NY Tries to Take Away Gun Permits and Confiscate Guns From Owners  

 

by: Nicole Sanders / The Shark Tank

New York has flagged 278 gun owners as being mentally unstable. Could the same happen to other states or even Florida in the near future?

After passing their new SAFE Act gun control law the state collected 38,718 names in a database of individuals who were found to be at risk for owning guns. This list came from psychiatrists and other health professionals. I was under the impression anything said to a doctor was confidential.

The state then compared the 38,718 names to the list of current permit holders and found 278 gun owners were a match. Those people are now in jeopardy of losing their gun permits and having their guns confiscated.

It was reported the names in the database are confidential and judges have to sign off on suspensions and confiscations of the weapons. The defending party can challenge the order as well but we all know they will probably not win.

Cortland County officials told the Syracuse Post Standard the police have already confiscated the guns from at least one permit holder whose name was on the list.

Whereas some find the number of people on the list to be alarming and fear for their safety, others feel it is an invasion of privacy and people’s rights are protected under the 2nd Amendment. Either way the real question is: will this happen to other states in the near future? Keep in mind the White House has stated the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors from asking patients if they have guns.

Propagandist Jon Gruber Shilled for Bloomberg’s Cigarette Tax  

Michael Schaus / Townhall Columnist

 

Jonathan Gruber seems to be giving the propagandists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia a run for their money. In addition to bragging about hoodwinking the American public into believing that healthcare reform was actually about reforming healthcare, he has also called abortion a “social good” because it kills “marginal children” in poor communities. This gem of a human being, unsurprisingly, was also a vocal advocate for former Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s cigarette tax… Ya know, the $5.85 tax on each pack of smokes (which inevitably drives tobacco sales to the criminal, tax-evading, entrepreneurs like Eric Garner)? According to Breitbart.com:

Michael Bloomberg, who is infamous for regulating everything from large sodas to tanning salons to guns, hired Jonathan Gruber in 2008 to write a report on the implications of tobacco taxes, titled A Modern Economic View of Tobacco Taxation.

So Gruber was paid by Bloomy to put a positive spin on the NYC tobacco tax?

Well… I guess that pretty much explains why the tax seems to be as much of a disaster as Obamacare. Sure, Bloomberg might have been able to pay an academic snake-oil salesman to put his Goebbels spin on the Nannycratic (and excessive) taxation of Lucky Strikes, but that doesn’t change the fact that the law is still based on dependably oppressive big-government. (If Eric Garner was killed by NYPD for refusing to pay a cigarette tax, I’d hate to see what happens to someone who refuses to pay their Obamacare tax.)

Aside from Gruber’s obvious penchant for pitching oppressive government schemes, he also seems to have a knack for defending policies doomed to failure. Heck, while the American public has been increasingly kicking the habit of puffing on a cancer stick, New Yorkers have been exponentially picking it up. (I guess Al Capone was right: Outlaw a vice, and millionaires will be made.) It’s almost enough to make you wonder if Gruber advertises his ability to dupe the American public into hopeless experiments of big-government failure.

Just like Obamacare, Bloomberg’s punitive tax on tobacco is ineffective, invasive, and antithetical to market based morality. (And, given that I never called the killing of unborn children a “social good” because it targets “marginal children”, I think I have a little moral high ground from which to lecture Gruber.) Gruber, regrettably, represents everything that is wrong with the progressive dependence on academic propaganda justification.

After all, the consequence of big government is not that hard to quantify:

Cigarette taxes encourage those (highly addicted) smokers to smuggle, steal, or import their habit. Obamacare’s “taxes”, regulations, and fees tend to hike the overall cost of healthcare. Both of these observations are based off of current trends, not some whitepaper drafted by an Ivy League fertilizer salesman. (Apologies to actual fertilizer salesmen.)

It figures that Gruber crafted a PR campaign for the tax that ultimately cost Eric Garner his life.

Jonathan Gruber has made millions of dollars shilling for progressive agendas; but his specialization seems to be crafting lies, distortions, and manipulations to sugar coat progressive failures. After all, academics aren’t really concerned with the real-world implications of their policy prescriptions (like increased costs, dropped healthcare coverage, or the death of Eric Garner)… Just so long as “dumb” voters believe them long enough to get the policy put into effect.

In other words: Gruber’s your typical progressive apologist.

11 Law Enforcement Officers Killed

Chuck Norris / Townhall Columnist

While many in the nation, from Oakland to New York, rally in protest over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I keep wondering: What about the good cops? As with our military personnel, we are often quick to hang the allegedly corrupt but slow to honor those who serve honestly to protect.

 

According to the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there are more than 900,000 of them who are serving in the United States; about 12 percent are women.

The FBI reported that there were 404 incidents of "justifiable homicide" by American police in 2011. That is a high number, especially when compared with other countries. As Business Insider reported, "by comparison, just six people were killed by police in Australia over the same period. Police in England and Wales killed only two people, and German police killed six."

What BI doesn't explain, however, is that 150 U.S. law enforcement officers are killed in the line of duty every year. Did you know that one cop is killed in the line of duty roughly every two days?

First, it's important to note what our uniformed guardians of good are really up against. According to the NLEOMF, in the U.S.:

--"According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes occurred nationwide in 2011."

--"On average, over the last decade, there have been 58,261 assaults against law enforcement each year, resulting in 15,658 injuries."

--"Since the first recorded police death in 1791, there have been over 20,000 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty."

--"A total of 1,501 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty during the past 10 years, an average of one death every 58 hours or 150 per year."

--"There were 100 law enforcement officers killed in 2013."

Before Beheading, Children Tell ISIS: ‘No, We Love Jesus’
Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

My G-d, look at the courage these children exhibit in the face of Islamic savagery and evil. Even at their tender ages they refused to live as barbarians and accessories to carnage.

Before Beheading, Children Tell ISIS: ‘No, We Love Jesus’

“ISIS behead four children in Iraq after they refuse to convert to Islam,” By Russell Myers, Dec 08, 2014

A British vicar based in Baghdad said Islamic State militants hounded Christians out of their homes and threatened to kill their children if they did not convert to Islam.

Barbaric: The children were killed by Islamic State militants (file photo)

Barbaric Islamic State militants have beheaded four Christian children in Iraq for refusing to convert to...

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Taliban indoctrinates kids with jihadist textbooks paid for by the U.S.

By Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

In the 1980s, the State Department foreign policy establishment thought that they could use jihadis against the Soviet Union, and win their gratitude as they aided their struggle to be free from the Soviet yoke. The State Department’s thinking has not changed much since then; the foreign policy “experts” still underestimate the global jihad and think they can win the hearts and minds of jihadis.

Far too much of American resources are still devoted to attempts to do just that — which is as much a waste as throwing billions of dollars off a cliff.

“The Taliban indoctrinates kids with jihadist textbooks paid for by the U.S.,” by Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, December 8, 2014:

After the United States helped chase out the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001, it came across a legacy of its earlier intervention in the region. As The Washington Post reported in 2002, the United States had spent millions of dollars beginning in the 1980s to produce and disseminate anti-Soviet textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. The books encouraged a jihadist outlook, which was useful propaganda at the time for a Washington driven by the imperatives of the Cold War.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum,” The Post reported. “Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.”

Printed both in Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s two major languages, books such as “The Alphabet for Jihad Literacy” were produced under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and smuggled into Afghanistan through networks built by the CIA and Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI.

Since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, American authorities have invested heavily in helping modernize Afghanistan’s woeful education system, opening it back up to girls and revamping the backward curriculum put in place during the Taliban rule. But despite moderate gains, many challenges remain. And, according to at least one American scholar, these old anti-Soviet textbooks are still in circulation.

Dana Burde, an assistant professor of international education at New York University, says the Taliban is reprinting and using old U.S.-sponsored jihadist books to influence children in areas where the militants still hold sway. Burde says she found multiple reprinted copies of some of the texts, including a 2011 edition in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

According to Al Jazeera America, the Pashto version includes such chilling entries as “T” is for “topak,” or gun. How do you use the word? “My uncle has a gun,” the entry reads. “He does jihad with the gun.”

Other lessons instruct that Kabul can be ruled only by Muslims and that all Russians and invaders are nonbelievers….