Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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When Persuasion Fails, Gun Control Groups Resort to Fearmongering Print
By Ben Boychuk
Thursday, September 03 2015
Given that open-carry is the law in all but five states and the District of Columbia, wouldn’t it be sensible to educate the public about the law, rather than stoke people’s fears?

The clash between Americans who exercise their constitutional right to bear arms and proponents of gun control appears to be escalating. Restrictionists have lost in Congress and in all but a notable handful of states. They have lost in the courts of law. That leaves only the court of public opinion.

Most states allow citizens to carry firearms openly. Many of those same states allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed as well, if they obtain a permit.

Anti-gun groups don’t like to see guns in public. They don’t like to see guns in private. They don’t like guns, period. So the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has launched a campaign urging its members and sympathizers to report anyone they see openly carrying a gun. Never mind what they may be doing.

“If you see someone carrying a firearm in public — openly or concealed — and have ANY doubts about their intent, call 911 immediately and ask police to come to the scene,” the group wrote on its Facebook page. “Never put your safety, or the safety of your loved ones, at the mercy of weak gun laws that arm individuals in public with little or no criminal and/or mental health screening.”

As Fox News reported this week, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is a bit late in jumping on this foolhardy bandwagon. “The Facebook pages and websites of groups including the coalition, Moms Demand Action and GunFreeZone.net included numerous comments from the public advocating that people call the police and intentionally exaggerate what they see in the hopes of getting cops to stop those open-carrying guns.”

The danger here should be obvious. Somebody calls the police to report a man with a gun. Perhaps the caller exaggerates what he sees. The police respond expecting a confrontation, and tragedy results. It’s happened before.

Police in Beavercreek, Ohio last year responded to a 911 call that a man was “walking around with a gun” in a WalMart, that he “just put some bullets inside,” and was “pointing it at people.” When officers arrived, they confronted 22-year-old John Crawford and shot him to death. Crawford was on his cell phone at the time and may not have been aware of what was happening until it was too late.

Oh, and the gun he was carrying? It was an unloaded Crossman air rifle that he picked up from a store shelf.

It’s worth noting, too, that Crawford violated no laws. He wasn’t even in violation of store policy. Because Ohio is an open-carry state.

Now, one might object that just because something is legal doesn’t make it right or sensible. Sometimes that’s true. Why walk around with a rifle shouldered or a pistol on the hip? Isn’t that just asking for trouble? Shouldn’t people err on the side of caution in this era of mass-shootings and terrorism?

Caution is good. Knowledge is better. For example, it isn’t true that mass-shootings are on the rise. It is true, however, that gun violence on the whole is down in the United States. It’s been on a steady decline since 1994. Not that you would know it from the media coverage, or from the clichés and tired talking points of politicians who use any event to push their restrictionist agenda.

The law is a teacher. Given that open-carry is the law in all but five states and the District of Columbia, wouldn’t it be sensible to educate the public about the law, rather than stoke people’s fears? Perhaps that would be expecting too much.

California — one of the five states where open carry is outlawed — is an example of how fear and ignorance trumps facts and awareness. Golden State politicians are masters at the art of arousing terror at the very sight of a gun. For all but a handful of elected leaders, the assumption is that one’s fellow citizen simply cannot be trusted to exercise their rights lawfully or responsibly. The legislature’s remedy, year after year, is to banish all such evil objects from view. Then all will be well.

California lawmakers a few years ago banned people from openly carrying unloaded handguns in coffee shops and fast food joints. Gun owners protested by carrying unloaded rifles and shotguns instead.

Were those gun owners imprudent? Needlessly provocative? Obnoxious? Not nearly so obnoxious as their elected representatives.

“Unfortunately,” condescended State Senator Anthony Portantino, a Southern California Democrat, “the open-carry folks reacted by carrying rifles and shotguns, alarming the public and creating a dangerous situation.”

That’s certainly one way of looking at it. Here’s another: Californians responded to an unwise law by exercising their rights too flagrantly for Portantino’s liking.

In reality, Portantino and his colleagues fueled public alarm in the first place by describing the right to carry an unloaded handgun as a “loophole” in the law. “You don’t need a handgun to order a cheeseburger,” he said. “You don’t need a handgun to get a cup of coffee.” He intimated that people who did so were one bad service away from loading their guns and opening fire. He spoke as if the lawful exercise of a right somehow offers a pretext for mass murder.

The same is true of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Moms Demand Action, and other groups now engaged in a public campaign of fear mongering, superstition and demagoguery.

They have made a fetish of what they consider evil objects. They shun the far more difficult task of identifying and separating truly dangerous people from dangerous weapons. Far easier to say that anyone vindicating his rights is presumptively crazy and call the cops. They may think they’ve done a service, but all they’ve really done is undermine liberty.

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