by Dave Funk | Oct 24, 2023
DEFUND THE ATF? Where Does Your Presidential Wannabe Stand, Iowa?
DEFUND THE ATF? Where does your presidential wannabe stand on this Iowa? With the obvious total failure of gun control costing thousands of lives in Israel just days ago, every Iowa Republican caucus-goer needs to know exactly where the POTUS candidates stand on this question.
We all have friends who are Federal Agents. Most of them understand the roles and Constitutional duties of their offices. Many of them have also quietly spoken to me about the necessity to clean the houses of the politicians in their agencies and getting back to core missions.
Freedom is about more than just “keeping the program funded”. It’s an important part of why the Founders wrote the Enumerated Powers Clause of the US Constitution. Of the five powers granted Congress, none of them included gun control in any form.
This is not just a DC Swamp vs the rest of America question. This is about the next step in ensuring that Americans continue to have the ability to defend not just themselves, but our communities, and with the open border invasion being allowed by President Biden’s Administration, our country.
America’s Founding Fathers clearly understood the necessity of the government not having a monopoly on power. Of all the things that they wrote about in the first ten amendments to our Bill of Rights, the second most important thing after being safe in your beliefs, thoughts, and speech was that every person should have a gun!
Clearly, a majority of our friends in Israel now see the need for an armed population that is Ready at All Times, and not just a few military members or the police.
Help us educate Iowan’s on the facts by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
President, IFC
by Dave Funk | Oct 17, 2023
Dangerous Quacks — The Next Generation Is With Us!
President’s Message:
Dangerous Quacks — The Next Generation is with us, and I’m not talking about another Star Trek series. On October 12, 2023, Kennedy Lein, a fourth-year undergraduate student with a double major in Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, penned an opinion piece on Rural Gun Violence in The Daily Iowan. Her other contributions to that publication include pieces on wind energy and food insecurity for college students.
Getting to the gist of her piece that opens with this statement:
“Gun violence, especially in rural areas, has been an overlooked issue for many years.
According to NBC News, two decades of data shows that gun violence is worse in rural areas than big cities.
This issue is largely overlooked by the public and lawmakers alike.
As stated in a study in a study from the American Medical Association, “high rates of gun homicide in urban centers have been the sole focus of many policymakers and used as justification to loosen gun laws, when in fact gun violence is an issue in counties of all sizes.”
As I read through the article, I noticed that the author cited nothing but anti-gun studies and publications as her basis for her conclusions. What’s more, she lumped into what she calls “Gun Violence” accidental shootings and suicides committed with firearms. What amazes me is that the author used such limited data to come to her conclusions. It takes but one murder in a town of 100 people in a four-year period to skew the data to make it look like a town in rural America is more dangerous than Chicago on a per 1,000,000 people comparison.
She closes with this statement:
“Politicians and citizens have the power to change the narrative about gun violence. The facts are there, and this will only get worse if nothing is done.
Rural areas need to have stricter gun laws, but most importantly, there needs to be light shed on the gun violence crisis that is happening in rural America. Before we lose any more innocent lives to gun violence, let’s put an end to it.”
Apparently not just the majority of Iowa voters firmly rejected her arguments, when they passed with 65.17% of the vote, the Freedom Amendment last November, but my guess is that a majority of our friends in Israel clearly see the need for an armed population that is Ready at All Times.
Ms. Lein is representative of the next generation of anti-gun dangerous quacks. Help us educate Iowans on the facts by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
President, IFC
by Dave Funk | Oct 3, 2023
Abolishing the ATF is Starting to Go Mainstream
This week let’s cover some important 2A news from the Ninth Circuit court and news about abolishing the ATF. Let’s start first with a tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter) by none other than well-known Dana Loesch on abolishing the ATF:
Dana Loesch reacting to a White House post, on X 10:20 AM · Sep 25, 2023
“It’s not extreme. This whole damn department should be abolished.”
The White House
@WhiteHouse
Sep 24
“Extreme House Republicans want to take 70 ATF agents off the beat as a condition of keeping the government open.”
Sounds like a great start, but not an extreme position to me. Another powerful opinion piece by Jeff Charles titled Abolishing the ATF; Why It Makes More Sense Than Ever Before can be found over at RedState.com. It is behind a paywall, but I highly recommend it. Biden Administration official Andrew Bates is trying to link the fentanyl crisis to the GOP, as illustrated by the recent exchange between him and NBC News accusing the GOP of assisting the cartels by opposing the ATF;
“MAGA Republican extremism in Congress is a growing threat to the fight against violent crime and fentanyl trafficking. President Biden is working hard to prevent the flow of firearms into the hands of drug cartels, as part of a comprehensive strategy to block the flow of fentanyl into the United States. But hardcore MAGA members of Congress are doing everything they can to thwart these efforts.”
If that were true, Biden and his minions would be supporting Border Patrol and DEA agents, not highlighting what is essentially a support agency, to secure the US-Mexican border. Most Iowans see projection and flat-out lies for what they are.
California Courts’ News This Week
We have all heard for years that the average number of shots fired in a Defensive Gun Use (DGU) is 2.2 rounds. Well, Federal Judge Roger Benitez in California completely took apart the 2.2 rounds per DGU canard that turns out to be a made-up number, completely anecdotal data. The fact is that the number of shots fired was unknown 69% of the time according the the very study the State Of California statistician used when defending Duncan v. Bonta in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. That case is the one in which Judge Benitez struck down California’s greater than ten-round magazine ban. As Michael George said about Lean Six Sigma, “In God we trust, everyone else brings data”. Intentionally misrepresenting data, brings us crappy policy, as Professor John Lott pointed out recently in his article about the FBI underreporting the number of active shooters by a factor of six that are stopped by civilians.
And to follow up on the Duncan V. Bonta saga unfolding in California to close up this week’s message: Attorney Mark Smith over at The Four Boxes Diner reporting that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals thumbed its nose at the US Supreme Court on 2A issues.
“Ninth Circuit Judges VanDyke and Bumatay lambasted their Ninth Circuit colleagues last week for their decision in Duncan v. Bonta. Likely fearing a pro-2A outcome, the anti-gun en banc panel reached out in an unheard of manner to remove the case out from the normal legal process. Mark Smith Four Boxes Diner provides a geeky breakdown of what happened.”
You should watch Mark’s withering analyses over at his “The Four Boxes Diner” YouTube site. Here is his first, and his second regarding how the process is being manipulated to obtain what the liberals on that court are trying to accomplish.
Lots of examples of why each one of us needs to be Ready at All Times and never forget that those gun control dangerous quacks are still playing a long game, but then so are we at IFC. Help us by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
President, IFC
by Dave Funk | Sep 26, 2023
Is Vice President Harris being set up to fail again, as she heads up the new Office of Gun Violence Prevention? Or is this the one case where she has an adequately intelligent staff to do actual harm to America’s right to defend themselves as enshrined by our Federal Constitution’s Second Amendment and Iowa’s 49th Amendment?
Depending on who you ask, she will either muck it up completely like she has everything else she touches, or possibly the goons from Everytown and other Organizations will finally have the funding and power they need to impose on the rest of America the mess they are making in New York and other “blue” states. I tend to think she might appear to get something done for the gun controllers, but it will not turn out the way they expect. I think there are two main reasons why.
First, with the large number of minorities and women who are new gun owners as a result of the overreaching by the nanny state during Covid, I see this as a ‘bridge too far’ in the current political climate to expect all those gun owners to just lay down their arms like the Governor of New Mexico recently advocated.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
The second is the logistical nightmare that prohibition would bring. Back in 2018, I wrote an article for ClashDaily.com about the problem that searching the United States for millions of firearms would present. Here is part of that article:
… Let’s ask them about the logistics of finding and seizing the over 500 million firearms in America.
There are 199,672,842 acres of land in just the lower 48 states. Let’s do the math:
199,672,842 acres Divided by a maximum of 250,000 trained searchers (it will take time to screen, hire and train them).
That would be 798.691 acres per searcher (45,560 square feet per acre), if they worked alone at least three days per acre = 19,168.59 hours based on eight hours per day of work (union contracts after all!)
At normal full time employment rates of 2000 work hours per year, it would take 9.58 years to search just the lower 48 States for guns, assuming the entire search force would actually survive the process, unlike back in 1776 when American’s just shot the British troops who showed up to take their arms and ammunition…
Leftists must think that math does not apply to them, or perhaps it’s a problem only those schooled in common core math can solve. We can all hope that the recent rejection by a Federal District Judge of the California magazine capacity limit as unconstitutional is another example why VP Harris will eventually fail. The law is on the Rights of the People’s side.
Regardless this is another example of why each one of us needs to be Ready at All Times and never forget that those gun control dangerous quacks are still playing a long game, but then so are we at IFC. Help us by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
President, IFC
by Dave Funk | Sep 19, 2023
In this week’s President’s Message, I’ll provide a brief legal news update. First, we will start with some international news. A while back I wrote about Brazil and its experience that when the good guys are armed, murder rates drop.
This week it’s Trinidad and Tobago farmers who are asking that they be allowed to acquire firearms to defend themselves from rampant crime and cattle theft. From the Trinidad Daily Express:
“Farmers throughout the country should be granted firearm user’s [licenses] (FULs) to protect their farms from praedial larceny, according to Couva North Member of Parliament Ravi Ratiram, who called on Commissioner of Police Erla Christopher to issue licensed firearms to those affected.
Speaking at yesterday’s United National Congress (UNC) press conference, Ratiram said the country should equip farmers with the necessary tools to protect their livelihoods and safeguard produce and livestock.
… “I call upon Commissioner Erla Christopher to issue licensed firearms to registered farmers through firearm user’s [licenses] (FULs), granting them the power to safeguard their produce and livestock. This is not a plea, it’s a resounding demand for action, for change, and for justice…Commissioner Erla Christopher, the choice is yours—stand with our farmers or sit back and watch them fall victim to the criminal elements. The choice is clear, and the solution lies in your hand,” he said.
… “I spoke to one farmer who lost approximately nine head of cattle on his farm. We are talking about nearly $100,000. Farmers and fishermen have been asking for this type of relief where the Government cannot protect them, they are prepared to protect their families, their livelihoods, and properties…this is why we have issued these calls. This is something that came about in consulting with our farmers,” he said.”
Go figure…
Meanwhile, in California…
Out of the Ninth Circuit (yes, President Trump’s judicial appointments are making a difference out West) California’s law prohibiting the marketing of firearms and shooting sports to minors has been struck down for now on First Amendment grounds. Judge Kenneth Lee, writing the majority opinion stated:
“While California has a substantial interest in reducing gun violence and unlawful use of firearms by minors, its law does not “directly” and “materially” further either goal. California cannot straitjacket the First Amendment by, on the one hand, allowing minors to possess and use firearms and then, on the other hand, banning truthful advertisements about that lawful use of firearms. There is no evidence in the record that a minor in California has ever unlawfully bought a gun, let alone because of an ad. Nor has the state produced any evidence that truthful ads about lawful uses of guns—like an ad about hunting rifles in Junior Sports Magazines’ Junior Shooters—encourage illegal or violent gun use among minors. Simply put, California cannot lean on gossamers of speculation to weave an evidence-free narrative that its law curbing the First Amendment “significantly” decreases unlawful gun use among minors. The First Amendment demands more than good intentions and wishful thinking to warrant the government’s muzzling of speech.
California’s law is also more extensive than necessary, as it sweeps in truthful ads about lawful use of firearms for adults and minors alike. For instance, an advertisement directed at adults featuring a camouflage skin on a firearm might be illegal because minors may be attracted to it.”
This law’s overly broad reach to make lawmakers feel good about doing something, even if it is ineffective or unprovable, does not pass any First Amendment test whatsoever. Maybe if the Ninth Circuit keeps up this kind of behavior, it will lose its nickname “Ninth Circus”.
Moving On…
Then, in the continuing saga out of New Mexico: As you know, Governor Grisham imposed an unconstitutional Executive Order banning the open or concealed carrying of firearms for thirty days in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. It was quickly slapped down in Federal Court. An excellent analysis can be read by our friends at BearingArms.com and of course, she’s now trying to guilt the rest of us for not agreeing with her and trying to repackage it to only include parks and playgrounds. If nothing else, Gov. Grisham has displayed true contempt for both the Federal Constitution and New Mexico’s. “Karen’s” like her should never be allowed in elected office.
Lastly, in my recent Ready at All Times President’s Message I wrote about the growing ChiCom threat not just to Taiwan but also to the United States. One has to wonder why Chinese companies are smuggling suppressors and Glock Full Auto Switches into the USA packaged as toys. Well, if I were planning Mumbai-style attacks and sabotage in the US, I’d be smuggling those item’s here for the thousands of military-age Chinese males that Biden is allowing to walk across the US-Mexican border unimpeded, to provide them with the tools they need to attack Americans and our infrastructure.
If you read through the 9-11 Commission Report, a recurring theme was that our intelligence agencies did not connect the dots before the attacks. Hopefully, any post ChiCom attack on Taiwan and the USA will not cite the same errors in the future. But under apparently-compromised Joe Biden, I doubt it.
Those gun control dangerous quacks are playing a long game but so are we at IFC. Help us by joining or renewing your IFC membership here today.
Shoot Straight, Speak The Truth, and Never Surrender Our Liberties.
Dave Funk
President, IFC
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