FBI: don’t believe your lying eyes! Well, it would figure that the once-revered Federal Bureau of Investigation as the ‘best of the best’ in America has now totally succumbed to the Obama-Biden politicization of Federal Law Enforcement and our DOJ. The FBI is cooking the books when it comes to crime data in the United States, and it was another federal agency that ratted them out!
The FBI issues its Uniform Crime reports, butit fails to highlight that major cities like New York,Los Angeles, and others, don’t even report their crime data to the FBI. Also, many other cities including Baltimore and Chicago underreport theirs. Meanwhile, in its annual National Crime Victimization Survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows crime skyrocketing!
Noted economist and author Dr. John Lott just published an article about this very subject, it’s worth a full read. I’ll highlight just a few paragraphs here:
“I have pointed out before that since 2020, the FBI’s number of reported crimes and the NCVS’s number of total crimes have gone in opposite directions. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI showed a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an increase of 29.3%.
But there is a more fundamental problem. The FBI and NCVS’s estimates of reported crimes have also gone in opposite directions since 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally tended to move up and down together. But from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each other. Each time one measure of reported violent crimes rose, the other measure fell.
For example, while the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6% and 29.3%, respectively.”
Dr. Lott sums it up here:
“The news media relies on reported crime numbers without considering unreported crime. However, the gap between the two measures of reported crimes provides strong doubts about the accuracy of the FBI’s reported crime data. Americans believe that crime is increasing as law enforcement is collapsing. They also say that they are reporting more crimes to the police, but that isn’t showing up in the FBI reports.”
How can we have good public policy without good data, while many cities and the FBI are clearly cooking the books? The answer is we cannot. It’s another reason why the Framers never wanted the government to have a monopoly on power and why they enshrined our God-given right to keep and bear arms into our Constitution.
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.
Legal updates & IFC at NRAAM: This week’s President’s Message includes a couple of surprising court decisions and a heads-up that IFC will be attending the NRA Annual Meeting in Dallas this week. As President of Iowa Firearms Coalition, I was invited to speak at the Clubs & Associations Forum on Friday, May 17th. After missing the last two weeks for a much-needed vacation, I’m back at it here at IFC.
Legal Updates
These last few weeks have seen someinteresting court rulings from some surprising places.
Thisfirstunfortunately is from the Iowa Supreme Court with a ruling (I think incorrectly) that antique muzzleloading firearms are “firearms” when it comes to ‘felon in possession’ statutes. We strongly disagree with this ruling and are studying the case to see if the Iowa legislature needs to clarify this issue.
The more interesting case is that the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that non-violent convicted felons cannot be denied the right to keep and bear arms in Duarte. In Duarte, the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that they could not be denied. The case was very well summarized by Jeff Charles at RedState:
“The court’s ruling repudiated an earlier Ninth Circuit decision in United States v. Vongxay and argued that the decision was “clearly irreconcilable” with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen. The Vongxay ruling upheld federal laws prohibiting felons from owning firearms.
The court applied Bruen’s two-step framework, acknowledging that Duarte, as an American citizen, is part of “the people” covered by the Second Amendment and rejected the state’s argument that felons are excluded from its constitutional protections.
At Bruen’s second step, the court determined that “The Government put forward no ‘well-established and representative historical analogue’ that ‘impose[d] a comparable burden on the right of armed self-defense’ that was ‘comparably justified’ to the current law’s “sweeping, no-exception, lifelong ban.”
Why This is Surprising
What is striking to me is that this same court just overruled its own prior decision in United States v. Vongxay. That case previously upheld the federal ban on felons’ possession of firearms. You might remember that the current SCOTUS session included a case I’ve previously written about, United States v. Rahimi, challenging that ban. That ruling has yet to be passed down from SCOTUS but is expected shortly.
At the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the only felonies defined by law were capital crimes like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and a few others. At that time, capital crimes were mostly punishable by death. Because those were so serious, persons convicted of them lost their constitutional rights.
This ruling might be the 9th Circuit’s attempt to set up a future Bruen-limiting SCOTUS ruling. For now, however, the Bruen decision is upending nearly everything related to gun bans and prohibitions. Its impact will be felt for years–and that is good news. I’ll follow up in the next few weeks in a future President’s Message, with the “in common use” standard. I think that standard may be the answer to nearly every unconstitutional gun ban starting with the 1934 National Firearms Act to the present.
Please post a comment below on this issue for us. We’d like to get your input on this important question.
National Rifle Association Annual Meeting 2024
NRAAM is this week, and a couple of members of our Executive Committee will be in attendance in Dallas. On Friday morning, May 17th, I have the honor of presenting about IFC’s social media efforts. I’ll be talking about how we successfully spread the truth regarding the Second Amendment far and wide. As the 2020 and 2022’s ‘NRA Outstanding State Association of the Year’, IFC continues to set the pace when it comes to leveraging both social and earned media.
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.
Tyranny is the problem with the progressive anti-liberty mindset. Whenever possible, they employ tyranny over us with glee and enthusiasm. Why? Because they tell themselves they’re saving us from ourselves. It isn’t that the 2A or 1A are fundamental problems. Rather, the average progressive, post-modern, neo-Marxist, or run-of-the-mill left winger can’t handle a world they don’t control. It won’t matter to them that you and I, among 99% of the rest of us do well, sometimes even great, with the exercise of our civil liberties, but more that they can’t imagine doing anything of the sort themselves. And because they can’t think through what it would be like to defend oneself with a firearm, they seek to remove any choice for you to do so.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Lewis does a pretty good job of outlining this fundamental problem in the quote above. If you cut to the core of these silly progressive liberal arguments, you inevitably come to one irrefutable truth. They can’t possibly grapple with the precept surrounding responsibility and consequence. They wish to place upon us restrictions that make them feel better about themselves with simultaneous safety nets to make it work.
Why safety nets you ask? Well, when the consequences are no longer bound to the choices we make, we simply don’t learn the lesson. Without lessons learned, we are apt to make more bad choices. With more bad choices, we see poor outcomes associated with everything you can chart, categorize, or easily reference. To avoid the truth associated with such endeavors, safety nets are necessary to mask the logical conclusion that ethics matter and serve as the basis for our morals in action.
This isn’t to say progs don’t care about people. Of course, they do. But they don’t love them enough to allow them to grow in ways that can often result in a bruised knee or a scraped elbow. My dad pushed me down the driveway, which had a considerable grade, without training wheels, and yelled, “Peddle son!” Guess what? I learned to ride a bike in 7 seconds. How long might it have taken me if I’d had training wheels on? I’m unsure, as it was the road not traveled. But I’m guessing longer than 7 seconds. Dad wasn’t wrestling his own mind about what was going to happen or not happen when he gave me a push. He had sized me up, knew I was probably ready to rock, and gave me a shove. Progs have a hard time with that metaphorically speaking, so they tend to avoid the possibility it won’t go well, by placing everyone on perpetual training wheels for their own good.
Unfortunately, their version of training wheels is perpetual intolerance of us while demanding 100% tolerance of them. Thus, tyranny and Hell on Earth. Pay close attention to what they say when they’re talking. They rarely skip an opportunity to talk down to you. Go read the Lewis quote above again, and let it sink in.
News from the NSSF reveals alarming statistics about ATF’s activities. Last week, in a blog called “This is New York“, we told you about Judge Darkeh who said “‘Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.’ That Judge obviously feels that New York is exempt from the Second Amendment due to restrictive (and unconstitutional) state laws.
“Only in New York” – am I right?…Except that’s no longer true. It is not just New York. Several states have passed laws in defiance of the Bruen case. I believe that lawfare is one of the many ways the current regime, backed by an unleashed and out-of-control ATF, is attempting to make our exercise of Second Amendment rights too expensive, too risky and too much trouble to participate in and enjoy. IF we give up.
ATF’s Nefarious Activities
Another example of this effort is the ATF’s use of Zero-Tolerance to close down gun shops. The National Shooting Sports Foundation shared this article “ATF ‘Zero-Tolerance’ Revocations Continue at Blistering Pace”, regarding the ATF’s Zero-Tolerance policy and the aggressive closure of gun shops around the country.
The campaign to shutter firearm retailers over minor clerical errors, called a “zero-tolerance” policy, is having devastating effects on small businesses and the ability for law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights by freely approaching a firearm retailer for a purchase.
The number of inspections, warning letters, settlement conferences, license revocations AND the number of FFLs which “voluntarily” gave up their licenses after interaction with the ATF in order to avoid protracted and expensive investigations, have skyrocketed under the Biden’s gun-control regime. Even those dealers which do not have any violations are “named and shamed” by the ATF, and rather than face an onslaught of threats and inspections preventing them from conducting their lawful businesses, they simply fold. But the ATF has it backwards and upside down!
All this adds up to the ATF carrying out a politically-driven agenda to drive firearm retailers out of business rather than the ATF inspection process being used as it was designed – to assist firearm retailers to operate their lawful business in compliance with the laws and regulations governing the sale of firearms.
There are efforts afoot to rein in the ATF, however. Our own Senator Ernst introduced a bill to do so, as described in this recent Press Release from her office.
Biden’s ATF has had it out for gun owners since day one,” Ernst said. “For years, the Biden administration has cracked down on law-abiding gun dealers to advance its gun-grabbing agenda, even preventing small businesses from making a living. Rather than helping dealers comply with the law, Biden’s ATF has created more hurdles to legally sell guns, so it can turn around and revoke licenses for inconsequential, so-called ‘violations.’.
The fate of Senator Ernst’s bill remains to be seen, but at the least it brings the ATF’s actions into sharp and questionable focus.
NSSF’s Project ChildSafe
In other news from the NSSF, they are promoting firearms safety during National Safety Month and in advance of the upcoming June 11th Responsible Gun Owners Day, pointing out that:
Over the last two years, there have been more than 14 million first-time gun owners, many of them seeking guidance on training and safety education at firearm retailers, shooting ranges and through NSSF’s Project ChildSafe program. Firearm ownership is a right enjoyed by millions of Americans, and with that right comes the responsibility to safely handle and store firearms when they’re not in use. Project ChildSafe has a vast library of firearm safety resources available to gun owners to help prevent accidents, theft and misuse, including suicide.
The Press Release is here for your review and consideration. IFC strongly supports responsible firearms ownership and gun safety, and we hope the links from this article are helpful to you and your families:
Top Project ChildSafe resources for firearm owners:
A newly-updated digital brochure on best practices for secure firearm storage
A Guide for Parents: Understanding Youth Mental Health and Preventing Unauthorized Access to Firearms and corresponding video, developed in partnership with AFSP
A video highlighting How to Have a Conversation with Children About Firearm Safety
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GUNCON 2024 is happening and it isn’t too late to get your tickets and be part of the “collective” as it were… This event is the next evolution of our TGC Panel you know and love. We are bringing together some of the top content creators, some of your favorite brands, and YOU all at the Brownells HQ! There will be tours of the Brownells facility, tons of cool guns and gear, as well as some big giveaways!
The Gun Collective is brought to you by Jon Patton, and he produces all the content for TGC. Jon makes every effort to be honest and forthright, focusing on educating firearm owners and enthusiasts, while pay close attention to continual quality content. The news, reviews, videos, or podcasts you see coming from TGC is top tier. That’s what makes GUNCON 2024 being held in our neighborhood so exciting. You can listen to the panelist discussions, talk to vendors directly, and shake hands with the people you’ve followed for years. GET YOUR TICKETS HERE.
IFC is a sponsor! Read all about GUNCON 2024 HERE. Listen in with Michael Ware of IFC and Jon Patton of The Gun Collective as they discuss what is going on with GUNCON 2024 right here in the middle of little ol’ Iowa.
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