Apples to apples, a comparison that we hear all the time from those dangerous quack gun control advocates. You know, the same people who tell us to “follow the science”, but who never do. A great example is that for over two hundred years New York City’s murder rate has been more than five times what London’s has been. In 1911, NYC passed the strictest gun control law in America. This was, thankfully, overturned by the Bruen decision over 100 years later. In this YouTube video, “Gun Control Zealots Hate Facts, This is Why…”, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out why it’simportant to look into the full history and not just make snapshot comparisons of different countries. As Dr. Sowell says; “Gun control zealots, they hate facts!” Sorta like President Biden when it comes to guns.
IFC 2024 IOWA LEGISLATIVE WRAP UP
One importantpiece of legislation that was passed and just signed by Governor Reynolds is the Students First Safety Act. Slightly amended from the original version that passed the Iowa House, it takes effect immediately.
In an op-ed out of The Tennessean, we find out that the same common sense eluding Iowa’s State Education Association leadership is also a problem in The Volunteer State. The author opines:
“Teachers like me are trained to educate kids. Arming us will make everyone less safe.”
It’s easy for any thinking person to take her arguments apart here:
“My lifelong passion for education has led me straight to Nashville, Tennessee, where I now major in elementary education at Vanderbilt.
Part of my studies requires me to complete countless hours of elementary education curricula, including tutoring, practicum, and student teaching, all to ensure I’m well trained for the many challenges of the job. Managing a classroom is taxing, it takes an incredible amount of focus and dedication for not only students but also teachers, to get through a single lesson.
And these difficulties are all without deadly weapons in the mix. Our attention should be on students, not firearms. Guns are already the leading cause of death for my generation – and my students’ generation – and this would only increase the risk for me and my students.”
Teachers overwhelmingly agree that guns do not belong in schools
More guns in more places do not make us safer, especially schools. The risk of a shooting increases when we bring guns into the classroom. There have already been several incidents of guns unintentionally or intentionally discharged on school grounds by school staff. Not only that but research also strongly suggests that children will access guns when they are present. There have been multiple situations where guns carried into schools were misplaced and several more where they were outright stolen by students.”
Interesting to me that Tennessee teachers don’t trust their fellow teachers with firearms, yet they expect us to trust these same teachers with our kids? Several of the author’s statements are flat-out lies.
Scholastic Clays is the safest sport in American schools and has been from its inception.
Never forget that Time and Math are irrefutable when it comes to stopping an armed attacker.
Watch this short Facebook video by IFC Board member Richard Rogers for a breakdown of our legislative victories in this session here. Richard will have more details on those victories shortly.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Serving IFC’s membership and for that matter all Iowan’s God-given right of self-defense, is what drives every one of our volunteers here at the Iowa Firearms Coalition. As your President, I’ve always strived to be a good steward of our volunteers’ time and our donors’ money. Our whole team here are volunteers, unlike other groups.
After several years of using the same vendor for our membership management system, that vendor has raised prices significantly, reduced the quality of the services they have provided to IFC, and suffered “lost files” issues. We made the decision last year to go with a different membership management system. The cost of the new system is less than one-fourth of what we were paying for the previous system.
That rolling “cutover” has not been without its growing pains. The most significant has been with the automatic renewal of annual memberships. You should be receiving emails reminding you to renew your membership in advance of it’s expiring, and if it has expired. However, due to the changeover, please don’t automatically assume your auto-renewal will handle that. You will need to go in and reset your password and manually renew this year. Your auto-renewal will restart after that. Also, if you could add membership@iowafc.org to your contacts list, that should prevent our emails from being directed to your spam box.
IOWA LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
There was a lot of progress made late last week in the Iowa Senate with that body passing several important IFC-supported bills. Some bills are on the way to Governor Reynolds for signature; others went back to the Iowa House for final reconciliation due to small amendments by the Senate. Hopefully, they will be acted on quickly by the Iowa House.
Update: Monday, April 15th, the House passed HF2586 with the Senate amendment, on a vote of 61-36. This is the hard-won Students First Safety Act, headed now to the Governor’s desk for signature!
HOGG SLAPDOWN: AKA “THE GUN CONTROL DEBATE IS OVER”
From our friends over at RedState, in an exchange from self-proclaimed firearms expert David Hogg and a Chinese immigrant who escaped communism:
LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Hi, my name is Lily Tang Williams. Welcome to my live free or die state. Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism. And under Mao, you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them. And 20 million people died… murdered during his cultural revolution. So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, that our government in the U.S., in D.C., will never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?
DAVID HOGG: There’s no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical. LILY TANG WILLIAMS: Well then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns. And you should go to China. Never. Never. And you should go to China to see how gun control works for the dictatorship of the CCP.”
You can see the exchange on X by following this link.
Looks like the aforementioned anti-gun activist, David Hogg has turned his PAC into a fundraising machine for his personal benefit — like some ineffective, no-compromise, allegedly pro-2A groups.
Please stay Ready at All Times, and help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Random Thoughts. We all have them. Here are a few of mine from the last few days:
Judge Shopping
If you are a leftist and you want a favorable judicial ruling, you go to San Francisco Federal Court to file your lawsuit. Remember that bad cases make bad case law. You know that at the SF Federal Court, you will get a reliable leftist activist judge (because they all are), to hear your case and rule in your favor.
Causing the adults in the room to spend years and possibly millions of dollars to get the case to the US Supreme Court to get it corrected. But if you are a conservative, you go somewhere like the Northern District of Texas where there is only one Judge, who happens to be pro-freedom, and he will rule in your favor.
Funny that now Senator Chuck “U” Schumer wants to make sure you can’t do that. He wants to force those lower court districts to have more than one judge. Hat’s off to Attorney Mark Smith at the Four Boxes Diner in his YouTube video “Anti-Gun Senator Tries to Stop 2A “Judge Shopping”“. He pointed out this bit of backroom arm twisting. The linked video is worth watching if you want to know how the sausage is made.
Fake Data?
Professor John Lott, PhD. sends out a weekly email newsletter. This week’s newsletter was incredible because it highlighted two things:
underreporting of crime since Covid
that 92% of violent crime does not include the use of a firearm!
This new research, I think is really important. The American news media has been working overtime to convince people that violent crime is dramatically falling, and castigating Americans for falsely believing that crime is increasing. However, new research shows that Americans are right and the media is wrong.
Arrest rates have plummeted since COVID. In 2022, only 20% of reported violent crimes, and 4.5% of reported property crimes in cities with over one million people, resulted in an arrest. As arrest rates have fallen, people have been less likely to report crimes to police. This led to criminals committing more crimes, as they have little to worry about. The end result is that reported crimes have fallen even as total crimes have risen. To show how law enforcement is collapsing in these large cities, only 8% of all violent crimes and 1.4% of property crimes result in an arrest.
But, there is a big problem with using the FBI Uniform Crime Report data on crimes reported to police because victims don’t report most crimes. More importantly, the number of crimes reported to police falls as the arrest rate declines. If people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police. While the violent crime rate reported to police fell by 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey shows that total violent crime (reported and non-reported) rose from 16.5 to 23.5 per 100,000. Violent crime in 2022 was above the rate the last year before the pandemic in 2019 and above the average for the five years from 2015 to 2019.
Additional research, also from John R Lott, PhD, shows that over 92% of violent crimes over the last eight years ending in 2022, did not involve guns. It doesn’t exactly fit the frequent claim that violent crime is a gun problem.
The short answer is YES! And I fully expect it will while we have such a weak and compromised President in the White House. TownHall.com editor and author Kurt Schlichter wrote a piece on March 25th, 2024 that you should read. “America is Going to Be Targeted for a Massive Terrorist Attack, Will You Be Ready? Describing an October 7th type of attack, I know I am ready and I hope you will be too. Please stay Ready at All Times. Be it ChiCom or ISIS, you are America’s first responders. But then, we are Iowans and we are used to taking care of business.
Help us defend all of Iowa’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Yes, Gun-Free School Zones Are Unconstitutional! With the help of Mark Smith, on the YouTube channel Four Boxes Diner, I’ll explain why.
Those anti-gun dangerous quacks would have you believe that under the Heller decision, and later affirmed under the Bruen decision, schools are included in the “sensitive spaces” illustration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only three sensitive spaces were identified by the Supreme Court:
polling places
legislative bodies (the US Capitol Building)
some courts (generally considered the US Supreme Court)
HISTORICAL FOUNDATION
Importantly, the historical record of 1791 at the adoption of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights must be considered. At the time, only a few colleges regulated the possession of arms by students. The reason for that was that many college students were still not of majority age. That is, they were not over the age of eighteen, able to enter into contracts, vote, or own real property, for example. Mr. Smith points out that Alexander Hamilton entered Kings College in New York City at the age of sixteen! It was very common at the time of our nation’s founding that some college students entered as young as fourteen years of age.
Those 1791 colleges, and their administrators, were acting in the role of loco parentis, Latin for “in the place of a parent”. No sane person that I know of has ever argued against a parent’s right to control the use of firearms by their children. In their loco parentis role, those administrators could regulate the possession of arms by their students under their care and supervision. But clearly at that time, the very same Americans who fought off the British King and gave us the Bill of Rights -including the Second Amendment – would not have prohibited any adult from bearing arms at, near, or in schools.
PRESENT DAY
More importantly, nearly all college students in the present day are over the age of eighteen when they enter college. They are, therefore, legal adults. This prohibits the colleges from regulating their possession of arms! There is no historical evidence that law-abiding adults cannot possess arms in and around schools or school zones, whether they be colleges or your local elementary school.
Mr. Smith goes on to give us a very exhaustive explanation of why that legal issue matters. You can watch his video about this very subject here.
TIME FOR ACTION BY THE IOWA SENATE
IFC and our partners at the NRA are still involved in the legislative fight at the Iowa Senate on important legislation involving the Students First Safety Act, and the Gadsden License Plate initiatives. Please go over to the IFC Action Alert page and use it to reach out to your State Senator encouraging him or her to support these bills.
Personally, I find it repulsive that in the last three years, the Iowa Senate has ignored Iowan’s demands to act on these important issues. They seem to forget that in 2022, 65.17% of Iowa voters (in a bi-partisan vote) supported the Freedom Amendment. Yet the Senate continues to refuse to act to clean up the current Iowa Code to bring it in line with the Bruen decision and the 49th Amendment to the Iowa Constitution.
Yes, it’s obvious from my arguments at the beginning of this President’s Message that the need for the Student First Safety Act should be moot. However, getting things done legislatively is faster than waiting for the US Supreme Court to rule on something that could take a decade to get done. Frankly, when it comes to our kids, Time and Math proves we can’t wait.
Help us defend all Iowan’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today. And please stay Ready at All Times.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Unserious Dangerous Quacks. As many of you know, I love referring to our opposition as dangerous quacks. Nothing points out how those leftists have twisted themselves into knots over their ever-changing definitions of things.
It wasn’t that long ago when in her confirmation hearing (now) Justice Jackson-Brown could not define what a woman is. When asked that question, she answered: “I’m not a biologist”. Just a few days ago, she stated that a bump-stock increased the rate of fire of an AR15 to 800 rounds per second!
But it gets even worse with those Leftist Dangerous Quacks. A national treasure, Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana, took apart federal Judge Nancy Maldonado when he asked her to define an assault weapon.
“You said, ‘Assault weapons may be banned because they’re extraordinarily dangerous and are not appropriate for legitimate self-defense purposes’. Tell me what you meant by assault weapons? “
Judge Maldonado did everything she could to not answer that question, despite having signed a Legal Brief on the issue years before in her role as an anti-gun activist!
This is just one more example of it being time to end the Chevron Deference ruling that allows the courts to defer to “reasonable” agency interpretation of ambiguous federal statutes. It is high time to start calling out the absurd idea that unelected government experts be given authority over everyday Americans. Or, for that matter, Federal Judges with no idea about the subject matter over which they rule.
Elections have consequences. Let’s push the anti-gun and anti-freedom leftists out of power this November.
Iowa Legislative Update
We have passed the second funnel. Our priorities, both The Students First Safety Act and the Gadsden Flag Iowa license plates bills are still sitting in the Iowa Senate awaiting action. Please keep the pressure on your Senators through the IFC Action Alert System on these two bills.
Help us defend all Iowan’s rights by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today. And please stay Ready at All Times.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
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This new research, I think is really important. 
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