Surprise: Washington Post Rails Against Firearms After Texas Church Shooting

They have absolutely no idea how Keith Kinnunen obtained his shotgun, a weapon that Gun Grabbers usually approve of because they are for hunting, but, they are still going to go hardcore

The Texas church shooter should never have had access to a firearm

Lives were saved when a member of the volunteer security team at a Texas church fatally shot a gunman who had opened fire on the congregation during a Sunday morning church service. Thanks and praise for his skilled actions are due Jack Wilson. But what must not be forgotten or forgiven is that two innocent people were shot to death in a house of prayer by a man who — despite a troubled and violent past — had access to a gun because of this country’s lax gun laws.

“Keith is a violent, paranoid person with a long line of assault and batteries with and without firearms. He is a religious fanatic, says he’s battling a demon . . . He is not nice to anyone.” That is how one of his ex-wives described the gunman in 2012 as she sought a protective order against him. Keith Thomas Kinnunen, 43, who killed church deacon Anton Wallace, 64, and church security volunteer Richard White, 67, at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Tex., had an extensive rap sheet in numerous places across the United States. Included in his troubled history was the 2012 determination by an Oklahoma judge that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial on charges he attacked the owner of a doughnut shop; he was committed to a psychiatric facility. In 2016, he was arrested after being spotted acting suspiciously near an oil refinery in New Jersey while armed with a shotgun; he ended up pleading guilty to criminal trespass.

None of that prevented him from getting a firearm. Exactly how is unclear, but Texas has one of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws with no requirements for background checks when the seller is not a licensed dealer. That irrational permissiveness needs to be addressed, but gun advocates — cheered on by President Trump — instead seized on the terrible events to promote their agenda that the answer to gun violence is more guns. So much for not politicizing tragedy. And never mind the rates of suicides and homicides in Texas, or that the state has been home to some of the country’s deadliest mass shootings.

See, we should blame Trump. Of course. And Texas. And unlicensed gun dealers. Despite not knowing how he obtained the weapon. Despite there being lots and lots of shootings in states with every bit of gun control (excepting pure bannings and confiscation like they really want).

No licensed dealer would sell him a gun, because he was already banned from owning one. That 2016 arrest? One of the charges was unlawful possession of a weapon. Because he’s a felon. But, hey, criminals always obey the law, right?

The hero in Sunday’s shooting was not, as gun advocates would want us to believe, an ordinary churchgoer — the proverbial “good guy with a gun” — but rather a firearms instructor and gun range owner who has been a reserve deputy with a local sheriff’s department. It’s not hard to imagine an even greater tragedy if there had been someone less skilled than Mr. Wilson or if the shooter had been armed with a weapon that didn’t require it to be reloaded. Indeed, the next madman intent on killing as many people as possible, rather than being deterred by Sunday’s events, might conclude that he needs a more lethal weapon. Those who see more armed guards as the only answer are driving down a road of ever-intensifying escalation.

Of course they have to downplay this, but, really, it doesn’t matter what Jack Wilson’s pedigree is, he’s a private citizen engaging in his right to carry and plugged Kinnunen.

Instead of turning churches and schools into armed camps, we should do a better job of keeping guns away from people who shouldn’t have them. Gun control that includes strong background checks makes sense, as a majority of Americans understand.

Again, Kinnunen wouldn’t pass any background check. Further, how do you take away an illegally owned, and probably illegally obtained, firearm away from someone if you don’t know they have it? Well, with gun registration, of course. Which is where the Dem Gun Grabbers policies are going.

Read: Surprise: Washington Post Rails Against Firearms After Texas Church Shooting »

For New Year’s, Climahypocrite Doesn’t Want To Be A Climahypocrite Anymore

And Warmist Conal Hanna has ideas

I’m a climate change hypocrite — but I’m making a New Year’s resolution to do things differently

….. (snip through a bunch of paragraphs)

If we are to neutralise the threat of climate change, we must first neutralise the power of self-interest. But doing so requires a hard look at ourselves.

Earlier last year I found myself becoming riled up by the same circular discussion we’ve been having for decades now: that Australia alone can’t make a difference to global emissions, and we need to await some magical consensus that includes big emitters like China and the US.

“But we should be setting an example!” I cried.

Then I applied the same logic to my own life. And my hypocrisy was laid bare.

Shocking, eh? Imagine a Warmist being a hypocrite. But, hey, what’s Conal going to do?

That’s why our family — who have done a bit, but are by no means model citizens — is planning to make one new life-long, carbon-reducing resolution every month in 2020.

We’re going to re-examine all aspects of our lives: from diet and purchasing habits, to leisure activities and super investments. There will be no gimmicky “my year without …” abstinence. Each commitment will be something we’re willing to do forever from that point on.

So, obviously, giving up fossil fuels, downsize to a tiny home, live only on wind and solar, grow own food, etc?

First up is a war on ignorance: I’m going to commit at least one hour a week to reading about the impact I’m having on the planet. It’s not the most dramatic first step, but it will ensure each subsequent resolution is well informed.

We’re also aiming to eliminate (as much as possible) our standby power use. Simple things: switching the TV off at the wall, turning the wi-fi off overnight, etc. Using electricity more mindfully.

We are not seeking immediate perfection, simply to each month become better than we were before. Not only does this stepped approach make it more likely our new habits will stick but, if more people were to follow suit, it would give the economy time to adjust to the effects of large-scale change.

So, pretty much nothing of consequence. Surprise?

Read: For New Year’s, Climahypocrite Doesn’t Want To Be A Climahypocrite Anymore »

If All You See…

…is horrible heat snow which will disappear in the future, you might just be a Warmist

IAYS

The blog of the day is Climate Change Dispatch, with a post on St. Greta being the living example of the Left’s beliefs.

Read: If All You See… »

Happy 2020! Here’s The Annual Climate Challenge And Pinup!

Happy New Year’s! Welcome to 2020! And one year closer to End Of Life As We Know it. 2150 and 2200 are fast approaching, the primary dates that the climate alarmists always want to use to denote when Earth is going to burn, baby, burn in fire, dan dan daaaan, fire, dan dan daaaaan.

New Year’s is usually a time when we make resolutions which we abandon when we realize that chocolate, bacon, and beer are great (and bacon cooked in beer and covered with chocolate!) In the blogosphere, we often make predictions for the New Year. Instead, how about a challenge? I’ve done this every year since 2011: will Warmists take it?

Read More »

Read: Happy 2020! Here’s The Annual Climate Challenge And Pinup! »

2020 Will The Last Election Not About ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

If ‘climate change’ is so darned important, why is 2020 not about ‘climate change’? Oh, right, because most people care only in theory, not practice, and don’t want to even spend $10 a month of their own money on “solving” it. But, the Cult of Climastrology will keep pushing pushing pushing

2020 Will Be the Last Election That’s Not About Climate Change

It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to notice he was not named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2019.

So, of course this piece starts out with some Trump Derangement Syndrome. That goes a couple more paragraphs, let’s skip them

That article was real. “In a world where hundreds of millions of human beings still go hungry and the global recession has left all but the wealthiest fearing for their future, it’s easy to wonder why we should be concerned about the dwindling of the planet’s biodiversity,” Bryan Walsh wrote from Madagascar in 2009. “The answer is that we can’t afford not to.”

The substance of that argument hasn’t changed in the last decade, only its urgency. “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing,” Thunberg told the United Nations in September. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

So, what did Obama and the rest of the climate scam believing world leaders do?

Yet, as an election looms in 2020, money and fairy tales about economic growth are still most likely motivating voters, not climate change. But things are changing. It’s almost inevitable that this will be the last election where climate change is not the top issue at the ballot box.

Haven’t we heard this for 30 years?

In November, polling firm Engagious hosted a focus group of swing voters in Youngstown, Ohio. A few of them supported Thunberg, but also said she shouldn’t be the face of the global climate movement. “You have to win hearts and minds,” one man said. “It’s as much marketing as it is education… In this kind of argument, where you have people say it’s a hoax and people who say the world is coming to an end, you have to be able to persuade.”

And yet it seems Thunberg has been persuasive. She’s inspired millions of people to march in climate protests across the planet. Her success is no doubt partly due to her being so young, so firm, and so committed to her cause, and she deserves the accolades she has received. At the same time, Thunberg appears to be pushing against an open door, globally and in the United States.

And yet it seems that most of those young people aren’t actually making changes in their own lives, just marching and Demanding stuff that affects Other People. So, pretty much business as usual with members of the Cult of Climastrology.

Despite the ongoing blind fealty Republicans in Washington, D.C. pay to Trump, his decisions to remove the United States from the Paris climate accord, or to roll back offshore drilling regulations, or to allow for more logging on federal lands, may start to play badly within his party — particularly with its youth wing. This year, Pew found that younger Republicans are more likely to support climate-conscious policies. They’re less likely to support expanding coal mining than their older GOP peers, and more likely to support expanding solar farms. Millennial Republicans are also more likely than older Republicans to say that climate change is having “at least some effect” on their community.

And then they enter the Real World and put away childish things.

Climate change, David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth, is “not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met — a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world’s future problems and all of its possible solutions.”

Climate cultists like to place every issue under the banner of Hotcoldwetdry. But, if they think this and young voters will somehow make it a major force in elections after 2020, well, good luck. People really do not care that much.

You know what this does show, though? That this is all about politics, not science.

Read: 2020 Will The Last Election Not About ‘Climate Change’ Or Something »

Rep Al Green Admits Impeachment Was Always The Democrat Goal

The impeachment theater of the Democrats was always political, it was always unhinged, and it began even before Trump was elected

Rep. Al Green: The ‘genesis’ of Trump’s impeachment began when he was ‘running for office’

One of the most vocal pro-impeachment Democratic voices on Capitol Hill said the “genesis” of President Trump’s impeachment began long before the Ukraine scandal.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, one of the first lawmakers to push for Trump’s impeachment, appeared on MSNBC on Monday and was confronted about the president, and how his allies have weaponized Green’s outspokenness against Democrats.

“Political expediency and insincerity — those are two charges that have been leveled against Democrats during this entire affair, particularly since September when the formal impeachment inquiry started, and you play a starring role in those charges,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes said to Green.

“The argument goes like this of House Republicans and Trump and his allies: the Democrats wanted to impeach Donald Trump from day one, they cast about looking for a set of facts that they could plausibly use to do it, and all of it was pretextual and reverse-engineered to get to this point, and Exhibit One: Congressman Al Green, who [has] been calling for the man’s impeachment for two years now,” Hayes said. “What’s your response to that charge?”

Green didn’t deny the charge being made against him.

“Well, the genesis of impeachment, to be very candid with you, was when the president was running for office and he had members of his own party to talk about his unfitness to hold office,” Green told Hayes, later citing rhetoric from Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah; Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., from the 2016 election. “So the president didn’t have the luxury of persons from his party having been on his side as it were throughout this entire ordeal.”

OMG, same party people criticizing him? Impeach!

He continued: “With those things in mind and with the president’s behavior before us, firing Mr. [James] Comey who was investigating the intrusion of Russia into his campaign, our election — that was something that was not to be tolerated. And the president has continued to try to thwart the efforts of Congress to investigate with Mr. [Robert] Mueller.”

Impeachment was always the goal, especially after Trump won the GOP nomination. They talked about it, recommended it just in case he won (which they thought would never happen), then ramped it up the minute he actually won. Then codified it when Trump took office, looking for any excuse, no matter how minor, no matter that it would be just business as usual. No matter that they will set a standard that politics as usual would mean impeaching a Democrat president in the future. They are deranged.

Read: Rep Al Green Admits Impeachment Was Always The Democrat Goal »

New Hampshire Looks To Require Schoolkids To Learn About ‘Climate Change’ (scam)

Now, just imagine the apoplexy if someone was looking to pass a bill requiring that the Bible be taught in public schools. Religions, and cults, should not be taught in school by Government decree

Bill would require schools to have climate change lessons

A bill up for consideration before the New Hampshire Legislature in 2020 would require school districts to offer lessons on climate change.

The House bill would require at least 10 hours of climate education or a full semester of environmental education in high school, and anywhere from two hours to eight hours for younger students. It would take effect July 1, 2021.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Balch, a Democrat from Hillsborough, said some teachers incorporate climate change into their science curriculum, but it’s the state’s responsibility to prioritize it.

“We need to have a common base of knowledge of what climate change is, how it works, how it happens, what we can do about it,” he told New Hampshire Public Radio. (snip)

The bill focuses on causes and effects of climate change in New Hampshire and beyond; maximizing energy efficiency in homes and schools; information about careers in solar, wind, hydrogen power; and other topics.

Does anyone want to bet that only the Cult of Climastrology view will be taught? Being New Hampshire, you can be assured that this bill will pass.

Read: New Hampshire Looks To Require Schoolkids To Learn About ‘Climate Change’ (scam) »

If All You See…

…is a wonderful low carbon sailing ship, you might just be a Warmist

IAYS

The blog of the day is hogewash, with a post on when the narrative that citizens don’t need firearms for self protection begins to fail.

Read: If All You See… »

Sheriff Joe Thinks We’re All Dead If We Don’t Stop Using Fossil Fuels

What Joe Biden really means is that you have to be forced to give up fossil fuels, as he runs around the country using vast amounts of fossil fuels

From the link

Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed during a Sunday campaign event that “we’re all dead” if fossil fuels continue to be used as one of the world’s primary energy sources.

Biden made the apocalyptic pronouncement while discussing climate change before a crowd of supporters in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

“If we don’t stop using fossil fuels–” an attendee began a question to the candidate.

“We’re all dead,” Biden interrupted.

Dead, people, dead!!!!!!

Joe wants to hold them liable, and if they don’t comply, jail them. What of people who use the product in vast amounts while traveling around the country and the world as the political gentry? What about…

It is unclear whether Biden meant he would also imprison his own son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of directors of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings between 2014-2016. The younger Biden was reportedly paid up to $83,000 as a Burisma board member, despite having no expertise in the energy sector.

Joe just wants to jail everyone.

Read: Sheriff Joe Thinks We’re All Dead If We Don’t Stop Using Fossil Fuels »

Times Square New Years Ball Drop Theme Is About ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

But, of course it is. A city that would collapse without fossil fuels will host a ball drop celebration where thousands and thousands will take fossil fueled trips to NYC, tons of energy will be used, people will be wearing clothes shipped from all over the world with fossil fuels, and etc and so on

The theme for this year’s Times Square ball drop? Climate change.

Tens of thousands of people gather in and around Times Square every New Year’s Eve, many braving the winter cold for several hours, just to witness New York City’s world-renowned ball drop to ring in the new year.

Every year, the organizers of the event invite special guests to push a crystal button on the main stage to signal that it’s time to drop the ball. Last year’s special guests were 12 prominent journalists, reflecting the theme of press freedom. Previous guests have ranged from former President Bill Clinton to Lady Gaga, so you can imagine our excitement when we found out that this year’s theme is … drumroll please … climate change!

From ice sheets crumbling and wildfires raging around the globe to kids taking climate matters into their own hands to Time magazine naming Greta Thunberg Person of the Year, 2019 was definitely a breakthrough year for climate change.

That’s why the event’s organizers, Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, decided that this year’s ball drop will honor New York City science teachers and students who have been working hard to address the climate crisis.

“You’d have to have your head buried in the Saudi Arabian sand to not be alarmed by all of the environmental catastrophes of 2019,” Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, said in a statement. “And you’d also have to have a soul of Styrofoam not to be moved by the passion of young people demanding that we do better, and ‘listen to the science’ to start solving the problem.”

How many people will be holding cups of coffee and hot chocolate (and alcohol) in Styrofoam cups? Anyhow, a bunch of kids and teachers who are Concerned over Hotcoldwetdry will be on the stage to push the button that starts the ball dropping, then, everyone will drink too much and throw confetti in the air and expel carbon pollution as they sing. Then they’ll take a fossil fueled trip home.

What they should have done was block off Times Square and charge a ‘climate change’ fee to each person who wants to enter, turn this from a theory into a practice, see how people like it.

Read: Times Square New Years Ball Drop Theme Is About ‘Climate Change’ Or Something »

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