The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that bump stock accessories cannot be considered “machine guns” and thus not subjected to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) ban.
On Dec. 26, 2018, ATF classified plastic bump stock accessories as “machine guns” defined in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act, despite them having no ability to fire on their own. The move came after former President Donald Trump’s Feb. 20, 2018 memo ordering the Attorney General to develop the ban, which was spurred by reactions to the deadly Oct. 2017 Las Vegas shooting carried out using bump stocks affixed to rifles.
“The district court erred by finding that the ATF’s Final Rule, which interpreted the meaning of a machine gun as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), was entitled to Chevron deference,” the 6th Circuit ruling said, in reversing the district court’s decision.
“And because we find that “single function of the trigger” refers to the mechanical process of the trigger, we further hold that a bump stock cannot be classified as a machine gun because a bump stock does not enable a semiautomatic firearm to fire more than one shot each time the trigger is pulled.”
The ruling comes two years after the ATF’s ban went into effect on March 26, 2019, illegalizing an estimated 500,000 bump stock accessories owned by Americans.
The case was filed by Gun Owners of America (GOA), Gun Owners Foundation (GOF), the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), Matt Watkins, Tim Harmsen of the Military Arms Channel, and GOA’s Texas Director, Rachel Malone.
“Today’s court decision is great news and told gun owners what they already knew,” GOA Senior Vice President Erich Pratt told American Military News. “We are glad the court finally applied the statute accurately and struck down the ATF’s illegal overreach and infringement of gun owners’ rights.”
In 2010, ATF had originally deemed bump stocks different from machine guns and unable to be subjected to the same regulation as machine guns.
Unlike the internal mechanisms of a machine gun that permit high rates of automatic fire in rapid bursts, a bump stock is a plastic accessory that is affixed externally to a semi-automatic gun. Without changing the internal components, a bump stock uses the gun’s recoil to then “bump” the gun back against the user’s finger, causing another round to fire.
A bump stock does not change a semi-automatic gun’s ability to shoot one bullet per trigger pull, whereas a machine gun fires a rapid burst of bullets per single trigger pull. Instead, a bump stock enables the trigger to be pulled quickly, simulating a higher rate of fire than a user can typically achieve with the unaided action of their finger.
Speaking on the future of the filibuster at the first press conference of his presidency, President Joe Biden, 78, said he came to the Senate “120 years ago.”
“With regard to the filibuster, I believe we should go back to the position of the filibuster that existed just when I came to the United State’s Senate 120 years ago.”
Biden became a Senator when he was 29 and served for 36 years.
Many top Democrats have argued that the filibuster is a ‘racist’ practice and have advocated for its demise. Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, say that argument is meant “to justify a partisan power grab in the present.”
Biden has made it a priority to fight the filibuster.
What, exactly, are the taxpayers paying for in the highly politicized and loaded-for-money wokester FBI these days?
The recent mass-shooting out of Colorado, from a murder-spewing freak they knew about, would suggest nothing. While they were out there busy looking for ‘white supremacists’ this admitted refugee from Syria was making plans to kill.
The FBI knew in advance the Pulse Nightclub shooter (Omar Mateen) and were tipped off by the local sheriff. The FBI knew in advance the San Bernardino Terrorists (Tashfeen Malik). The FBI knew in advance the Boston Marathon Bombers (the Tsarnaev brothers) tipped off by Russians. The FBI knew in advance the Garland, Texas, shooters (Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi). The FBI knew in advance of the Parkland High School shooter (Nikolas Cruz). The FBI knew in advance of the Fort Hood shooter (Nidal Hasan); and now the FBI knew in advance of Ahmad al-Aliwi Alissa.
Those are just off-the-top of my head… Anyone notice a pattern?
Two points leap to mind on this:
One, the FBI has gotten fairly ineffective since it has grown wokester-politicized, ignoring Antifa and its depredations as non-existent, putting tremendous resources into busting Trump officials on process crimes, violating the law on surveillance of such Trumpsters, focusing its on hunting down ‘white supremacists’ and now targeting pro-Trump conservatives as national security threats in the wake of the Jan. 6 failed crowd-control incident at the Capitol, which involved no participants with firearms. Yes, there were a few plotters who planned and ignited the incident, and they have been and should be duly busted and thrown into jail. Nobody’s arguing with that, but it’s indisputable that these losers were awfully easy to find, what with the videos and selfies they took. No glory in catching those clowns. But the FBI’s broad focus now on anyone who was simply attending the Jan. 6 rally for President Trump is KGB-class stuff. That would be the same KGB (or whatever the hell they are called now) that allowed Chechen mass terror attacks to go on across Russia because they were so preoccupied with persecuting journalists, poisoning dissidents, and busting the zero-talent “singers” of Pussy Riot.
It’s scary to see that kind of thing going on here, too.
The Treehouse has a revolting picture of 12 people wearing FBI vests “taking a knee” presumably to the American flag, apparently to demonstrate their superceding loyalty to washed-up football player Colin Kaepernick, and the wokester Black Lives Matter rioters.
A reminder…. 50 FBI agents were enlisted within the Trump-Russia investigation to push a narrative. 13 FBI agents were dispatched to Talladega speedway to investigate a garage pull-down rope and push a narrative. Thousands of FBI hours have been spent investigating the January 6th Washington DC protest… and once again another terrorist carries out a mass shooting where the FBI knew the suspect in advance.
Two, the politicization of the bureau seems to be going hand in hand with the increased money and personnel being larded onto the bureau.
The FBI’s annual budget as of 2020 stands at more than $9.3 billion, with 35,500 personnel, about a third of whom are Special Agents. That’s double of what it was in 2004, the last year of President Bush’s first term, when the budget ran at $4.6 billion, and the agency employed about 30,000 people. The bureau is an old agency, dating from 1908, and not since the 1940-1950 period, according to this Congressional Research Service report, has it proportionally risen so sharply as it has in this most recent period, although there were some spikes in the Reagan and post-911 periods, too.
Presumably, the added outlays (most of which apparently went for cybersecurity and intelligence/counterintelligence) would bring more in added value to the taxpayer, as would the high amount it spends of gun-purchase background checks. Perhaps so on the counterintelligence and cybersecurity fronts (some great busts of Chicom spies in recent years, gotta give them that). But on the serious violent crime front, which ranks low on funding priorities, according to this report here, they have not. The gun-purchase checks section has had some failures, too. Detecting this kind of crime seems like a low-prestige backwater for the worst-performing agents or something, high resources have not apparently been going in to this kind of high-impact crime from these kinds of miserable losers. Yet they have enough to know about these people and they certainly did about this one in Colorado.
It yielded nothing. Now there’s another round of them plotting the next copycat attacks and the evil cycle will continue. Which ones will be missed on the next murder spree? It’s creepy to think about, because this agency is being paid to stop these creeps and it apparently doesn’t have the will, or possibly, the tools, to stop them. If they need more legal tools, it’s up for them to ask for them of Congress. Otherwise, there seems to be a great fail going on, a waste of money. Seems that if more resources can go into finding and stopping spray shooters, maybe they can take it out of the political budget. The prevalence of spray-shooters ought to leave the FBI no time for political persecutions that benefit only Democrats. They need focus now on real threats and be on the hot seat if they don’t.
It’s a reliable voting block. On Tuesday Democrats held a hearing on the election transformation bill HR1 that will ensure the party that cheats will never lose another election. Democrats LOVE this package of criminal behavior that makes it possible for anyone to in the United States or vote a hundred times.
According to PJ Media the bill is full of all sorts of wild federal mandates – bans on voter ID laws, prohibitions on cleaning voter rolls, requirements to accept late mail ballots and over 700 more pages of other commands that will lead to election chaos like we had in 2020.
During the hearing on Wednesday one of the Democrat witnesses argued that removing dead people from the voter rolls is “voter suppression.”
He actually said this! The dead people may actually feel suppressed of their right to vote!
Vice President Kamala Devi Harris attacked her own country as violent and racist when she appeared on the world stage with Ireland’s prime minister this week.
She kicked off a St. Patrick’s Day online summit by assailing America in what can be seen as a tribute of sorts to Barack Obama, a mentor of hers who pioneered the globetrotting national self-denunciation when he was president.
Before much was known about a deadly shooting spree at Asian spas in the Atlanta area, Harris seditiously declared on the world stage that it was a hate crime.
“It is tragic,” she told Irish premier Micheal Martin.
“It speaks to a larger issue which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it. The investigation is ongoing. We don’t yet know, we’re not yet clear about the motives, but I do want to say to our Asian-American community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people but knowing the increasing level of hate crime against our Asian-American brothers and sisters we also want to speak out in solidarity with them and acknowledge that none of us should ever be silent in the face of any form of hate.”
Whether “hate” as in “hate crime” was involved in the killings wasn’t clear when Harris spoke, and still isn’t clear at time of writing.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, was soon arrested in connection with the shootings that left 8 people dead, 6 of whom were Asian women, accordingly to the intermittently accurate Heavy website.
The fact that the victims were mostly Asian females in “spas” does not prove Long targeted them because they were a) Asian b) female or c) massage therapists, but because Long is a white male and the media nowadays is obsessed with race, journalists feel entitled to ascribe racial motives to him.
Long reportedly told police his motive had something to do with sex addiction, making him, perhaps, more Travis Bickle than Godzilla.
Harris herself is black, well, sort of. According to some on the Left, she’s not black because she has no slave blood. This woman of Indo-Caribbean ancestry is descended from slaveowners, which makes her the oppressor, not the oppressed.
Harris, who was such a dud during the Democrats’ presidential primaries that she didn’t even make it to the first vote, won the Democrats’ diversity lottery when Joe Biden picked her as his running-mate. Harris is a token. Her only qualifications were her skin color and her genitalia.
Harris sees the world as a kaleidoscope of intersectional differences so when the spa shootings happened, she threw women under the bus in favor of Asians because they rank higher in the hierarchy of victimhood.
Hatred of America is what animates this former San Francisco district attorney and Willie Brown plaything. She only denounces violence she considers to be bad. If the violence consists of Black Lives Matter and Antifa burning the nation’s cities down to the ground to protest the self-caused drug death of a loser like George Floyd, that is good violence in her view.
As her party’s voting base was turning urban America into cremains last summer, Harris cheered them on.
“They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you.”
“They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop,” she said. “They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day.”
“Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not,” she said.
And let the world beware that Kamala Harris isn’t going to stop reminding the planet’s inhabitants that America is a rotten, violent, racist country, even when she replaces the mentally feeble placeholder president who chose her.
Despite being out of office, he was somehow able to invite the invasion of the US by illegal aliens and even furnish them with “Biden please let us in” tee shirts.
Or so democrats would have you believe.
There is a crisis at the Southern border, which is being overrun by illegals and unaccompanied minors.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday said that the U.S. is on track to encounter more migrants than it has in the last 20 years, as he defended the administration’s approach to a border surge that he described as “difficult” — but again fell short of calling it a crisis.
“The situation at the southwest border is difficult,” Mayorkas said in a lengthy statement. “We are working around the clock to manage it and we will continue to do so. That is our job. We are making progress and we are executing on our plan. It will take time and we will not waver in our commitment to succeed.”
It also has a lot to do with Biden dismantling the system Trump had in place when the border was in control.
Career officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that revoking President Donald Trump’s border policies would have “catastrophic consequences,” according to Stephen Miller, who served as Trump’s top adviser on immigration issues at the White House.
“Biden’s transition team was warned by career DHS officials that terminating our proven border security measures would lead to catastrophic consequences… they ignored those warnings and voluntarily unleashed chaos,” Miller wrote on Twitter on March 17.
“By 2020—defeating a flood of meritless years-long litigation—we had in place the most effective, rock-solid, profound border security measures ever realized. Biden inherited an unbeatable system. He then immediately shredded it & created this rapidly-escalating emergency,” Miller added.
Now 13,000 unaccompanied minors– far more than ever in the Trump era- are being held in cages and detention camps. Only now the media calls them “facilities.”
CBS News reports U.S. Border Patrol officials are holding more than 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children in custody along the Rio Grande. Many are being held for at least five days — well beyond the 72-hour legal limit.
CBS News Correspondent Mirey Villarreal reported from the Texas-Mexico border that officials are holding more than 13,000 unaccompanied alien children in Border Patrol facilities designed for adults. Many of the children are being held for at least five days. Courts previously imposed a limit of 72 hours on how long unaccompanied children could be held without being released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Unaccompanied minor children are sent here as a prelude to mass chain immigration.
But don’t you dare blame Biden, says Pelosi. He’s only been in office for two months. Never mind that he said no one will be turned away or deported.
It’s not Biden’s fault, said Jen Psaki. Blame Trump
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday referred to the influx of migrants at the southern border as a “big problem” and blamed the Trump administration for an “unworkable system” — following weeks of the Biden administration refusing to call it a “crisis.”
“We recognize this is a big problem,” Psaki said during a briefing with reporters. “The last administration left us a dismantled and unworkable system and, like any other problem, we are going to do all we can to solve it.”
Blame Trump, says the head of the Department of Illegal Alien Importation and Shifting Fault Alejandro Mayorkas:
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers Wednesday that the “unprecedented challenges” at the U.S.-Mexico border cannot be resolved overnight, “due in large part to the damage done over the last four years.”
It’s all Trump’s fault, says democrat water boy and Biden flack Chuck Todd:
Wanting to “dive into politics of this current moment,” Todd wailed: “…Republicans try to keep focus on a border emergency. In some ways they’ve sabotaged our immigration policy and this is why we’re here…” Despite Biden actually being in the White House, Todd singled out a top Trump aide for blame instead: “…look, this is an impossible situation in some ways, because in many ways, the asylum process was essentially destroyed by Stephen Miller, they sort of blew it up, and so it is an extra mess.”
Todd lamented that “it’s hard to look at Republicans in Congress and see that they’re willing to – that they want to solve this problem.” After briefly acknowledging that he has “watched both parties at times, duck a potential compromise because they think the politics will help them,” Todd targeted the GOP once again: “This is what it looks like now with Republicans, that they’re almost rooting for a problem so they can walk away from it.”
Everything coming out of the press secretary’s [Jen Psaki’s] mouth is a spin and a blatant lie. The dangerous part is the journey. Right now, in the middle of the global pandemic, they’re traveling through [coronavirus] hotspots in Mexico, traveling in groups, which I call active mobile petri dishes. When they get to the border, they’re kept in overcrowded, unsanitary houses.
“Up to 30% are abused along the journey. Once they’re smuggled in, they’re trafficked. It’s incredulous that she’s talking about the cruelty after they get here.
The horrific murders in northern Mexico this week by drug-cartel gunmen are a stark reminder that the United States and our southern neighbor still face significant security challenges. Yet the violence overshadows a policy success story on border security: the Trump administration’s effort to curb the flow of would-be migrants at the border, preventing our border-security infrastructure from being totally overwhelmed and cutting down on opportunities for human rights abuses of migrants and human trafficking by criminal gangs.
The reason you don’t see breathless hyperbole about “children in cages” dominating news cycles anymore is because between May and August, border officials report a sharp decrease in migrants attempting to cross the US border, with apprehensions falling by 62% and total enforcement actions dropping by 70%.
In September, there were some 40,000 arrests, the lowest month this fiscal year and down from nearly 133,000 apprehensions in May.
The reason? Determination and sustained pressure by the Trump administration — including, yes, threats of tariffs — to convince the government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to do its part to stop the flow of migrants, mostly from Central America traversing Mexican territory.
Now it’s FUBARed so badly that Biden has been reduced to saying “don’t come.”
We have an ongoing pandemic, businesses are closing, Biden says he might allow us to have a small family gathering on July 4 if we behave and he intends to import millions of economic dependents.
Did I mention that he’s sending COVID positive illegals all over the country? He’s dumping them in small towns, leaving the towns on the hook for the financial burden. None of them are going to Pelosi’s or Schumer’s districts.
Trump had it nailed. The border was secure and we were far more safe. Biden has screwed it to hell.
Former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame along with eight other women including former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, soccer icon Mia Hamm and NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who died last year.
The National Women’s Hall of Fame named the members of its Class of 2021 set to be inducted on Oct. 2 on Monday.
Others in the list include author Octavia Butler, who died in 2006, Rebecca Halstead, who had a near three-decade career in the military, poet Joy Harjo, artist Judy Chicago and activist Emily Howland, who died in 1929 and had taught formerly enslaved people how to read and write in refugee settlements where she worked during the American Civil War.
“Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most influential and iconic women of the 21st century,” the National Women’s Hall of Fame website said.
Socialism is not the Answer 