misrepresented information in its tax filings and violated whistleblower protections. LaPierre announced his resignation days before the trial was set to start.

Longtime NRA executive Andrew Arulanandam stepped in as interim CEO.

[teenmomcentral]

Teen Mom Jenelle Evans has claimed her husband David Eason possesses ammunition, explosives and guns including an AR-15 in terrifying past court papers.

In Jenelle's own words in a 2019 order of protection, which are being fully revealed for the first time by The U.S. Sun, the former Teen Mom 2 star begged a local court to protect her and her three children from David, while detailing his arsenal of deadly weapons.  

In a lengthy statement on the court filing, Jenelle stated: "I married David on September 23 of 2017. Since then, he has been abusive and violent toward me. Because of this behavior, I want to leave him.

"As he has realized this over the past couple of days, he has escalated his threats.

"Although we previously lived together in North Carolina, my children and I moved to Nashville earlier this week.

"David does not currently know where I am. But once he learns, I'm afraid he will try to come and find me and hurt me."

She continued in the court filing: "Because of his recent threats, his history of violence, his erratic behavior and his large stockpile of weapons, I'm scared for my life and the life of my children and my children's well-being."

"I have provided below details and documents in some of his past incidents of verbal and physical abuse, property damage, animal abuse and his most recent threats of violence against me."

"These are not all of the events that have happened, but they provide context for why I'm afraid," she continued before giving 11 jarring alleged instances for which she was pleading the court to protect her from David, now 35.

"I've put them in chronological order below and the dates and the dates are the best estimates that I can recall."

The first incident she listed she estimated happened on or about December 12, 2017. 

"About three months after we married David became angry at me. He grabbed and squeezed my arm causing a bruise.

"That same day, David took my car without asking him not tell me where the car was. Without the car, I couldn't easily leave my home," Jenelle alleged in the court documents.

The second incident she listed she estimated happened around October 7, 2018.

"David got angry and destroyed our master bathroom. He tore up the new shelves, broke my prescription glasses, smashed my hair straightener and destroyed a glass vase in the bathroom.

"I don't know what started the argument that led to his actions, but after I confronted him about destroying my things, he came to the bathroom while I was taking a bath and screamed in my face as loud as he could to scare me.

In the third incident, she wrote: "Approximately one week later I called the police on David after I was injured from a fall. 

"I don't remember exactly what happened but I know that we were arguing the next thing I remember falling down with him falling on top of me. The fall caused me to injure my collarbone. This was a week after I had septoplasty and was still recovering from surgery," Jenelle alleged in the incident which she believed happened around October 13, 2018.

In the fourth instance, in December of 2018, Jenelle wrote: "David posted a threat on social media against President Trump and Speaker Pelosi."

'"He was angry because he believed they were going to ban certain types of guns. "

The post, which we've referenced Trump and Pelosi in the caption, showed David shooting an assault rifle.

'As a result of the post the Secret Service came to our house to talk to him. In response to the officers' visit, David posted videos threatening to shoot Secret Service agents and showing off his stockpile of ammunition. 

"He has a large amount of ammunition, explosives and guns in the house, including semi-automatic firearms like an AR-15.

The day before Valentine's Day in 2019, in a frightening alleged incident involving their daughter Ensley, 6, Jenelle said: "David became angry at me again.

He said 'I'm going to break everything in this motherf*****,' gesturing at the house. I took a video of this incident and it shows him going into the master bedroom and shutting the door. 

"On the video, you can see a hole in the door from a previous argument. The video shows spilled coffee on the floor and our daughter Ensley can be heard crying in the background.

"I have attached pictures as Exhibit 6 that show broken glass, turned-over barstools, spilled coffee all of which were a result of his actions."

In a terrifying alleged incident involving Jenelle's son Kaiser, 9, this time, the former MTV star wrote to the court that on February 17, 2019: "David told me 'You can die for all I care. You're a piece of sh***. Biggest piece of s*** I've ever seen.' When he said this, I was recording him on my phone. When David saw I was recording him he flipped off the camera. 

"That same day, I took a video of David locking my car door with the car running with my son (his stepson), Kaiser, inside the car. He did this because he was angry at me. 

"I had to tell Kaiser to unlock the car. While Kaiser was trying to unlock it, David continuously locked it again with my spare key, scaring both me and Kaiser."

Then, in May of 2019, in a penultimate move that saw Jenelle ousted from her cushy, lucrative MTV gig, and had her children removed from her home by CPS, Jenelle detailed how her husband ruthlessly shot dead their family dog.

"A few months later, our family pet, a French bulldog, nipped our two-year-old daughter Ensley. David was very angry and responded by taking out his gun and shooting the dog to death. This incident led to our children being temporarily moved from our home by CPS," Jenelle wrote. 

David has since also admitted to shooting the dog, whose name was Nugget.

The last four incidents that Jenelle chose to outline for the court in her plea for protection against her husband David happened over the span of a week in October of 2019, which led up to her filing the order of protection.

On October 23, Jenelle alleged: "Recently, there have been even more strains in our relationship. It got so bad that David became angry from little things, this time because I had to go to a doctor's appointment.

"As he got angrier, he began to verbally abuse me and threatened me to 'go inside the doctor's office and yell.' I took a video of this incident."

On the 25, Jenelle claimed: "I had to travel out of town for business meetings and find a way to get away from David. But, because I was afraid of David's reaction, I did not tell him I was leaving.

"One worry I had was that he would hide my car keys or take my wallet, so that I couldn't leave. So I made arrangements with children's care before I traveled. But I left without telling David where I was going. In response, he sent me a stream of text messages, accused me of cheating on him and threatening me with harm."

Jenelle said she texted him: 'Because of your threats, I think it's best that I not come home. I picked up Ensley so you don't need to get her. Please stop sending me threatening texts. I'll let you know my plans when things have settled down.' He responded by texting 'f*** you a******' and 'You're a piece of s***.'

"He also claimed to have seen me ride by the house with my 'boyfriend.' I don't have a boyfriend and the only person I was in a car with that day was my mother and children driving to Tennessee.

And finally, on October 30, Jenelle claimed: "David continues to try to call and text me. He posted a picture of me and my daughter on social media saying 'If I had to live without these two I wouldn't want to live at all.' 

"Given his actions and knowing his temperament. I believe that he's implying that he would kill himself if I do not come back to him.

"For all these reasons I'm afraid that David will harm me or my children, and that he will continue to threaten me using text messages, phone calls or on the Internet."

Jenelle was granted the temporary order of protection in early November 2019. 

By January 2020, Jenelle and David had reconciled and the former Teen Mom 2 star filed to have the order dropped. 

About a year later, Jenelle posted a YouTube series about her tumultuous time taking the kids away from David and moving to Tennessee.

In the finale of the series, which she titled Addicted to Growth, David is featured prominently. 

He had a very different take on the events that had transpired the year prior.

In the video which was posted to YouTube on October 14, 2020, David alleged that he and Jenelle had separated for entirely different reasons.

David said into the camera: "I know Jenelle and I, we split up for a couple of months, but she just had to go party, get it out of her system. She realized life is not greener on the other side. It's more fun at home, with me, go fishing and stuff."

David was charged with child abuse last week after allegedly assaulting Jenelle's son Jace, 14, just before the teen's third runaway attempt.

According to David's criminal summons, first revealed by The U.S. Sun, he allegedly left marks on Jenelle's son's neck.

Also in the fallout of the alleged attack, Child Protective Services took custody of Jace and he is back living with his grandmother Barbara, who raised him. 

[the-sayuri-rin]

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined for now to block a new law in Illinois that bans assault-style weapons such as the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which has been used in multiple mass shootings.

The decision in a brief unsigned order means the Illinois law enacted in the wake of a July 4 shooting in the city of Highland Park last year that killed seven will remain in effect while legal challenges continue. In a separate case, a federal judge blocked the law, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has put that decision on hold.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Congressman for Lewiston area of Maine changes position on assault rifles.

          Rep. Jared Golden represents the Lewiston area of Maine—the site of the latest mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of eighteen people. “Last year, Golden was one of just a few Democrats in the House to oppose gun control measures, such as a ban on certain semi-automatic weapons and limits on high-capacity magazines. But Golden said that he now plans to work with colleagues to get a ban passed.” Democratic Rep. Jared Golden reverses course, now in favor of assault weapons ban after Maine mass shooting - CBS News

In a press conference of officials discussing the killing, Golden made the following remarkable statement:

"The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles, like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown of Lewiston," Golden said. "To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the 2nd District, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I asked for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings. In the days to come, I will give everything I have to support this community's recovery.”

          Rep. Golden’s change of heart and strong public statement deserve praise. If we want more politicians to follow Golden’s lead, we need to welcome them with open arms if they follow his example.

          Still, Rep. Golden’s change of heart would have been so much better if it did not take the deaths of his constituents, his neighbors, and (possibly) his friends to convince him to change his mind. Were the deaths of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook not enough? Or the killings at the Tree of Life Synagogue? Were those deaths an abstraction because they were in different congressional districts? I hope as Rep. Golden becomes part of the community of citizens seeking to stop gun violence, he will urge others not to wait until violence touches their lives in a direct way before changing their position on weapons of war.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[fmpjaydenhall2023]

Gun Control In Games And Laws:

What are the laws of guns in the UK and the U.S?

UK: members of the public may own sporting rifles and shotguns that they are subject to licensing. However, handguns have been banned in Great Britain since the Dunblane school massacre in 1996, therefore, anyone with a handgun will be arrested and charged. Firearms are used to just hunt wildlife but weapons that are fully automatic such as assault rifles and submachine guns are not available for the general public but the general government guards do in fact have these fire arms accessible. 

Revolver rifles and carbines are permitted, with certificate, in any calibre. Self-loading, also known as semi-automatic or pump-action rifles are only permitted in .22 rim fire calibre, pistols are banned, some shotguns are permitted with a license and air guns are accessible but a license is required. 

U.S: citizens and legal residents must be at least 18 years of age to purchase shotguns or rifles and ammunition. All other firearms such as handguns, for example can only be sold to people 21 and older. Fire arms are used as self defence and can be used when the residents home is being invaded/ broken into. The person that would want to purchase a fire arm has to be 18 and has to have a fire arm license in order to purchase. 

Fire arms are a huge problem in U.S right now because of the lack of law around purchasing a fire arm and how easy it can be to buy one. Recently a lot of people have been killed due to people under the age of 15 purchasing weapons and killing people with them, this is because of the lack of law around gun control and how easily it is to just buy a fire arm in a local store in the U.S. 66% of home owners own a fire arm, but only used to protect themselves and their home in case of an intruder but apparently over 500 people die within a short amount of time due to fire arms being shot by others and most of them dont have a fire arms license. 

Games such as call of duty and Grand theft auto influence people to buy guns and mess around with them, thinking that they are some sort of toy to be playing around with but fire arms can actually harm another if shot. Games have a fun side to guns where people want to purchase them but owning a fire arm could lead to arrests and consequences and games such as call of duty and GTA, guns are their main thing that makes that game what it is as it is their main identity to use guns and violence. 

GTA promotes this as the only way to purchase guns in the game is to go to a in game gun shop where different fire arms are being sold, this promotes this even further as this is more realistic and Call Of Duty allowed players to run around with realistic weapons and where they can level them up and make them better by getting attachments makes it a whole lot realistic. This has a massive impact on others as gun crime and how it is promoted within games to audiences where it is massive in most areas where fire arms are permitted and can be purchased because they can lead to serious harm, that is why in my game, even though it will have a weapon that the player will be able to shoot, it is a fictional weapon and is not real as i created it and is unrealistic, even though it is cool to use in game, it is not a real thing and this will prevent any thoughts of purchasing a fire arm. 

[pennzance]

Bit of a different post from me today. This is a long comment from Reddit about the recent gun violence in Texas (case not specified, too many to count and rising), and it has some good information in it along with some commentary I happen to agree with.

Reddit user Col_Irving_Lambert writes:

"Here it comes yet again: "No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Happens Regularly"

Are we not tired of this? I sure as fuck am.

Now that I have your attention probably after seeing this post for hopefully multiple times I’d like to get something off my chest and personal soapbox today. Buckle up,

"The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face."

We live now in a country in which our children are randomly put to death in public, so that our congressmen can pose with weapons of war, by Right Wing Terrorists. We live in a country where the amount of stickers in the back of our lifted trucks equates to how many rounds of AR ammunition are stockpiled in our closet.

We live now in a country where we ban books, where we ban drag shows, where we ban doctors from helping kids in crisis, where we ban women from making choices with their bodies. We ban people from voting because some don’t like how they might vote, we ban representatives from state legislators for how they have voted, we ban immigrants, we ban some stem cells, and we ban transgender athletes, we even ban water bottles on planes.

BUT WE DO NOT BAN ASSAULT RIFLES (or assault-like or lite rifles or especially Semi automatic ones as some ammosexuals like to point out) DO WE?

Our children are randomly put to DEATH in public. Our Teachers, our friends. Our Family. Some of them just want to go and enjoy an afternoon at a mall together. Never to return. To protect somebody's right to randomly put another innocent person to death, once a month, once a week, once a day, once AN HOUR.

Well since my last update, a 14-year-old was shot in the head. What did this child do? She was playing hide and seek.

When it becomes unmistakably obvious with each death, a little piece of us dies inside, and within 10 years, or 1 year, or 1 month. The pain of that is too large to process, so we simply pretend that it doesn’t hurt anymore. We simply pretend that it doesn't hurt to think of the horror and the terror of those children and those adults in their final moments. We simply stop dealing with it. Or fighting back against it. Or recognizing that the gore and brains on the sidewalks outside the malls of this country and our streets might as well be our own.

And it turns out the good guys with guns can’t stop it. And the responsible gun owners can’t stop it, and the politicians won’t stop it and insist that thoughts and prayers are working and if you disagree with them you are one of those who doesn’t believe in an almighty god who is absolutely in control of our lives?

That translates insanely as the solution to all of these nightmares. God and we want the thirteen thousand nine hundred people shot to death in this country already this year? Did God want them dead?

I say bullshit.

Now we have news conferences, and without emotion, it’s read off the number put to death this TIME, and the number transported to the hospital and how badly they feel. Do you realize they now treat the public execution of more people, as if it was…BAD WEATHER?

Gun massacres are not bad weather.

So we ban licenses to carry handguns in Texas, give the ability for open carry all over the United States, and Ban mental health care by cutting the budgets. Ban abortion because we are pro-life, and ban books because the children are too precious to be indoctrinated, and ban drag shows because we must protect kids from grooming and we must make sure those kids are happy and fit so SOMEBODY CAN GET A WEAPON OF WAR AND EVERY OTHER DAY PUT GROUPS OF OUR CHILDREN TO DEATH.

But at least those kids were not taught something as terrible as CRT.

80 percent believe in banning assault weapons. 80 PERCENT. 81 percent believe in raising the age to buy guns or at least keeping the age at 21. 81 percent believe in enforcing existing gun laws, and 87 percent want background checks for all gun purchases and these numbers are from 2 WEEKS AGO in a poll done by FOX NEWS.

And yet non of this can pass our elected officials? BULLSHIT.

It is time for a change. Spread how you feel far and wide. Copy this, put in your story (how many of us now have been personally affected or know someone at this point), and let your representatives and the whole goddamn Country know, the whole damn planet!

NO MORE!

So now to boost the signal on some actual honest to god things that could be done about this never-ending nightmare?

For starters, the next generation is tired of this shit and is planning a sit-in at the capital on June 6th. Here is a relevant link:

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1655293349245452289

And also this goes without saying this group has some amazing ideas:

https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/

This website is dedicated to having the media stop reporting the perpetrator's names to prevent glorifying mass murderers

https://nonotoriety.com

The Gun Violence Archive is also a really useful source on shootings. Their statistics are highly accurate and they have an up-to-date list of all that occurred in the last 72 hours

https://gunviolencearchive.org

@Emilyinyourphone on Instagram shares scripts and other resources for calling your local representative, it even has a campaign right now for mothers to get their loved ones to call instead of flowers for Mother’s Day.

Copy this post or take their info but please. Take a minute and boost the signal.

Some stats to back up this rant because Credible Hulk always comes angry and with sources.

Guns deaths by state

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-deaths-per-capita-by-state

and just because it’s becoming increasingly relevant by the day

Texas Mass Shootings Up 62.5 Percent Since Permitless Carry Bill

This WaPo article on the damage that an AR-15 does to a body is sobering but important reading.

THE BLAST EFFECT | This is how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart

And finally, Check out

https://www.everytown.org/

They’re pushing to end gun violence. The more people who make their voices heard the bigger difference we can make."

If you can, please re-blog and boost the signal. This shit is getting out of hand and has been for WAY too long. Zance out.

[rametarin]

Mean spirited, ineffectual gun control laws.

I want you to imagine this:

A typical head-up-ass religious conservative hemming and hawing and hooting impotently that there are pro-LGBT books in a public school. “Those shouldn’t be there!!!” He croaks, in between abusing drugs.

But he knows, legally, he cannot ban LGBT books with the swipe of a pen without it being considered an act of censorship, that the US government deems unconstitutional. There are laws of freedom of expression and social politics to consider, rights of the LGBT, etc. There is no way to get what he wants.

So they wait. They wait, and as soon as someone is found molesting children, that’s when he makes a great big hooting spectacle about “books encouraging this sort of thing, popular with groomers.” Which isn’t true, and even if it was (which it isn’t), it would have no bearing or correlation to a person deciding to commit a horrible atrocity on a child.

So target acquired, they single out a SPECIFIC book and get others of like mind to start hooting and not-thinking about how that VERY SPECIFIC BOOK which ultimately has nothing even risque in it is a contributor to “grooming culture,” because LGBT people like it. It’s not eve legally accessible by children, but the fact LGBT people like it and they’re allegedly groomers means it’s in childre’s best interests if said book is banned.

So they ban this particular and specific book, wholesale, no one adult or minor can now purchase it and must give it in whenever they see it.

Okay, now you have some idea how stupid it is for gun control advocates to grasp at any ole straw to make a specific brand of firearm illegal. Such as wanting to ban AR-15s, just because they’re a popular choice among people looking to do mass shootings.

The AR-15 is not some magical child kidding machine, it’s no different from any other firearm. Yes, it is literally a coincidence that many use it, because it’s a genuinely ubiquitous platform. It’d be like banning specifically silver Ford trucks from the road. That exact same truck with that exact same engine and those exact same features would still exist outside of being blue- arbitrarily banning the blue ones would do nothing but inconvenience owners of blue Ford trucks and be the booby prize for being unable to legally infringe on truck owners wholesale so consoling yourself in exploiting a loophole to infringe in the name of public safety.

And yet these limp dicked anti-gun people are so chomping at the bit to do what they legally can’t, they go out of their way to look for the next best thing they can ban just to stick it to gun enthusiasts. Usually stuff like arbitrarily banning models of handle, or finishes, because the shiny black thing looks, “unnecessarily tech and tac!” Like demanding a gun have wooden furniture instead of dark carbon aesthetics would somehow stop the mass shooters from shooting because it doesn’t look “tacticool” enough or something.

So the public can’t enjoy the comforts of suppressors, even despite the near ubiquity of security cameras with audio capable of picking up the sounds of mouse farts through mall walls, because some jackasses are afraid some mime is going to walk around with a silent rifle and go on a silent shooting rampage.

So the public can’t enjoy legal full auto, because a bunch of mooing sacred PTA cows can shake their fists at imaginary lazy 1920s gangsters that surely would NEVER modify a machine beyond its factory settings in order to better exploit the characteristics for fun and profit

(hahahaha NASCAR’s origins cough cough cough.)

And the worst part is they’re trying their damnedest to use language that puts semi-automatics under the same umbrella as full-auto, while arbitrarily declaring you aren’t allowed to have ammo capacity beyond 4-5 bullets. Because that’s what they’re saying when they call semi-automatic capacity rifles and handguns to be, “assault weapons.” Semi-auto is not an assault weapon. “Assault weapons” would be guns that do full auto suppressive fire; those are ALREADY ILLEGAL TO COMMERCIALLY MANUFACTURE OR SELL OUTSIDE THE MILITARY, and ALREADY REQUIRE GOVERNMENT PAPERS TO OWN. Manipulating language to put semi-automatics under that category without any debate or argument and then arguing from the string assuming that topic was settled, isn’t slick.

Trying to get firearms that are capable of semi-auto firing put under the same category as “assault rifles” is a dirty disgusting trick by people that want to infringe on rights, but don’t actually want to debate from any position but one where what they say goes. And the reality is, the only reason full-auto is illegal, is because of ignorance, fear, and knowledge that justifying this infringement is a stepping stone towards “progress.”

Gun owners and enthusiasts know that these petty actions add up, they’re done on purpose, and they are deliberately a slow walk through a kangaroo court towards eventually winding up at the most gelded version of gun rights possible. Right where people that don’t like guns, want them.

This kind of limp dick, group think authoritarianism capitalizes on fear and uses false empathy to appeal to terrified people, like parents, that would be willing to bargain in the illusion it’s a.) either what is “ultimately right,” or b.) going to keep them safe.

It isn’t. And compromising with these people so they’ll feel they’ve had their taste of blood and hope they’ll be satisfied, does not work. Left to their own devices, they’d try and technically ban every single component of a firearm that makes it function, or make it so legally difficult to acquire one that you wouldn’t be allowed to possess one without the same kind of clearance you need now for legally owning artillery as a civilian.