Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Amazingly, it was just over a week ago that Joe Biden single-handedly ended gun violence in the United States. How did you miss that? Well, you probably were distracted by all the other amazing things Joe Biden is doing, like making air travel more efficient and winning the war in Ukraine.
So, you probably weren't paying attention on June 25th when a law called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was signed and it, true to its name, was, in fact, bipartisan. Fashionably liberal Republicans like John Cornyn helped write it. So, the question is, will it live up to the second half? Will it make communities safer? Emphatically yes, said Joe Biden, "It's going to save a lot of lives." How many lives exactly? Well, in the characteristically modest words of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, "What we are doing will save thousands of lives." Thusands.
And that makes a kind of sense because now that we're going to have red flag laws in all 50 states, laws that allow the government to disarm you by force without charging you with a crime, without bothering with due process. Once we do that, and we are doing it, mass shootings like the one we saw in Buffalo this spring will never happen again. That's what they promised us and the media assured us it was true – every word of it. What they never mentioned was it was not only ridiculous and false, it was provably false because actually gun control does not stop bad people from using guns. It's not a talking point. It's a fact. Here's how you know.
On the day that 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 people in Buffalo, the state of New York already had a red flag law and Gendron was exactly the sort of person they told us that red flag laws would stop from committing mass murder. Gendron had bragged in school, remember, that he wanted to murder large groups of people. That was a red flag, speaking of. He'd already been caught by his mother killing a cat with his hands. Gendron was so obviously crazy and threatening that at one point New York State Police came over and investigated him, but in the end, nothing happened. It had no effect, these laws, and that's not surprising. Ask anyone who knows anything about violence and wasn't getting paid to lie to you about it, and you will learn the truth, which is it's almost impossible to stop someone who's dead set on harming other people.
Prison guards get killed regularly. There are no guns in prison. There are plenty of psychopaths. Psychopaths are the problem. In case you need still more evidence, just yesterday on the 4th of July, there was yet another mass shooting in the state of Illinois. Illinois is a state with red flag laws, assault weapons bans, every other form of gun control that authoritarians can dream up in a country that still has the Second Amendment. But the shooting happened anyway. It happened in Highland Park, which is a pretty suburb north of Chicago and once again, the shooter was exactly the person they claimed red flag laws would stop before he hurt others.
His name is Robert Crimo. He's a 21-year-old amateur rapper with a long and documented history of bizarre and very threatening behavior. And on Monday, he lived up to what everyone who knew him thought he might someday do. He dressed in women's clothes. He scaled a fire escape ladder to the roof of a local business, and then he opened fire on a parade.
So awful. As today, the authorities say seven people have died from that shooting. At least 36 others are wounded. Good people, terrified, bleeding, in some cases dead, on the 4th of July. That's awful.
Now a normal person sees a tape like that and takes a breath as the tragedy of it sinks in as it should. Americans were just murdered for no reason. So, pause a beat before politicizing their deaths. Show some respect. You owe them that. But social media do not encourage respect. Social media are the domain of partisans and the first question of partisan asks never changes. It's this: "How can I use other people's misery to become more powerful myself?"
So, on the basis of that, the usual morons leap in to blame the other team. "They did it. It's their fault. Elect me." Eric Swalwell did this immediately, of course, speaking of morons, but so did many others. These are the sort of people whose first instinct is to ascribe political or racial motives to every crime, to prove their point about how they were right all along. And sometimes they are right. Sometimes racists and ideologues do commit crimes, but that's not the majority. Some mass killers are White. Some mass killers are Black. Some are right wing. Quite a few are left-wing, actually, though, the New York Times never mentions it. But one thing nearly all mass killers have in common almost every single one of them, with some but few exceptions, all of them are alienated young men. That's the common thread. They're young. They're male. They're crazy. Robert Crimo certainly fit that stereotype. Have you seen the guy's picture? If he sat next to you in the bus, you would move immediately. He literally had face tattoos and dressed in costume in public.
On his YouTube channel, which for some reason was very quickly scrubbed from the Internet by authorities, (Why is that? We found it.) Crimo posted videos of the presidential motorcade along with newspaper clippings about the Kennedy assassination, speaking of red flags. Months ago, he was filming the Highland Park parade route, the one he shot up. Not surprisingly, in a press conference today, police acknowledged they had encountered Crimo several times before. Three years ago, for example, police arrived after he had attempted to kill himself.
POLICE OFFICER: I'm going to relay some information from two prior instances that occurred here in Highland Park. The first was in April of 2019. An individual contacted Highland Park Police Department a week after learning of Mr. Crimo attempting suicide. This was a delayed report. So Highland Park still responded to the residents a week later, spoke with Crimo, spoke with Crimo's parents, and the matter was being handled by mental health professionals at that time. The second occurred in September of 2019. A family member reported that Crimo said he was going to kill everyone and Crimo had a collection of knives. The police responded to his residence. The police removed 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from Crimo's home.
So, there you have it. Back in April of 2019, police found out that Crimo had tried to kill himself, and then a few months later, in September, he threatened to "kill everyone." So, police took away his knives and that was it. They didn't follow up and even if they had, what would they have done? Taken away his guns? You get more knives.
In any case police didn't think the situation warranted further steps. As we saw, Crimo was still able to buy firearms legally despite being obviously mentally ill. Now, pause for a second. Why is that? Look at Robert, Bobby Crimo. Would you sell a gun to that guy? Does he seemed like a nutcase? Of course, he does. So, why didn't anyone raise an alarm?
Well, maybe because he didn't stand out. Maybe because there are a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy. It's not an attack. It's just true. Like Crimo, they inhabit a solitary fantasy world of social media, porn and video games. Their high on government-endorsed weed. "Smoke some more. It's good for you."
They're numbed by the endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out in every school in the country by crackpots posing as counselors and of course, they're angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents. They'll be worse. That's all but guaranteed. They know that. They're not that stupid and yet, the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stops lecturing them about their so-called privilege. You're male. You're privileged. Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that.
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So, a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised? And by the way, a shockingly large number of them have been prescribed psychotropic drugs by their doctors, SSRI or antidepressants and that would include quite a few mass shooters and keep in mind, again, these drugs are meant to prevent crazy behavior and yet there seems to be a connection.
Eric Harris, the columbine killer was on Zoloft and Luvox. A year earlier, a 15-year-old called Kip Kinkel shot his parents and dozens of classmates. He was on Prozac. In 2005, a 16-year-old called Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and ten kids in Minnesota. He was on Prozac, too. So was 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak who murdered six people at Northern Illinois University. In 2012, you may recall when 25-year-old James Holmes walked into a movie theater and shot 82 people. He was on Zoloft.
The list goes on and on and on and on. It includes the shooter at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. That would be 34-year-old Aaron Alexis. It also includes Dylan Roof. He's the 21-year-old who shot up the church in Charleston. Now, he was apparently a racist, and we've heard a lot about that. Fine, but we've heard next to nothing about the fact that he was taking SSRIs, he and many, many others. You're not supposed to notice, but some have.
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The Journal of Political Psychology once assembled a list of dozens more mass killings, all committed by young people, young men on prescription drugs. So, is there a connection? Well, we don't know definitively. We do know there are a whole lot more of these drugs being taken by kids than ever before and by the entire population. Who's not taking some prescription medication at this point? Between 1991 and 2018, total SSRI prescriptions in the United States rose by more than 3,000%. 3,000%!
3,000% of anything is a massive change. You don't see changes like that, but the point of this change was to make Americans calmer, saner, happier. Take these drugs and your problems will go away. Yes, you will become numb. You will lose part of yourself. You no longer experience deep joy. You'll become part robot, but at least you won't want to kill yourself or harm other people. That was the promise.
3,000%. Did it work? Let's see. Over the very same period, the suicide rate in the United States jumped by 35%. Did it work? Well, millions of people got on anti-suicide drugs and we wound up with many more suicides. So, maybe it's not working. Is it possible it's making the problem worse, you think? Well, let's see. Mass shootings also increased dramatically over the very same period. Here's a chart that shows it. Now the halfwits on Twitter always scream the same thing. Correlation is not causation. All right. Whatever that means, but tell us, halfwits. What is going on exactly? What does that chart mean?
We know that SSRIs are dangerous. It says so right on the label. They increase "the risk of anxiety, agitation, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity and mania." Oh, not a big deal. That's not causation. Then what is it? According to one meta study by the FDA, young people who've been prescribed SSRI have an increased rate of suicide. Oh, wait. More suicides? Weren't they supposed to reduce suicide, but we're getting more suicide? Let's stop right there, but we're not stopping. We're accelerating.
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Between 2015 and 2019, the use of SSRI drugs by teens in the United States rose by nearly 40%. So, it's not working? Let's do a whole lot more of it.
This seems like a massive and extremely obvious problem, extremely obvious. People aren't themselves. They're taking drugs that appear to be causing the behavior that drugs are designed to prevent. Why don't they talk about this on TV? Oh, let's see. In 2020, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $4.5 billion advertising on national television in this country. Now, how much is that? Well, to put it in some context, Pfizer spent more on advertising in 2020 than it did on research and development.
But it wasn't a bad decision. It was a great decision. Pfizer's revenue doubled last year to more than $81 billion. Now, how do they do that? Well, the ad campaign paid off. It helped convince politicians to require the entire population take Pfizer products, products that don't work as advertised, that have killed large numbers of people and whose side effects are indemnified against lawsuits by the United States Congress. That's quite a business model. You might think it could be a subject of a media story, but no. No stories on Pfizer. They're paid to be fanboys of Pfizer. Therefore, they are.
Here's a tweet, for example, from CNBC, which is ostensibly a news organization and we're quoting, "Pfizer is uniquely positioned to advance MRNA, which could be a breakthrough for other infectious diseases, genetic diseases and cancer. (Paid post for Pfizer) #ad." It was on their Twitter account, a news organization. They're admitting it's a paid post for Pfizer. But in CNBC's defense, they're not alone. Pretty much all the news coverage you see in the United States is a paid post for Pfizer. Watch this.
CNN VOICEOVER / 2019: Anderson Cooper 360 brought to you by Pfizer.
ABC VOICEOVER / 2016: ABC News Nightline brought to you by Pfizer.
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CNN VOICEOVER / 2021: The Human Factor brought to you by Pfizer.
CBS VOICEOVER / 2012: CBS Health Watch sponsored by Pfizer.
ABC VOICEOVER / 2017: And Good Morning America is brought to you by Pfizer.
CNN VOICEOVER / 2019: CNN tonight, brought to you by Pfizer.
Oh, it's all brought to you by Pfizer. Now, why is that? Because TV channels don't prescribe drugs. Doctors do. So, why would Pfizer, a drug company, be advertising on television? Well, we're not sure the answer. Let's put it this way. Don't hold your breath waiting for CNN or Good Morning America to do a hard-hitting investigative piece on the potential connection between prescription drugs and violence. Probably not going to happen since they sponsor those channels. They're going to keep telling you it's all about guns. It's all about guns.
Does anyone really believe it's all about guns? No one thinks that. If you really thought that guns caused violence, you would, for example, demand far harsher prosecution of gun possession in the cities. That's where most of the shooter’s shootings are taking place, but no one's doing that. Why? Because that's where Democratic voters live. So, there's no chance anyone's going to crack down on them. Instead, politicians are using these tragedies to do what they've always wanted to do, which is disarm their political opponents. Here's someone who's kind of dumb enough to say it out loud. This is the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
GOV. J.B. PRITZKER: It is devastating that a celebration of America was ripped apart by our uniquely American plague. A day dedicated to freedom has put into stark relief the one freedom we as a nation refuse to uphold, the freedom of our fellow citizens to live without the daily fear of gun violence. It's the 4th of July, a day for reflection on our freedoms. Our founders carried muskets, not assault weapons and I don't think a single one of them would have said that you have a constitutional right to an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine.
Does a single person watching that, does even one person watching that, believe for a second that J.B. Pritzker has had an authentic human emotion in the last 20 years, other than gluttony, greed and the lust for power? No, no one believes that. This is politics. Disarm the law-abiding. That's the first thing every authoritarian regime does, of course. Make sure the other side can't fight back. Of course, that's what they all do. So, of course, in New York, the state's unelected governor, speaking of democracy her name is Kathy Hochul, used to have a little vaccinated necklace, probably won't wear that anymore. But Hochul disapproved a law requiring gun buyers to provide their social media accounts to the government. Hmm. Paging First Amendment lawyers here.
Applicants must prove to Kathy Hochul satisfaction that they have and we're quoting "the essential character, temperament and judgment necessary to be entrusted with a weapon." So, the idea is Kathy Hochul, who has not been elected governor, is the holder of your rights and she kind of doles them out based on your obedience.
Now, this is an inversion of the basic promise of America, which is your rights came before the government. They were given to you by God – can we use that word now? And the government merely safeguards them, but once you get rid of that, like Joe Biden does, when you start telling us that "I've thought your rights and if you do what I tell you to do, I'll give them to you," there's nothing you can't do.
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks during a ceremony to sign a legislative package to protect abortion rights in New York, Monday, June 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
So, New York's not stopping there. New York has also made it a felony to carry a firearm in any public place unless your Kathy Hochul's bodyguards. That would include public transit, Times Square. You can't carry a firearm in churches or schools where mass shootings have been known to occur. So, that means the law abiding in New York can't defend themselves. So, is there data on this? Did Kathy Hochul consult some kind of study telling us would save lives? No, not even pretending. Just doing it just because she feels like it. She just admitted that on camera. Watch.
REPORTER: Governor, do you have the numbers to show that it's the concealed carry permit holders that are committing crimes?
GOV. HOCHUL: I don't need to have numbers. I don't need, I don't have to have a data point to point to, to say that this is going to..all I know is I have a responsibility to the people of this state.
"Oh, I don't need numbers. I don't need to have the numbers. I'm acting purely on emotion because this is how I feel because I care." Wow. Living down to the stereotype, anybody? There's no actual evidence that will work. She doesn't need that. She wants more power. Watch Kathy Hochul explain.
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul debates in the race for governor at the studios of WNBC4-TV June 16, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Ruttle-Pool/Getty Images)
HOCHUL: Imagine you're on a crowded subway and you bang into somebody inadvertently. Tempers flare, and the person that you banged into happens to be carrying a concealed weapon. Imagine you're in a bar. Someone starts a fight. They have a concealed weapon on them. Imagine you're in Times Square visiting with your family. You're on the way to a show with your family and you're surrounded by people with concealed weapons. Does that make you feel more or less safe?
Where is your vaccinated necklace, Kathy Hochul? Weren't you just bragging about that? You're not bragging about being vaccinated anymore. Why is that exactly? Maybe just come out and explain.
But her reasoning is, as soon as we tell people on the subway, bad people, they can't have guns, they'll immediately obey Kathy Hochul because they voted for her. Oh wait nobody did. Because bad people follow the rules. Is that what she's saying? What is she saying exactly? We're not sure.
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-gun-control-doesnt-stop-bad-people-guns