GUN CONTROL2

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SEE FOUR

Absolutists At WallBuilders Suddenly Find An Exception After The Latest ICE Shooting

01/26/2026

For years, the trio of Christian nationalist pseudo-historians at WallBuilders have been radical Second Amendment absolutists, with founder David Barton asserting over and over again that the Constitution protects not just an individual right to own guns, but that is places absolutely "no limitation" on an individual's right to own "whatever you can get your hands," including tanks, fighter jets, and even nuclear weapons.

"We need the ability to protect and defend ourselves against [the] government," said Barton's son, Tim, in 2018. "We wanted to make sure the people had the same means of defense as a government might have offensive weapons, so we need the same level of weapons to defend ourselves as we're going to be attacked with because we didn't want to disadvantage the people from being able to defend themselves against a tyrannical government."

WallBuilders has dedicated multiple episodes of its radio program to highlighting "the critical role that informed, active citizenship, and the Second Amendment play in protecting our cherished liberties." Those programs featured presentations delivered by WallBuilders co-host Rick Green, who teaches "constitutional defense" courses at his Patriot Academy that provide "physical and intellectual training on the 2nd Amendment ... so that you can better understand the history and importance of the great Right to Self-Defense."

The entire premise of Green's course is that "all Americans" should be carrying weapons everywhere at all times and be trained and prepared to protect themselves and other, especially "from the tyranny of the government."

Given such views, one would expect that Green and the Bartons would be outraged by the killing of Alex Prettiby ICE agents in Minneapolis over the weekend. Pretti, who was filming ICE agents during an operation, was legally carrying a weapon in a holster when he was confronted by multiple ICE agents who shoved him to the ground and attempted to subdue him. During the scrum, one agent removed Pretti's weapon just seconds before another agent fired multiple shots into Pretti's back, killing him.

On their radio program today, Green and the Bartons blamed Pretti for his own death.

"I think we do a pretty good job of being intellectually honest and being consistent," Green said. "You mentioned this thing in Minneapolis. We have always said—whether it was the BLM riots of 2020, whether it was Jan. 6th at the Capitol, whether it was these things in Minneapolis, wherever it is—we have always consistently said, 'You don't fight law enforcement.' You don't go in and physically be violent with law enforcement. You are asking for trouble. You don't resist arrest. You don't climb through a broken window; that's the last line of defense for police officers defending members of Congress from what was literally on that side of the Capitol, a mob. You don't take a gun into a protest situation like this where you could end up in a scuffle with police officers."

"So," Green continued, "we can be intellectually honest and consistent in this. It's not based on our emotions or who the player is in that situation, who's president, who's protesting or not protesting, it's based on the principles. And I just want to point that out because I can't say that about even some of our conservative friends. Sometimes they the position based on who the players are, whereas we take the position—we try to, and I think, again, we're pretty consistent to this—we take the position based on what the principles are."

"You know, this guy that got shot and all about him being the victim; look, when it turns out you don't have any ID on you and you came in with multiple magazines, don't tell me you're a peaceful protester," David Barton replied. "In a court of law, that establishes intent right there. You have no ID; you leave that away so you can't be ID'd, and you carry multiple magazines? Not good."

"All three of us talk openly about the fact we conceal carry all the time," Tim Barton added. "It's going to be very unusual if you find us without having a handgun on us. And Rick, I know for you and me often, we'll carry multiple magazines and pocket knives, sometimes a tourniquet. We carry different things, so it's not crazy that somebody might have a firearm and have multiple magazines. However, when law enforcement is doing an operation and then you go to intervene, as you would call it, or interfere, as they would acknowledge, and then you put hands on an officer?"

"We don't yet have all the information," Tim Barton continued. "We haven't seen it all. So we don't know if in the wrestling, they saw his shirt lifted, they see the gun, or if he actually reached for the gun. We don't know. We know somebody yells 'gun.' We know they discharge their firearms, and we know he goes to stand before Jesus. That's what we know. But the bottom line is even if you are legally carrying, when you put your hands on an officer and it goes to the ground, at that point, you've already messed up so many ways. If you're showing up without ID, it could be because you have intention and motive beyond what maybe the liberal media is pretending like he did. But even if you were an innocent bystander, you don't intervene and put hands on an officer and you go to the ground where there's a firearm and there's multiple officers telling you to stop resisting and you continue to resist."

IFrame Content

There are multiple videos documenting the deadly confrontation and none of them show any evidence of Pretti ever "putting hands" on any of the ICE officers or brandishing his weapon. Every video shows Pretti directing traffic while filming ICE officers and then attempting to help another protester who had been shoved by an agent, at which point Pretti was doused with pepper spray and attacked by multiple agents, one of whom fatally shot him moments later.

WallBuilders has spent decades promoting a truly radical interpretation of the Second Amendment while openly encouraging everyone to exercise their Second Amendment rights at all times and in all places in order to fend off "a tyrannical government." But when a protestor documenting government brutality is killed by authorities, WallBuilders rushes to defend the government and blame that protester for legally carrying a firearm while absurdly praising itself for its supposed commitment to principles and intellectual consistency.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/revealed-leaked-memo-shows-the-republican-partys-vile-strategy-to-respond-to-mass-shootings-with-lies/

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Revealed: Leaked memo shows the Republican Party’s vile strategy to respond to mass shootings with lies

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos August 16, 2019

In the wake of the most recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, congressional Republicans have been circulating a “memo,” on how to discuss gun violence. The Tampa Bay Times obtained this memo and report that while not shocking to most people here, the depth of cynicism and craven hypocrisy on the part of Republicans knows no bottom. According to the Times, the memo discusses the general rhetorical tricks of handling questions about closing existing gun law loopholes instead of creating more robust gun laws. But it also discusses how to very specifically move the conversations away from white supremacy and the role that right-wing propaganda seems to be playing in most domestic terrorist scenarios like the recent El Paso shootings, where the gunman told authorities that he wanted to kill Mexicans.

If asked, the memo suggests that the first thing to do is to “steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.” Subsequently, Republicans are directed to point out, falsely, that many of the mass shootings in recent years were carried out by “left-leaning” individuals. They specifically point to “El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.” The El Paso mention is a classic right-wing typo, they meant the Dayton shooting—the right wing in our country does have a level of incompetence that one might call its brand.

Did you know that all of those shooters were “left leaning?” I bet you didn’t. Cause they weren’t. The man that shot Arizona’s Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen other people January of 2011, while registered as a Democrat, showed motives all over the map, referencing everyone from Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler, and according to people around him, a general obsession with Giffords herself. The Colorado shooters seem to have been motivated, more than anything, by anger over bullying and a perverse sense of revenge.

The most recent Dayton, Ohio, shooting has been the big news story for the right wing of this country because Donald Trump tweeted and told reporters that the shooter was a “fan” of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

CBS News

@CBSNews

President Trump on Dayton shooter: "He was a fan of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, nothing to do with Trump. Nobody ever mentions that." https://cbsn.ws/2Ky1ZZO

Embedded video

However, while the Dayton shooter may have had left “leanings,” politically, he also had a very specific history of violent fantasy not at all connected to one political ideology or another. Either way, the fact remains that domestic white nationalist terrorism is still the biggest problem when it comes to mass shooting gun violence in our country. As FBI Director Christopher McKay told a Senate Judiciary Committee last month, the majority of 2019’s domestic terrorist arrests were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” The need for the Republican Party to sit on their hands to protect their gun money, dovetails nicely with their need to appeal almost exclusively to white nationalists and the people who hate being called white nationalists, but espouse most of the same positions and beliefs of white nationalists.

AN 819

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People kill people — but capitalism makes it easy and profitable around the world

Written by Bob Hennelly / Salon August 11, 2019

The corporate media fakes soul searching for the root cause of mass murder in a nation that floods the world with weapons of every description and markets violence as recreation and entertainment.

You don’t have to be Marianne Williamson to know that this is another manifestation of late-stage vulture capitalism that has no conscience and feeds off the ever-mounting pile of human carrion it generates worldwide.

As tragic as our domestic mass murders are here, they are just part of the carnage around the world caused by weapons stamped proudly “Made in America.”

And while our politicians beat their chest about the United States being the bulwark to counterterrorism, we are the chief exporters of its tools out the back door of our loading dock.

Be sure with the billions of dollars the exporters of death have made, they easily bought and paid for the very same politicians who now offer American communities caught in the crossfire of gun violence just thoughts and prayers.

As the Trump administration tortures undocumented families from south of the border, separating children from their parents and putting them all in cages and the San Antonio shooter took aim in Walmart, its gunfire from American made weapons used by drug-gangs that have migrants fleeing northward.

That’s the iron ring of death and human misery forged by an economic system bereft of morality that uses just a portion of the vast profits it generates to subvert our politics and our legal system.

In 1994 Congress made it “unlawful for a person to manufacture, transfer or possess” a semiautomatic assault weapon as well as high capacity magazines. The legislation prohibited 19 different models of this class of weapon.

In 2004, President George W. Bush and the GOP, primed with millions of dollars from the gun lobby, let the decade long assault weapons ban expire.

U.S. guns flooded places like Mexico where The Economist reported in May “that 70% of gun crimes in Mexico involve American-bought weapons” and “the share of homicides in Mexico involving a firearm grew from 16% in 1997 to 66% in 2017.”

The Economist continued. “That suggests around half of Mexico’s 33,000 murder victims last year were killed by a gun manufactured in the United States, which had 14,542 gun-homicides in 2017. An American-made gun is more likely to be used in a murder in Mexico than at home.”

While one of President Trump’s first actions was to sign-off on rolling back of an Obama era regulation to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, he also shifted the responsibility for approving gun exports “from the State Department to the Department of Commerce, which applies looser rules,” according to The Economist.

For days now, since the back-to-back mass murders in San Antonio and Dayton the corporate news media has pondered ‘just what is it about the American character that lends itself to such random acts of such monstrous violence?’

Hmmm . . . just what could it be?

With panel after panel presented in “special reports” with bloody graphics and 911 calls as an audio scene-setter, the same old talking heads take turns diagnosing the seemingly intractable problem of random gun violence that is so uniquely an American problem.

One expert says it’s the undiagnosed mentally ill, who just happen to be mostly young white men who find succor in the dark recesses of the internet. Another will blame Donald Trump and the resurgence of white nationalism. The on-call ex-FBI and DOJ officials talk about their need for more “tools in their counter-terrorism toolbox” and the need for a domestic “war on terror 2.0.”

Really? We haven’t come to terms with the geopolitical ravages and costs of the initial war on terror, and now they want to bring the concept home. There’s just no sense of the cruel irony that we spent trillions, accelerated global warming and destroyed millions of lives prosecuting the first war on terror and all for what? Live fire drills at Walmart?

On the latest spate of mass murders, the safest ground for pundits to land on in their 30-second answer is to blame the widespread availability of guns in our country that is just five percent of the world’s population but owns 42 percent of the civilian-owned guns on the planet.

That means we are sitting on close to 400 million guns in a country with close to 330 people. Feel safe?

We are captive to the capitalist world view that detaches a product, no matter how potentially lethal, from the consequences of its use as if a commercial transaction where some sort of baptism that absolves the seller from whatever action a depraved customer might take.

Case in point, an economic impact study released in April by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association, that gushed about their sector’s exponential economic growth in “recent years has been nothing short of remarkable.”

The trade group’s economic impact footprint went from $19.1 billion in 2008 to $52.1 billion in 2018, a 171 percent increase in just a decade. NSSF reported the gun industry paid $15.7 billion in wages and paying $6.8 billion in taxes in 2018.

Yet, not factored in their cost-benefit analysis is the annual $229 billion in gun-violence related spending as well as the $8.6 billion in direct costs to cover emergency room and overall medical costs attributed to gun violence.

According to the Gifford Law Center, a gun control advocacy think tank, over the past decade 1.3 million Americans have been shot. Close to 36,000 are killed annually, or an average of one hundred a day. There is one mass shooting a day on average in the U.S. — that’s incidents with four or more people killed or wounded by gunfire.

But take heart, it’s August and President Trump has declared it National Shooting Sports Month and the National Sport Shooting Foundation reminds us the country’s firearms and ammunition manufacturers “take great pride in supporting wildlife conservation efforts.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-fascist-foot-soldiers-are-armed-to-the-teeth-with-weapons-of-war/

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The latest massacre shows the 2nd Amendment model of ‘slave patrols’ is still in effect

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1198949239 NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 26, 2018: Donald Trump, the President of the United States addresses reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly at the Lotte Palace Hotel.

Written by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams August 6, 2019

While, in the wake of the El Paso murders, the media and most of our politicians are acting shocked—“shocked, I tell you!”—that there are armed racists in America who are trying to terrify people of color, the reality is that it’s pretty much always been that way here in the United States. And until white Americans and the media they control acknowledge that simple history, we won’t be able to do the things we must to change it.

While we need rational gun control, this isn’t a gun control issue.

While we need economic security to be more widely shared, this isn’t an economic issue.

While we need universal, free, high-quality K-PhD education, this isn’t an education issue.

While the Republican Party needs to repudiate the “Southern Strategy” that has animated their racist base since 1968, this isn’t a political issue.

Encompassing all of the above, what we are confronting in America right now is the continuation of policies put into place by white people, to control and exploit Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, since the arrival of Africans in 1619 and the codification of slavery into North American law in 1662.

The institution of slavery can only exist in a police state. Without a constantly vigilant and well-armed force of men (and the rare, occasional woman) patrolling the towns and roads, slaves will rebel and put an end to their own enslavement.

As Sally Hadden notes in her brilliant book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, slaveholding regions had institutionalized police-patrol systems specifically to “regulate” enslaved persons more than 100 years before American independence.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, the colonial government passed laws in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their white male employees to be members of the Georgia militia and those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who might be planning uprisings.

As Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Davis Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”

James Madison even rewrote the Second Amendment into its current form during the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention in response to that state’s largest slaveholder, Patrick Henry, demanding that Virginia’s slave patrols be explicitly protected.

While slavery as an institution was abolished after the Civil War by the 13th Amendment (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”), the organized and systematic domination of people of color for the benefit of whites continues to this day. And the enforcers of that system—both formal and informal—are still very much with us.

State prisons legally enslaving “duly convicted” persons of color; Klan riders and lynching “parties”; cops killing black men for selling loose cigarettes or murdering black children for playing with toy guns; mass shooters raving about “invasion” by Hispanics; white men enforcing segregation by killing black men and boys who look ator date white women: These are the modern incarnations of the old slave patrols that most Americans recognize.

Less easily recognized is the patrolling of America’s economic racial divide, from Trump employees marking “C” for “colored” on rental applications so people of color could be denied residence, to the rigorous application of property tax funding for schools to keep poor districts poor, millions of individual corporate actions and thousands of state and local laws still conspire to “patrol” people of color.

Like his presidential hero Andrew Jackson (nickname: “Indian Killer”), who owned enslaved people and bragged about murdering Native American women and children, Donald Trump speaks to an exclusively white audience, in this era via Twitter and a TV network that, judging from the ratings, programs exclusively to white people.

From “very fine people” who are literally Nazis and white supremacists, to “I’ll pay for your lawyer” calls for violence, to barely speaking in code with words like “invasion” and “infestation,” Trump has cranked up a new generation of white men who, in previous centuries on this continent, would have been enthusiastic members of the police state that protected slavery from rebellion.

The slave patrols never really went away. And the slave patrollers are finding in Trump the president they’ve been missing since Andrew Jackson passed away.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/americas-recurring-doomsday-is-by-design-gun-culture-is-now-part-of-our-dna/

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America’s recurring doomsday is by design: Gun culture is now part of our DNA

Written by Bob Cesca / Salon August 6, 2019

As we look back at the twin massacres in El Paso and Dayton with fear, crushing sadness and mind-blowing frustration due to the helplessness of it all, including the usual political cowardice, a clear majority of Americans continue to support reasonable and obviousregulations to limit the supply of these deadly retail products.

But what about the demand? What about the uniquely American compulsion to own unnecessarily powerful firearms – specifically, the family of military-cosplay ARs and other semi-automatic weapons, not to mention their myriad accessories designed to augment their killing power? It seems as though simply limiting the supply will unintentionally spike demand. Knowing this, there has to be a concurrent national effort to address the demand side of this deadly equation.

Specifically, we have no choice but to minimize, if not extinguish, the pervasiveness of our gun culture.

What is the gun culture?

There’s an almost historical, genetic aspect of Americanism that’s synonymous with warfare and firearms. As we thumb through our national history, it’s impossible not to observe how our revolutionary founding, the glorification of war and the romance of the Wild West have collectively embedded guns into our national DNA, more so than any other industrialized nation. Even our generational traditions, our relics handed down from parents to children, involve an unnecessary reverence for guns.

Due to painfully effective marketing and lobbying in our modern First World age of consumerism, gun ownership has evolved from being a frontier necessity to a creepy, vaguely penile, Freudian symbol of masculinity and power. American guns have become unnecessary yet unmistakable avatars of virility and strength — of aggression, resolve and heroism. Scroll down through your Facebook newsfeed and note all of the advertisements for military-style tactical gear marketed to civilians who probably couldn’t point to a theater of war on a map. That’s a reflection of the gun culture.

While Donald Trump and the Republicans try desperately to sidetrack the debate by blaming the usual NRA-defined scapegoats: video games and mental illness — factors that absolutely exist in dozens of other nations where mass shootings are statistically nonexistent — we need to instead take a harder and more critical look at the crutch-like bellicosity of our political leaders who routinely explain that solving a problem by shooting at it is not just the only option, but the noble and patriotic one.

Likewise, we can’t overlook the national history of the post-World War II years when, for the first time, America kept a standing army and developed the infamous military-industrial complex, with its permanent lifeblood drawn from the virally universal idea that more firearms (in this context, weapons of war including nuclear warheads) are necessary for both prosperity, national security against the Soviet Union and, eventually, extremist Islamic terrorists. For a short while there, following Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell warning, the military-industrial complex was regarded as a necessary evil. Yet by the 1980s and on through the George W. Bush post-9/11 era, American patriotism — our basic love of country — became defined by the magnitude of our support for military aggression,complete with our vast arsenal of weaponry proudly arrayed against our enemies.

An entire American generation has been raised with the following ultimatum: Either you’re with us, and our shoot-first problem solving, or you’re with the enemy. To be clear: retaining a formidable national defense is compulsory, but we shouldn’t be so rah-rah turgid about it.

Despite what pro-gun operatives have been suggesting as a means of distracting from the real issue of gun regulations and the gun culture, breaking the nightmarishly escalating wave of mass murders requires the breaking of the dominant cultural attitude that aggression and weaponry are the only bulwarks standing between us and doomsday, even though it’s difficult to observe massacres like Sandy Hook, Parkland, Charleston, Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton and not regard them as a series of micro-doomsdays.

Enough screwing around. To extricate the gun culture from American society, we have to engage in an effort to 1) pass serious and unprecedented gun control regulations to, at the very least, match the regulations on cars and drivers, and 2) disconnect the false associations between masculinity/virility/power/patriotism and gun ownership.

Everything else orbiting this issue is secondary to regulating guns and undermining the visceral, demented obsession with using them. If we can limit both the supply and the fetishistic demand for guns, we can begin to roll back this age of mass murder in our public spaces.

The campaign against Big Tobacco, for example, has been wildly successful on both fronts: due to a broad effort to both limit cigarette sales while stigmatizing the act of smoking, cigarettes are more difficult to purchase (advertising has disappeared and prices have skyrocketed, though not enough), and the very act of smoking has become increasingly rejected, with smokers shamed and banished outside to huddle like refugees under awnings and inside bus shelters. It’s absolutely possible to accomplish the same thing with firearms.

By the way, the news media has a part to play in this — a major part.

Cable news has no choice but to devise a new way of covering gun massacres as well as covering the aforementioned political war-hawking. The profit-motive of modern television journalism is dependent upon running sensationalized breaking news that lionizes military strength and demonizes rational diplomacy, the latter framed by cable news analysts as weakness.

Unlike video games or other works of fiction, this is real-life blood and death, aired for the gawking masses and cynically pitched to advertisers for profit. And we wonder where disaffected, radicalized loners get the idea that murdering 20 people is not only the strong, patriotic thing to do, but it’ll make them famous, dead or alive. (Side note: Germany, Japan, Australia, England, France, South Korea and the Netherlands all spend more per capita on video games than the U.S., but the rate of gun violence is significantly lower in those nations. Jaw-droppingly lower. Why?)

If we break the culture, and if we disrupt the proliferation of firearms, the consumer demand will begin to adjust accordingly. Part of this monumental effort will involve reversing the prioritization of military strength over thoughtful statesmanship — to seriously adopt a war-as-last-resort policy at the highest levels of government, once and for all. Part of the effort will have to involve the marginalization of Americans who mistakenly sanctify gun ownership as a badge of pride and testicular fortitude. Another not insignificant part of the plan will have to include returning to a time when war of any scale required total national sacrifice, from everyone.

No matter how we get there, addressing the culture won’t work if we don’t make it much more difficult to attain firearms, especially ones that are manufactured for hunting people.

It’s not going to be easy. But we can’t allow necessary changes to be derailed by the usual suspects and their horseshit rhetoric. Their time has ended. Emerging from the heart-wrenching sorrow, the legacy of this past weekend and all of the doomsdays that preceded it has to be the launching of a national campaign to destroy the toxic culture that helped to manifest it all.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/how-southern-fears-of-abolition-shaped-the-second-amendment/

How southern fears of abolition shaped the Second Amendment

THOM HARTMANN / COMMON DREAMS

13 JUN 2019 AT 13:10 ET

“Give me liberty or give me death.” —Patrick Henry

Article 1, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution had southern slave owners concerned about the future of their economy.

Slavery can exist only in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the antislavery folks in the North could figure out a way to disband those southern militias—or even just to move the militias out of the states—the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery—and the southern economic and social systems—altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned more than 300 slaves), and the southern Christian evangelical Patrick Henry (the largest slaveholder in the state of Virginia).

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8, of the newly proposed Constitution—which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia—could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape the American South and join his forces. “Liberty to Slaves” was stitched onto the pocket flaps of the escapees’ jackets. During the war, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington’s army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Patrick Henry laid it out: “Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power ‘to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States.’ . . .

“By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither—this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.”

George Mason expressed a similar fear: “The [slave patrol] militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution].”

Henry then bluntly laid it out: “If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress. . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.”

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?

“In this state,” he said, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.”

Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given to the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority in the North opposed slavery, and he worried that they’d use the Constitution to free the South’s slaves (a process then called “manumission”).

The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing): “[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission,” said Henry. “And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?

“This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper [proposed Constitution] speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

He added, “This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress.”

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid. “I was struck with surprise,” Madison said, “when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not.”

But the southern fears wouldn’t go away.

Patrick Henry even argued that southerners’ “property” (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be a disaster for them: “In this situation,” Henry said to Madison, “I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone.”

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson’s insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft to one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

But Henry, Mason, and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word “country” to the word “state” and redrafted the Second Amendment into today’s form:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Little did Madison, Jefferson, or Henry realize that one day in the future, weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as “persons” by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, would use his slave-patrol militia amendment to protect their “right” to manufacture and sell guns to individuals who would use them to murder schoolchildren.

This excerpt originally appeared in the new book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment by Thom Hartmann. It was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

https://theconversation.com/how-the-good-guy-with-a-gun-became-a-deadly-american-fantasy-117367

At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter.

This trope – “the good guy with a gun” – has become commonplace among gun rights activists.

Where did it come from?

On Dec. 21, 2012 – one week after Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre announced during a press conference that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Ever since then, in response to each mass shooting, pro-gun pundits, politicians and social media users parrot some version of the slogan, followed by calls to arm the teachers, arm the churchgoers or arm the office workers. And whenever an armed citizen takes out a criminal, conservative media outlets pounce on the story.

But “the good guy with the gun” archetype dates to long before LaPierre’s 2012 press conference.

There’s a reason his words resonated so deeply. He had tapped into a uniquely American archetype, one whose origins I trace back to American pulp crime fiction in my book “Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority.”

Other cultures have their detective fiction. But it was specifically in America that the “good guy with a gun” became a heroic figure and a cultural fantasy.

‘When I fire, there ain’t no guessing’

Beginning in the 1920s, a certain type of protagonist started appearing in American crime fiction. He often wore a trench coat and smoked cigarettes. He didn’t talk much. He was honorable, individualistic – and armed.

These characters were dubbed “hard-boiled,” a term that originated in the late 19th centuryto describe “hard, shrewd, keen men who neither asked nor expected sympathy nor gave any, who could not be imposed upon.” The word didn’t describe someone who was simply tough; it communicated a persona, an attitude, an entire way of being.

Most scholars credit Carroll John Daly with writing the first hard-boiled detective story. Titled “Three Gun Terry,” it was published in Black Mask magazine in May 1923.

The May 1934 issue of Black Mask features Carroll John Daly’s character Race Williams on the cover. Abe Books

“Show me the man,” the protagonist, Terry Mack, announces, “and if he’s drawing on me and is a man what really needs a good killing, why, I’m the boy to do it.”

Terry also lets the reader know that he’s a sure shot: “When I fire, there ain’t no guessing contest as to where the bullet is going.”

From the start, the gun was a crucial accessory. Since the detective only shot at bad guys and because he never missed, there was nothing to fear.

Part of the popularity of this character type had to do with the times. In an era of Prohibition, organized crime, government corruption and rising populism, the public was drawn to the idea of a well-armed, well-meaning maverick – someone who could heroically come to the defense of regular people. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, stories that featured these characters became wildly popular.

Taking the baton from Daly, authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandlerbecame titans of the genre.

Their stories’ plots differed, but their protagonists were mostly the same: tough-talking, straight-shooting private detectives.

In an early Hammett story, the detective shoots a gun out of a man’s hand and then quips he’s a “fair shot – no more, no less.”

In a 1945 article, Raymond Chandler attempted to define this type of protagonist:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

As movies became more popular, the archetype bled into the silver screen. Humphrey Bogart played Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to great acclaim.

By the end of the 20th century, the fearless, gun-toting good guy had become a cultural hero. He had appeared on magazine covers, movie posters, in television credits and in video games.

Selling a fantasy

Gun rights enthusiasts have embraced the idea of the “good guy” as a model to emulate – a character role that just needed real people to step in and play it. The NRA store even sells T-shirts with LaPierre’s slogan, and encourages buyers to “show everyone that you’re the ‘good guy’” by buying the T-shirt.

:{The NRA sells shirts with LaPierre’s quote.:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}: :{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}:NRA Store

The problem with this archetype is that it’s just that: an archetype. A fictional fantasy.

In pulp fiction, the detectives never miss. Their timing is precise and their motives are irreproachable. They never accidentally shoot themselves or an innocent bystander. Rarely are they mentally unstable or blinded by rage. When they clash with the police, it’s often because they’re doing the police’s job better than the police can.

Another aspect of the fantasy involves looking the part. The “good guy with a gun” isn’t just any guy – it’s a white one.

In “Three Gun Terry,” the detective apprehends the villain, Manual Sparo, with some tough words: “‘Speak English,’ I says. I’m none too gentle because it won’t do him any good now.”

In Daly’s “Snarl of the Beast,” the protagonist, Race Williams, takes on a grunting, monstrous immigrant villain.

Could this explain why, in 2018, when a black man with a gun tried to stop a shooting in a mall in Alabama – and the police shot and killed him – the NRA, usually eager to champion good guys with guns, didn’t comment?

A reality check

Most gun enthusiasts don’t measure up to the fictional ideal of the steady, righteous and sure shot.

In fact, research has shown that gun-toting independence unleashes much more chaos and carnage than heroism. A 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research study revealed that right-to-carry laws increase, rather than decrease, violent crime. Higher rates of gun ownership is correlated with higher homicide rates. Gun possession is correlated with increased road rage.

There have been times when a civilian with a gun successfully intervened in a shooting, but these instances are rare. Those who carry guns often have their own guns used against them. And a civilian with a gun is more likely to be killed than to kill an attacker.

Even in instances where a person is paid to stand guard with a gun, there’s no guarantee that he’ll fulfill this duty.

Hard-boiled novels have sold in the hundreds of millions. The movies and television shows they inspired have reached millions more.

What started as entertainment has turned into a durable American fantasy.

Maintaining it has become a deadly American obsession.'

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/colorado-sheriffs-say-theyll-go-to-jail-rather-than-enforce-controversial-red-flag-gun-control-law/

Sandy Hook lawsuit court victory opens crack in gun maker immunity shield

Timothy D. Lytton, Georgia State University

The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims could sue a gun maker, a decision that could open the floodgates to more lawsuits.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/nra-magazine-features-target-practice-headline-next-to-photo-of-nancy-pelosi-and-victims-of-gun-violence/

NRA is facing widespread condemnation after its latest magazine issue hit mailboxes, with a feature article titled “Target Practice” next to a large glossy color photo of Nancy Pelosi with House Democrats standing behind her. As if that weren’t bad enough, the photo was taken when Speaker Pelosi and her Democratic co-sponsors were announcing the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019. Standing behind Pelosi in the photo is Rep. Lucy McBath, whose 17-year-old son, Jordan, was gunned down at a Jacksonville gas station when 45-year-old Michael David Dunn pulled up next to the car Jordan was in with his friends and fired on the teens because he felt their music was too loud; and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011 during an assassination attempt by Jared Lee Loughner, whose murder spree that day killed six and wounded 18 others.

...

The article was written by Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist of the NRA. He described Nancy Pelosi as the “arch anti-gunner.” See if you can pick up on the problem with how he describes other participants at the press conference.

Giffords was in attendance as Pelosi and Thompson introduced H.R. 8, along with other fixtures of the anti-gun cause, including Josh Horowitz, David Hogg, Lucy McBath and Shannon Watts.

Two of those “anti-gun” fixtures had their lives turned upside down by gun violence.

Jennifer Bendery of the Huffington Post was the first to share the image on Twitter, and the reaction was swift. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said it seemed clear the NRA “knew what they were doing” with this outrageous pairing. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jamie, was murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, called it an “incitement of violence.”

...[pix]

NB progress means armed teachers

BB bs

report on the the February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting shows no progress in implementing safety measures since the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack.

The Sun-Sentinel published their own report, which examines the use of unarmed security monitors. In lieu of guns, the security personnel had radios, yet two monitors spotted and recognized the gunman before shots were fired yet failed to call a Code Red to lock down campus.

The school had an armed resource officer on campus–Broward Deputy Scot Peterson–but he “remained sheltered [outside the school building] for nearly 48 minutes, watching as other officers enter the building.”

On March 15, 2018, Breitbart News published surveillance video allegedly showing Peterson outside Build 12 while the shooting was carried out inside. Broward Sheriff Scott Israel indicated that Peterson arrived at Building 12 roughly 90 seconds after the attack began.

He remained outside as the gunman went on a floor by floor shooting spree, that included stopping to reload five times.

Roughly six minutes after the attack was over, Peterson was still huddled up, sheltering in place outside. He told approaching Coral Springs officers that the gunman was on the second or third floor when, in fact, the gunman had already fled the building. Surveillance video shows the gunman–now unarmed–running across campus and going to Walmart, where he “ordered a drink at Subway.”

He left Walmart and went to McDonald’s, where he remained but a short time.

The commission instigating the Parkland shooting report noted the absence of safety as well, and voted 13-1 to recommend arming teachers at the school. Armed teachers are in the classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the school’s resource officer enters the building or not.

On December 19, 2018, Breitbart News reported President Trump’s determination to include armed teachers in his school safety push. Trump made the point that it is “critical to have armed personnel available at a moment’s notice,” and he noted that teachers can be part such personnel.

Armed teachers are in classrooms to defend themselves and their students whether the security monitors call a Code Red or not.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

2nd Amendment Politics Columbine Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School school safety school shooting

Wednesday night, a former Marine with a .45-caliber handgun opened fire at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Southern California, killing 12 people. Just a few hours after the horrific incident, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch equated the mass shooting to the state’s gun safety laws, calling both “horrific.”

It is not the first time NRA figures have shifted blame in shootings to stoke fear about “evil” gun safety laws.

Loesch failed to note that California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the country; it dropped by 56.6 percent between 1993 and 2013, which was “29.9 percentage points more than the decline in the rest of the nation.” California also hashave some of the strongest gun safety laws in the country, including universal background checks, a ban on most assault weapons, regulations on gun show purchases, and a 10-day waiting period.

mma

no lnx guard uk

arch conservative Justice Thomas is now the most senior justice on the bench – and that has many troubling implications

Mon 2 Jul 2018 07.55 EDT Last modified on Tue 24 Jul 2018 13.08 EDT

‘Unthinkably horrible as it is, we may very well be entering a new era, the era of the Thomas court.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

:{He is the most silent supreme court Justice. He has written almost no landmark decisions. Perhaps because of this, his extreme, rightwing jurisprudence has not been seen as very influential, unlike that of his ideological clone, the late Antonin Scalia or the court’s newcomer, Neil Gorsuch. But with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas is now the most senior conservative and quite possibly, the most important.

By most measures he is, since Scalia’s death, the furthest right on the court’s ideological spectrum. Already, this most recent court term has been a debacle for the liberal justices who, according to Adam Liptak of the New York Times, largely failed to peel off Kennedy to form a majority in the major cases.  }:

So, unthinkably horrible as it is, we may very well be entering a new era, the era of the Thomas court.

Already there is much speculation that Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Kennedy will be, if confirmed, the decisive vote to overturn Roe v Wade, the decision legalizing a woman’s right to have an abortion. Trump is on record saying he intends to nominate justices who oppose Roe. Thomas is the lone surviving justice who voted in the 5-4 minority in Casey v Planned Parenthood, the landmark 1992 decision that upheld Roe. In a joint dissent, the conservative minority, including Thomas, said in Casey: “We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.” So, it would be perfectly plausible that, if and when a new, even more conservative majority on the court decides to overturn Roe, Thomas would be chosen to write the notorious decision.

This would be the ultimate irony, given that one of the epic lies Thomas told during his 1991 confirmation hearing was that he had never discussed Roe v Wade. In subsequent books and articles, various people have said they heard him express his opposition to abortion before he joined the court.

Already, there are signs of Thomas’s growing influence. The Judicial Crisis Network, a rightwing organization, is already spending $1m to support whoever emerges as Trump’s new nominee. That organization is headed by Carrie Severino, a former Thomas law clerk. Her group spent millions to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and John Roberts. The group is closely allied with the Federalist Society, which has screened virtually all of the Trump judicial appointments.  

JCN operates as a dark money pit and does not disclose its donors. According to tax filings, another rightwing dark money group, the Wellspring Committee, has given JCN nearly $10m through 2014. Wellspring, in turn, is run by a couple known to be close to Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who has been active in various rightwing groups and causes. It is likely that Ginni Thomas will be a player, visible or not, in any upcoming supreme court confirmation battle.

Where once he spoke only before rather obscure and reliably friendly conservative audiences, Thomas has been more public of late. According to Slate, he appeared in April with Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland survivor who opposes gun control at an event in Washington DC, where according to Kashuv, the justice told him the second amendment “won’t be touched”. The previous November, Thomas gave an interview to Fox’s Laura Ingraham,the rightwing host who is another one of his former law clerks. In February, according to Slate:

“the justice issued his Trumpiest opinion yet, condemning his colleagues for refusing to review a lower court’s decision affirming the constitutionality of California’s “cooling-off” period for gun purchases. (These waiting periods have been shown to save lives.) He assailed the court for having “more favored rights” than the Second Amendment, overturning laws restricting abortion, free speech, and personal privacy while ignoring gun restrictions. He also rebuked the lower court for protecting the free expression of nude dancers and the marriage rights of same-sex couples. His dissent was an embarrassing, discursive tirade that might as well have been ghostwritten by Dana Loesch; no other justice joined it.”

It’s been too easy to dismiss Thomas as a rightwing crank who doesn’t matter much. That’s about to change. By inheriting the mantle from Kennedy as the longest serving conservative on the court, his stature inherently grows. On a Thomas court, John Roberts could become the swing, more moderate vote in certain cases. This is a measure of how far to the right the court has tilted.

In the era of #MeToo, it’s also beyond galling to see the man who sexually harassed Anita Hill and lied his way to confirmation in 1991 become so influential.

But this is exactly what Donald Trump has undoubtedly dreamed of.

And a Thomas court is exactly what people who truly value the constitution and human rights must fight to make sure we never see.

• Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist

AR-15S AMA study: shooters armed with semiautomatic rifles kill twice as many people CORY DOCTOROW bb

Following a mass shooting at a Madden video game tournament in Jacksonville, conservatives ran their usual disinformation campaign.

A Fox News guest speculated without evidence that the shooter had autism and that was responsible for the shooting: "This isn’t a gun control problem ... It’s mainly a video game control problem and access to good mental health treatment problem"

A Fox panel called for the regulation of video games and smartphones, with one Fox host arguing with a straight face that "When we think of other risks to children and their health, for example smoking, we actually take action and ban those things."

An NRATV host criticized a survivor of the shooting for supposedly not hearing gunshots over his headphones, saying if your headphones are “so loud you can’t hear what is going on around you, you are living in your own world. That can become deadly."

Anything to not blame America's lax gun laws.

bunch of alt rt trolls with conspiracy theory, now Qanon

Cernovich pushed conspiracy theories about mass shootings

In a since-deleted blog post, Cernovich claimed that “there wasmore than one shooter at Pulse in Orlando,” referring to the 2016 mass shotting at Pulse nightclub in Florida. Cernovich wrote, “As you follow the story, look for” certain “evidence.” He added, “If we don’t see all of this, then there was a second shooter.”

He also attempted to blame a mass shooting in New Mexico on anti-fascist protestersand made similar comments following a series of bombings in Austin, TX.

After a suicide bomber killed 22 people, including children, who were leaving an Ariana Grande concert in England, Cernovich attacked the pop star for liberal and “anti-American” statements that she made while reacting to a tray of donuts years prior.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/24/Fox---Friends-hosts-a-QAnon-conspiracy-theorist-who-has-claimed-the-Parkland-mass-shooting/221102

no linx vid

fox & Friends hosts a QAnon conspiracy theorist who has claimed the Parkland mass shooting was fake

Blog ››› August 24, 2018 4:50 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Fox & Friends provided a platform to a man who has repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, including sharing a post that claimed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, was “fake” and that student survivors of the shooting are “actors.”

During the August 24 edition of Fox & Friends, the show hosted Jason Fyk, who was identified as an entrepreneur, along with Fyk’s attorney to discuss Fyk’s lawsuit against Facebook for “unlawfully silencing people … for its own financial gain.” During the interview, co-host Steve Doocy praised Fyk for using Facebook to build a business and pursuing “the American dream,” whileFyk compared himself to YouTube personalities Diamond and Silk, citing the duo’s false Facebook censorship claims.

The show -- which President Donald Trump consistently watches -- did not disclose that Fyk has appeared multiple times on Infowars, the far-right conspiracy theory outlet that has been banned from multiple tech platforms for violating their hate speech and harassment policies. On his own Facebook profile, Fyk has also repeatedly promoted posts from “Q,” the supposed figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory who claims that Trump has a master plan to dismantle child trafficking rings supposedly linked to powerful politicians and celebrities and defeat his perceived enemies and the “deep state.” (Three conspiracy theorists reportedly spread the conspiracy theory for financial gain.) In March, Fyk posted an image of a “Q” post calling the Parkland mass shooting “FAKE” and a “distraction” that was “organized & designed to DISTRACT” and that it featured “ACTORS [who] are ACTING.”

Fyk also discussed QAnon in January while appearing on Infowars (which fully embraced the conspiracy theory early on), with an Infowars host saying to Fyk, “What do you think of these latest QAnon posts hot off the press? ‘Chuck Schumer will live in fear from today forward.’ This is turning out to be a really good day.” Fyk responded that it was “definitely a win for the right.”

Trump himself may have also tweeted in response to Fyk's appearance when he claimed social media platforms were "silencing millions of people."

Matthew Gertz

@MattGertz

Aug 24, 2018

Replying to @MattGertz

President watches television, complains that Reality Winner is going to jail but Hillary Clinton isn't.

Left, Fox & Friends, 6:12 am

Right, Trump, 7:10 am pic.twitter.com/44XxktlGid

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Matthew Gertz

@MattGertz

Fox caption: "Are social media giants silencing people?"

Trump: "Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people."

Left, Fox & Friends, 6:27 am

Right, Trump, 7:34 am pic.twitter.com/W7Y56Ma6kZ

5:06 AM - Aug 24, 2018

Short Link

http://mm4a.org/4Zg

copy link

Network/Outlet

Fox News Channel, Infowars

Show/Publication

FOX & Friends

Stories/Interests

Alt-right and pro-Trump trolls

omg

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/betsy-devos-planning-allow-schools-use-federal-funds-buy-guns

Betsy DeVosis working on a plan that would, for the first time in history, allow schools to use federal funds to buy guns, according to a report in The New York Times late Wednesday. The Education Secretary was tasked by the President with putting together a commission to protect schools from gun violence after the massacre at Florida's Parkland High School.

DeVos is examining an Obama-era program of grants that is designed to "provide all students with access to a well-rounded education," "improve school conditions for student learning," and "improve the use of technology in order to improve the academic achievement and digital literacy for all students," according to the Dept. of Education's website.

But because Congress did not specifically block the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants from being used to purchase firearms, DeVos believes she can use her discretion to order those funds be allowed to be used to buy guns, and to fund firearms training.

In essence, DeVos would be using federal funds to subsidize firearms manufacturers and the gun lobby.

DeVos' school safety task force has produced no tangible results. The Education Secretary revealed months after forming her commission that it would not be examining the role of guns in school gun violence.