Amid a new round of debate over gun control, Californians have already bought a record number of firearms in 2015, including major spikes in sales on Black Friday and the days after the San Bernardino attacks, an analysis of new federal and state data show.
Firearms purchases in California triggered 1.51 million federal background checks in the first 11 months of the year, breaking the previous annual record of 1.47 million set last year.
And December typically brings even more firearms purchases than any other month, whether for holiday gifts or getting ahead of new gun restrictions the new year might bring.
The gun dealers’ holiday season got off to a rousing start.
The newspaper interviews the head of a gun dealers trade group. And gets the standard book on the subject:
“Every single time the politicians start talking about firearms bans or increasing regulation, folks start to realize, ‘This is a right that if I don’t exercise it, I may lose it,’ “ said Craig DeLuz, spokesman for the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, a gun dealers’ trade group. “It’s not the sole motivator, but it’s a significant motivator.???
As he was shopping for some ammunition Saturday at San Jose’s new Bass Pro shop, longtime gun owner David Palava said the sales spike “is not hard to figure out.???
“Thirty years ago, guns were a hobby,??? said Palava, 62, of East San Jose. “Now they seem more necessary. … We have terrorists here being imported by our government.???
The government is the enemy.
And this is even as it has failed, or barely even tried, to do anything at the federal level on gun control. Insane booms in gun sales have occured at regular intervals and after every fresh massacre. The presidency of Barack Obama has also been fuel for increasing mass gun buys. Racism is the inspiration.
The other, the newspaper reads: “The number of background checks conducted each year in California — which fluctuated through the early to mid-2000s — has risen steadily each year since 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected and rhetoric about ‘gun-grabbing’ politicians began to fly in earnest.”
The newspaper asked the gun dealer, DeLuz, which California laws his trade group found “most egregious.”
These are “prohibiting concealed-carry permit holders from bringing guns into schools or onto college campuses; banning the sale of kits to convert legal magazines into high-capacity magazines; and increasing the period of time for which a person is prohibited from having a firearm because of a mental illness or threat of violence …”
“The Turner Diaries” is America’s premier piece of hate fiction. Published in 1978 by a white supremacist neo-Nazi for a large audience of white supremacist neo-Nazis, a lot of its eliminationist tone and philosophy, minus only the male romance fiction on dispatching all enemies, is noticeably mirrored presently in the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association and gun fanatics. Years ago, the book was often found at gun shows.
“The Turner Diaries” was literature for an underground white supremacy hate group. Today, the GOP, the NRA, gun fanatics, the American authoritarian right are a collectively large white supremacy hate group.
“Light the motherf**ker on fire,??? is the latest thing caught on videotape at a Trump rally yesterday.
“I would not only not piss on him if he was on fire—I’d throw gas on him.” said another raging white guy about the President, in a Frank Luntz focus group on the enthusiasm for the strongman.
“The Turner Diaries” tells the story of a violent overthrow of a “tyrannical” government and the mass revenge killings of black people who have been given advantage and positions over white men by a predatory government, according to the author.
However, lots of groups, races and classes are in for the deadly reckoning: Jews, any people of color, white people who marry or consort with any people of color, academics, elites, foreigners and, of course, government workers. The list of those marked for retribution and executed by the book’s freedom fighters basically encompasses everyone who isn’t Christian, white and a gun owner.
An excerpt:
All that brave talk by patriots, “The government will never take my guns away,” and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.
On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that so many of us had guns then, nearly 18 months after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn’t able to act more harshly against us after the Gun Raids.
“The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from firearms sales records which all gun dealers had been required to keep,” it continues.
Ten days after the San Bernardino shootings, thousands came to the Del Mar Fairgrounds to check out the latest deals on firearms and stand in line for discounted bulk ammunition.
While the shootings, which killed 14, were a common topic of discussion Saturday, there were a mix of interests and motivations at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, which runs through Sunday. Some, like [a fellow from Poway], said recent talk of further gun restrictions from federal and state-level politicians following the San Bernardino shootings made them think now might be the time to buy.
“It definitely makes you wonder how long before it’s time to pick up and move because they’ve already infringed on so many of our constitutional rights,??? [the Poway fellow] said.
The Sheriff’s Department has reported an uptick in the number of applications for concealed weapons permits in recent weeks. A federal appeals court is still considering whether to open up concealed carry to all law-abiding citizens in the state …
[Another man from Pacific Beach] said many who come to the show are simply concerned with the trends they see in the world, from the ongoing drought to terrorist attacks at home and abroad…
“People are worried about having things taken away from them.”
Before I get to the substance of the title today, intentionally amusing quotes from an editor of the Toronto Sun, why our neighbors to the north axed Harper and instated Trudeau. What it boils down to — they got sick of the nasty party. But it took awhile because, you know, angry old white guys who live in the country-side and want revenge.
It’s too simple to say that Mr. Harper was trying to Americanize Canada. That is rather insulting to Americans(no, not really — me), and anyway Mr. Harper, no internationalist, seemed bored by Americans, although he tagged along with them on their pointless bombing wars.
In the United States, divisions between, say, regions or parties seem reasonably matched. Mr. Harper was doing something different. He was enabling bullying on a national scale.
Ultimately Mr. Harper’s problem in this election was that he couldn’t win nationally with just an older, white male, rural base. He had to extend his reach, was weirdly unwilling to do that and ended up holding tiny rallies of Conservative voters, while Mr. Trudeau was meeting everyone, anyone …
The scroll of what Mr. Harper didn’t like grew longer as the years passed. It comprised scientists, environmentalists, returning veterans, urbanites, immigrants, then immigrants with accents, refugee claimants, then claimants needing health care, and so on. Bubbles of despised people began popping up. At some point the bubbles would have joined up and made Canada a vast blister for Mr. Harper to target.
Which is a definition of what the Republican Party wants to do, one we ought to adopt as short and to the point. The rest of the country, to the GOP, is a large boil.
The Turner Diaries is one of this country’s premier pieces of white supremacist, and anti-Semitic, gun nut hate fiction. It’s a thin paperback on a white revolt from the violent right, seen through the eyes of its narrator, Earl Turner. A bloody insurrection is triggered when the government tries to confiscate the guns and put the resistance in camps.
An excerpt, from near the end, with freedom fighters triumphant:
“It was like the Gun Raids of four years ago, only in reverse — and the outcome was more drastic and more permanent for those raided. One of two things happened to those the troops dragged out onto the streets. If they were non-whites — and that included all the Jews and everyone who even looked like he had a bit of non-white ancestry — they were shoved into hastily formed columns and started on their no return march to the canyon in the foothills north of the city. The slightest resistance, any attempt at backtalk, or any lagging brought a swift bullet.
“The Whites, on the other hand, were, in nearly all cases, hanged on the spot.”
This, as the book narrates, during an operation to leave Los Angeles “utterly and completely pacified,” after urban crowds “were chanting ‘racism must go’ and ‘equality forever’ and other slogans the Jews had taught them.”
“It reminded me of the mass demonstrations of the Vietnam era,” Earl Turner continues.
The radical left is getting much louder, much more shrill, and much more insistent in their desire to use force to get their way and impose their ideas on the American people.
If they try such a radical path it would end poorly and quickly.
The military and local law enforcement agencies in the United States that the radical left has been trashing in public since the Vietnam War until now will not take part in any plot to disarm American citizens.
Soldiers, Marines and sheriffs may even defect to actively resist any federal officers from a pool of just over 100,000 who would take on the suicidal task of taking on the military, local police, and a hundred righteously-angry million gun owners, led by over a thousand angry Green Berets that warned President Obama in 2013 not push his luck…
We do not want a civil war against the radical left wing of the Democrat Party, but let it be made abundantly clear that if they start one, they will be utterly destroyed by armed free citizens, as the Founders intended.
Gun nut, sexual athlete and ex-antivirus mogul John McAfee just went full electromagnetic pulse crazy. I suppose it had to happen although on the scale of all things McAfee, it’s not very original.
In a recent syndicated column (yes, someone gave him one), McAfee parrots what the extreme kook right and survivalists/preppers have been going on about for the last fifteen years, electromagnetic pulse doom:
My first thought upon hearing Obama’s proclamation [on the Roseburg massacre and gun violence) was that I was in the middle of an acid flashback and I had no benzodiazepines to mediate the trip. My second thought was: what possible single issue, in this complex society of ours, would merit a “single issue” status?
I assumed that the single issue would be the tragic issue of our national security. This issue would clearly be the rampant illiteracy of our elected leaders in the science of cyber security. Experts agree that an all out cyber attack, beginning with an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack on our electronic infrastructure, would wipe out 90% of the human population of this country within two years of the attack. That means the death of 270 million people within 24 months after the attack.
Yet our leaders are nearly all ill prepared for this near certain, not-too-distant event. If I were forced to choose a single issue, this would obviously be the issue.
One of my favorite celebrity freaks, McAfee then flails around for a bit before offering up the statistic that “85 percent of all mass shootings have happened while Democrats were on watch.”
Of course. McAfee continues that this needs looking into.
[The] report, entitled Challengers from the Sideline: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right, analyzed right wing domestic terrorism for contributing factors. The strongest correlator was the number of seats held in the House of Representatives by Republicans.
Simply, right wing violence escalates when their are more GOP Reps. The report reasoned this might be because those perpetrating right wing violence feel supported ideologically by Republicans in that body.
The other possibility, of course, is that the rhetoric emitted by the Republican Party in control of the House creates an environment in which some people feel empowered, or moved, to violence against the government.
The other contributing factor was legislation, specifically that having to do with gun control. The Brady Bill, or Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administrations, caused a spurt in militia growth and related right wing violence in that period …
And today we know that for the entire duration of the Obama administration, the National Rifle Association has mounted a concerted campaign that has little other purpose than to gin up paranoia and fear about gun confiscation by the same administration. Even though there has been absolutely (or virtually) no gun control laws of any kind enacted during the period.
So if we are to take Mr. McAfee at his word, yes, it certainly looks like most of the slaughters look like they take place when Democrats are in charge. And one of the drivers appears to be because white gun nuts have been repeatedly told Democrats are coming for their guns, among many other things.
As the paranoia of the gun crazy right wing in America rolls on newspapers continue to publish features on the local white guys who believe it’s all going to come crashing down from electromagnetic pulse attack. But they’re going to be ready with their off-the-grid homes, ammo, guns, gold bars and pemmican, ready to preserve their American way, if not democracy, in the inevitable ritual of purification.
Mark Rinke — a 32-year-old, married father of two in Olathe who worries about TEOTWAYKI (The End of the World As You Know It) — declined to be interviewed at his home for a strategic reason.
“OPSEC,??? said Rinke, floating the military jargon for operations security.
In other words, should the United States ever fall into social chaos through war, economic collapse or some other calamity, Rinke would rather, for security’s sake, not reveal too much regarding the details of his stockpiled energy, arms, water and food.
“WHAT WE’VE SEEN IS NOT ONLY THE PROLIFERATION OF APOCALYPTIC IDEAS BY THE INTERNET, BUT THEIR PROLIFERATION IN POPULAR CULTURE IN ALL FORMS.???
— Michael Barkun, Syracuse University professor emeritus of political science
“I think it [electromagnetic pulse doom] is a pretty decent concern because it doesn’t necessarily take a country making a decision to do it,??? Rinke said. “It can be a rogue thing with a homemade rocket. One day a guy pulls his contraption out of his garage and shoots it off. Our grid goes down.???
Should that day arrive, Rinke feels confident he will be among the prepared.
Although I gave up on Catholicism decades ago, a quick listen to David Peel seems appropriate in view of the visit and the fact that this pope has a lot of WhiteManistani panties in a twist because he believes we ought to do something about global warming, take from the rich to give to the poor rather than vice versa and drop the American ideology that a humanistic faith is compatible with our corporate business and capitalism. Jesus isn’t from America.
Semi-religious personal trivia: Before my first and only marriage, the priest who was going to perform it asked me if I was on drugs. I wasn’t impressed by his capacity for personalized assessments.
So about a half year later, noticing I hadn’t been to Sunday mass at all, he came around to the apartment for a visit.
Catholic priest, at intercom, outside: Hello, Mr. Smith. I’ve come by to see you. May I come in?
Me: No.
Catholic priest: You’re not going to let me in?
Me: That’s right.
Catholic priest: Could I come back some other time?
Me: No, that won’t make a difference.
Catholic: You’re really just going to let me stand out here, Mr. Smith?
There’s no beating getting it on in front of 16-inch triple mount phalluses. Speak or sing loudly, pose in front of or ride big dicks. So big, nobody’s going to mess with us! You bet Donald Trump liked Cher in 1989. (Minor note: For Cher, it was the Missouri in Long Beach, for Trump, the Iowa in San Pedro.)
“I do not consider myself to be a prude,” a retired Navy commander wrote to the Navy after being “arrested” by the video one evening. “I enjoy watching scantily clad young ladies as much as the next man. But were I the commanding officer or another of the senior people who form a deep personal bond with their ship, I would be deeply embarrassed.”
“She was wearing a see-through body netting that showed her rear end nude,” a woman from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., steamed in a letter to Navy headquarters in Washington, firing off a carbon copy to President Bush.
“The U.S. Navy, a part of our government that should stand for what is good and honorable, is putting its stamp of approval on trash like this. . . . What kind of image did you hope it would give the Navy?”
Opinions varied: “I thought the ship looked outstanding,” Lt. Cmdr. Steve Chesser in Long Beach said ….
The only thing that will save you — the you being the old white paranoid people in the studio audience — will be an old flivver, a water filter, and the electric generator whatsis he taps on. Plus, one the power fails and society breaks down, all the criminal drug addicts will raid your retirement homes for your medications and pills. Really!
All these people are delusional Christian right wing extremists, a big part of the Republican Party.
Ted Cruz, Republican Presidential hopeful (from USA Today— no link) :
If this deal goes through, we know to an absolute certainty people will die. Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, the single greatest risk is they would put it on a ship anywhere in the Atlantic and they would set off what’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. It would take down the electrical grid on the entire Eastern seaboard, and kill tens of millions of Americans.
And it will be done with an electromagnetic pulse attack as a consequence of same-sex marriage and abortions.
“What is going on with America?!” rails Jim Bakker. Yes, him.
It’s an idea, a wish for an apocalyptic trial of purification, that’s been bubbling up from the base of the Republican Party and extreme right for years.
Ninety percent will die in the aftermath. And they’ll have had it coming because — gay, abortion, unbelievers, non-Christian — and all that.
Get prepping. Keep your horses. Find an old flivver. (From RightWingWatch.)
Eventually, all of the potential GOP candidates will have to speak of their position on electromagnetic pulse attack, whether they secretly believe in it or not.
“After the final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program was announced in Vienna earlier this month, references to one long-gone politician surged on social media: Neville Chamberlain.
“This is not surprising. The late British prime minister, who presided over the ill-fated Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, is the metaphor of choice for all who prefer confrontation to mediation …
“[When] President Obama had a brief, friendly encounter with Cuban leader Raul Castro on the sidelines of a memorial service for the late South African President Nelson Mandela in 2013, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was less than impressed. ‘Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler,’ the outspoken senator reminded listeners during a radio interview.”
— something from the Washington Post (no link)
Angling for a techno-thriller book contract
“Flash to 2015: Secretary of State John Kerry negotiates Iran’s nuclear bomb aspirations. Ayatollah Khameini celebrates the deal as Iran’s most important victory since deposing the Shah. Khomeini’s revolution has finally succeeded.
“Flash to 2017: We now comprehend how Kerry’s deal was another Neville Chamberlain-like capitulation to a clear and present danger …
“The converging Obama/post-Obama presidencies were clueless; international progressive policies collapsed unceremoniously into the dust bin of history. Quickly, other Middle-Eastern states “acquired??? nuclear capability. Israel defended itself as best it could; the U.S. was forced to defend Israel. Europe and Asia chose sides; WWIII had begun. Khomeini’s triumphant Islamic revolution marshaled on under the cover of Shiite terrorist hegemonies and cozy military-oil arrangements forged with Russia, China and North Korea.
“Regrettably, the KKK of WWIII, Ayatollahs Khomeini, Khameini, and the Kerry deal, had unleashed a destruction not seen since the days of Hitler and Hiroshima. The 55 million dead of WWII would seem a pittance compared to total, world-wide nuclear holocaust.”
“President Obama and now five members of the Supreme Court have set themselves above God by declaring same-gender marriage as a civil right. Fortunately, one of the branches of government, Congress, has not done so — at least not yet.
“In the beginning of man, God ordained that marriage was a sacred covenant between a man and a woman. Jesus confirmed that.
“I believe the United States of America is going to face a devastating judgment. Some say it will be a catastrophic stock market crash on September 30, 2015. I believe it will be an electromagnetic pulse attack from Iran.”
Dealing with WhiteManistan is a test of endurance. In the end, one that you’ll always lose.
A substantial part of white America is out of its mind in rage, fear and racism. And there’s no way to fix it.
Thought questions: How many people in the US who utter the name “Neville Chamberlain” could locate the old Sudetenland on a map of modern Europe, if asked?
How many of the same have actually read a copy of The Rose and Fall of the Third Reich from cover to cover, know who the author is, or have even heard of the title?
Late this week, Timothy Egan at the New York Times, wrote “Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted.” I could also describe it in four words: the Ted Nugent vote.
They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,??? in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.
And now that the party can’t control him, Trump threatens to destroy its chances if he doesn’t get his way, running as an independent with unlimited wealth — a political suicide bomb.
Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!??? at their commander in chief.
And for years, GOP pols have been proud to also be associated with the classic rock kleagle, Ted Nugent, the only celebrity musician I know that’s ever been investigated by the US Secret Service.
Nugent is the boiled-down essence of the angry extreme right-wing extremist, a nativist and public bigot who regularly puts down everyone unlike him, but reserving his fury primarily for the president, African Americans living in cities and the need to destroy the US government, which he calls Fedzilla. His enemies are all subhuman, bloodsucking punks and Chicago is “Chiraq,” downtown south Los Angeles a place that ought to be machine-gunned from a helicopter.
Ban all gun-free slaughter zones. Ban freedom-haters from public office by supporting and voting for those candidates who support freedom and common sense while punishing those who want to put their boots on the throat of freedom and common sense.
A week earlier he devoted his column to describing what a potential GOP president must be prepared to do:
Only those on dope fail to recognize how foolish those on dope look, sound, smell and act like braindead dopey morons.
The trick is to not be a braindead moron and stay off dope.
The only sheep dishonest enough to vote Democrat are the dopey sheep benefiting from the redistribution scam artists, thereby enslaving the sheep to further engineered dependency …
Job 1: Annihilate anybody and everybody who publicly declares hate or danger to America, Americans or our allies. Unleash the greatest military might upon them with a fury that is inescapable. No more playing “containment??? games. Wipe them out.
Next, end the scourge of bribing Americans and illegal invaders to be bloodsucking, nonproductive leaches [sic] riding on the backs of hardworking, sacrificing American families.
Secure the borders for God’s sake, and for the sake of a safe, excellent American America. Invaders must return home or face painful, extremely uncomfortable punishing jail time. Legal good, illegal bad. Know it, enforce it.
American America! The week before Nugent recommended Trump be given the Medal of Freedom, effectively endorsing him for President.
Like Trump, Ted Nugent is the Republican brand. He has been for years.
And if you’re curious as to what Ted Nugent looks like when his summer tour season is canceled, click here.
Truth be told, every potential Republican Party candidate will have to join the cult. The dangerous GOP base of white American revenge-seekers, paranoids and nihilists demands it. (Some already have. Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and, I think, Donald Trump immediately spring to mind.)
So, in the National Journal, Cruz buys another ticket for an insane right wing train that’s been riding the rails for virtually the last fifteen years, perhaps longer: Iran will hit the United States with an electromagnetic pulse and millions of people will die.
It’s not just Israel that could be in danger if Iran violates the terms of a nuclear agreement with the United States, 2016 presidential contender Ted Cruz says.
Cruz told reporters Tuesday on Capitol Hill that the “worst-case scenario is that Iran actually uses a nuclear weapon.” Israel could be a target, but Cruz says the United States itself is also at risk.
“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, one of the most dangerous things it could do with it is load that weapon onto a ship anywhere in the Atlantic, fire the warhead straight into the air, into the atmosphere. If you get high enough and detonate that warhead, it would set off an electromagnetic pulse, what is called an EMP,” Cruz said. “That EMP could shut down the entire electrical grid on the Eastern seaboard, could take down our stock market, our financial systems, but even more importantly could take down food delivery, water delivery, heat, air conditioning, transportation. The projections are that one nuclear warhead in the atmosphere over the Eastern seaboard could result in tens of millions of Americans dying.
Actually, Cruz is a little off on his figures for apocalyptic electromagnetic pulse death. The Cult’s accepted value is usually that 90 percent of all Americans would be dead within a year of the attack.
Ironically, the evidence is overwhelming that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is highly beneficial. CO2 makes crops grow better with less water. A touch of global warming, all that we can possibly expect, is also beneficial, especially compared to global cooling …
The scientific credibility of the global warming has fallen to near absolute zero in the face of the 18-year failure of the Earth to warm. The science behind global warming may have collapsed, but the beneficiaries of government subsidies – scientists and crony capitalist developers of renewable power – are still promoting the theory that is their golden egg-laying goose. Scientific societies, supposed seekers of scientific truth, have fallen so far in promoting global warming as to make the greediest industrial unions look principled and honest by comparison.
[But] a real danger to our national survival that threatens the destruction of the electric grid is ignored. That threat is an EMP or electromagnetic pulse. An EMP can be created naturally when a solar storm on the sun ejects a cloud of particles that strike the Earth. An EMP can also be created artificially by exploding a nuclear bomb above the atmosphere at an altitude between 30 and 500 miles …
A single nuclear bomb, exploded 400 miles above Kansas, could wipe out much of the electronic and electrical infrastructure of the USA. Automobiles, trucks, and railroad engines might be so electronically damaged as to no longer operate. In any case, fuel would be difficult to obtain due to lack of electricity and due to destruction of the electronic control (SCADA systems) of refineries and pipelines. Electricity could be absent for months or years. The novel One Second After is a fictional account of what happens in a small town when an EMP strikes.