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Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Florida Paper Confirms What Dana Loesch Said During CNN Townhall: Sheriff Israel Failed Parkland Students

It's no secret that the shooting that took place on Valentine's Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida has had a profound impact on the country. The issue of gun control and law enforcement intervention in school shootings has been at the forefront of this discussion.

Since the tragic shooting took place, gun rights advocates, including National Rifle Association (NRA) spokeswoman Dana Loesch have said that the Parkland shooting took place, not because of lax gun laws, but because of the failed leadership under Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.

Remember this discussion that took place during the CNN Townhall? Loesch reminded Israel that law enforcement officials were called 39 times on Nikolas Cruz. And guess what? Absolutely nothing was done.

"They [Parkland students] were threatened with death. They were threatened that they were going to bleed. They were threatened that they were going to be killed," Loesch told Israel. "And [Nikolas Cruz] had already taken bullets and knives to school. He'd already assaulted people. He assaulted his parent. His assaulted other students. 39 visits and this was known to the intelligence and law enforcement community. Look, I'm not saying you can be everywhere at once, but this is what I'm talking about. We have to follow up on these red flags. Doesn't that meet the standard?"
The South Florida Sun Sentinel dug deeper into what occurred on that tragic February day. And guess what they discovered? That the Broward County Sheriff's Office failed to protect students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School...and that was a direct result of Sheriff Scott Israel's leadership...

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Florida Gun Grabbers Launch ‘Assault Weapon Ban’ Petition

Florida has long been unofficially known as the “Gunshine State” for its generally pro-gun status. While it wasn’t as pro-gun as many places–waiting period, I’m looking at you–it’s still a state with a pro-gun attitude. This is despite the knee-jerk legislation passed through in the emotional wake of the Parkland massacre.

However, anti-gun groups appear to believe the emotional wake is still taking place. Why else would they launch a ballot initiative to ban so-called assault weapons?

The groups, Americans for Gun Safety Now and the unambiguously-named Ban Assault Weapons Now, said in a joint statement released this week that they were formed during the advocacy wave that surged following the Marjo

ry Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left 17 dead in the state in February. Working together, they hope to gather enough signatures to put the initiative in front of voters for a yes or no vote that, if successful, would enact a statewide ban.

“The assault rifle, and its ability to fire approximately one hundred rounds a minute, can be purchased legally with no proof of training, no background check, and no regulations what so ever,” said Gail Schwartz, BAWNs chair, and the aunt of Alex Schachter who was killed at Parkland. “Our goal is to take military-style firearms off the shelves thus saving the lives of innocent people.”

Both organizations, with a small social media footprint and few independent events under their belt, are facing an uphill battle. The groups would need to gather 766,200 signatures from registered Florida voters through an approved petition process to put the amendment on the state’s 2020 ballot. Once there, state law requires that a constitutional amendment has to gather 60 percent of the vote to become law, rather than a simple majority.
The media footprint is only one of the challenges creating an uphill battle for their effort.
Another is the fact that now that things have settled down after Parkland, it’s unlikely that all that many people will want to sign the blasted things.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m quite sure that you can find 766,200 anti-gunners in a state the size of Florida. The problem will be getting the petition in front of them.

Even if that happens, though, I’d be shocked to see 60 percent of the electorate–in a presidential election year, mind you, which means a greater turnout than normal–decide to ban a class of firearms after all...

Monday, April 2, 2018

Media Darling David Hogg Ducks Debate With Gun Rights Backer Kyle Kashuv

Kyle Kashuv, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, emerged as the most prominent pro-Second Amendment voice among students there after the shooting at the school that left 17 dead.

Kashuv, 16, who has been embraced by many conservatives, hopes to debate David Hogg, 17, a Stoneman Douglas senior.

Hogg is one of the most visible liberal voices among the Parkland students in the media spotlight. The son of an FBI agent, he has been lionized by the left as he advocates more gun control.

By contrast, Kashuv does not get nearly as much media exposure as Hogg or other liberal-leaning Parkland students. His appearances typically are limited to Fox News Channel among the larger media outlets.

Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, argues that Kashuv is a worthy opponent for Hogg and other young liberals.

In an email to The Daily Signal, Kirk said:
Kyle is absolutely brilliant and deserves a chance to debate David Hogg in an open forum. David has insulted us gun owners enough, and Kyle deserves a chance to get his ideas out to the most amount of people possible.

CNN recently canceled a segment with Kashuv, apparently after someone there took offense to one of the teen’s retweets on Twitter.

Stoneman Douglas junior Cameron Kasky agreed in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” to debate Kashuv, but later backed out.

Kasky is credited with being a main organizer of the anti-guns March for Our Lives held March 24 in Washington, D.C.

Kashuv and other conservative voices were not given the opportunity to be heard at the march and rally in the nation’s capital.

These excluded voices included Hunter Pollack, 29, whose sister Meadow, an 18-year-old senior, died in the shooting. Their father, Andrew Pollack, has become a...

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

SWAT swarms home of Parkland student David Hogg after a prank call to police

A phone call about a possible hostage situation in Parkland on Tuesday morning led police officers to swarm the home of one of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's most outspoken student activists.

It turned out to be a prank called "swatting" — an illegal hoax call increasingly employed as a harassment tactic.

The Broward County Sheriff's Office said the target of call was the Parkland home of Stoneman Douglas senior David Hogg. The 18-year-old has emerged as one of the leading voices at the high school since a Feb. 14 massacre by a former student who opened fire with an AR-15-styled rifle and killed 17 students and staff on campus.

"They said there was someone in the home with a weapon," said Broward Sheriff's Office public information officer Gina Carter. "SWAT responded. They cleared the home. It was a hoax and we will be investigating."

The call came in at 8:39 a.m. When police arrived there was no one in the house.

Hogg was one of the leaders of anti-gun march in Washington in March and has been pushing elected leaders in Tallahassee and in the nation's capitol on gun control measures. At the end of May, Hogg led a sit-in at a supermarket after learning Publix had donated a large chunk of money to a state legislator who prides himself of being pro National Rifle Association. The giant supermarket chain caved and said it would no longer make political contributions.

Hogg is also one of several student leaders who will take part in a bus tour this summer to several cities in a get-out-the-vote campaign.

The continuing campaign has lead to social media attacks against many students, including Hogg, from many conservative and pro-gun commentators.

In 2015, dozens of Miami Beach police officers and SWAT members raced to the home of rap icon...

Monday, August 27, 2018

David Hogg, gun control advocates march on Smith & Wesson headquarters, demand $5 million donation

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Student gun control advocates and one of the survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting are finishing a 50-mile, four-day march in Massachusetts to the headquarters of gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson.

The group is gathering outside company headquarters Sunday in Springfield.

The marchers have condemned Smith & Wesson for making the rifle used in the February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The group wants the company to donate $5 million to gun violence research.

The Boston Globe reported David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, called the march empowering and said Massachusetts shows how commonsense gun laws work.

Another group held signs across the street from Smith & Wesson supporting the gun-maker and the Second Amendment.

Smith & Wesson hasn’t responded to...

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Florida governor suspends terror-tied Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for disastrous lack of response in Parkland shooting

Terror-tied CAIR Sheriff Scott Israel, whose deputies did nothing during the Parkland school shootout, yet he provided weapons training to a notorious radical mosque, has finally been suspended.
…several deputies stayed outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., during the response to the mass shooting instead of immediately going inside. Already, Sheriff Scott Israel has said the first deputy there, the school’s resource officer, did not go inside even though the gunman was actively shooting.

The investigation became public after several media reports, citing unnamed officials in the nearby Coral Springs Police Department, said officers who responded to the Feb. 14 shooting were concerned because Broward deputies did not immediately enter the building to help those who had been injured inside.

Longtime Geller Report readers were warned about Sheriff Israel and his terror-tied department for years.....

Monday, March 4, 2019

17 Takeaways From America’s Biggest Conservative Conference


The Daily Signal was at all three days of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual national gathering of conservative activists, in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington, and we’ve rounded up some of the highlights of our coverage.

1. Vice President Mike Pence Speaks Out Against the ‘Culture of Death’

“Life is winning in America. For all the progress we’re making, tragically, at the very moment more Americans are embracing the right to life, leading members of the Democratic Party are embracing a radical agenda of abortion on demand,” Pence said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Pence called President Donald Trump the “most pro-life president in history,” noting that Trump revoked U.S. tax dollars from funding abortions abroad and signed legislation allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood.

“Democrats are standing for late-term abortion, infanticide, and a culture of death,” Pence said. “I promise you, this president, this party, and this movement will always stand for the unborn and stand for the inalienable right to life.”



Pence also said the people of Venezuela are embracing freedom against the embattled socialist regime of dictator Nicolas Maduro.

“Freedom is more generous, more helpful, and more humane than any other social or economic model ever attempted because it is the only philosophy that respects the dignity and worth of every single life and sees every man, woman, and child as made in the image of God,” Pence said.

2. Lindsey Graham Praises Trump for Kavanaugh Nomination

“I want to thank the president for nominating Brett,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said at CPAC. “He did something not everyone does. He had somebody’s back when it really mattered. There were a bunch of people saying we need to move on, and the president said, ‘No, thank you.’ That’s truly called draining the swamp.”

Graham asked the CPAC audience to imagine what would have happened if Democrats had been able to block Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Qualified prospective nominees would be reluctant to step forward if the tactics employed against Kavanaugh had prevailed, he said.

3. Parkland Student: ‘Government Failed at All Levels’

Kyle Kashuv, now director of high school outreach for Turning Point USA, a nonprofit youth organization, was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a gunman opened fire Feb. 14, 2018, killing 14 students and three staff members. Seventeen others were wounded.

“What happened at Parkland wasn’t a gun issue,” Kashuv said during a session on gun control at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Kashuv, 17, pointed to statistics that show crime rates have declined as gun ownership has gone up.

He also expressed frustration that law enforcement officials received multiple reports about earlier behavior by the young man responsible for the shooting, but did nothing.

“Government failed at all levels,” Kashuv said. “Every single level of government knew this could happen. I’m targeting individuals who allowed this to happen. A gun is an inanimate object without someone pulling the trigger.”

4. Cabinet Secretaries Call for Senate to Confirm More Nominees

“One thing that has slowed us up a little bit is getting the nominations [through the Senate],” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Our friends on the Democratic side have not been quite as helpful as we’d like for them to be from the standpoint of getting nominations through.”

Perry said seats on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the energy industry and approved projects, should be filled.

FERC still has a couple of openings [and it] could be really important to get those done,” Perry said. “Billions of dollars in projects are going to get approved at FERC … that will allow our natural resources to be moved all around the world.”

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao stressed that this isn’t the fault of the Senate majority leader—her husband, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

“It’s not the Senate majority leader’s fault. I want to make that very clear. It’s not his fault,” Chao said. “It is the deliberate policy of the Senate minority leader [Chuck Schumer] to slow up the nominations of this administration by invoking cloture at every single step of the nominations process on the floor.”

5. Activist Assaulted at UC Berkeley Describes What Happened

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal podcast, Hayden Williams, who was attacked in February when recruiting students for a conservative group at University of California, Berkeley recounted what occurred:
As soon as I pulled out my phone, one of them said, ‘You guys are promoting violence,’ and then out of nowhere my phone gets smacked out of my hand. I go to pick it up off the ground and then the table gets flipped over and I turn around and this guy is just looking at me with flames in his eyes and he starts telling me, ‘Get out of my face, get that camera out of my face,’ and he starts pushing me and punching at me. It was just a really scary situation.

I’ve got most of it on film but he swatted my phone down about three times in total and the third time he got it I think the video stopped for whatever reason and he took my phone from me.

Luckily there was a third-person angle, some student who was walking by and realized what happened, basically, just took it upon himself to record.

So we have this angle, and if you actually look closely at the video, you can see my phone in this guy’s right hand when he punches me and knocks my hat off my head and then it looks like I’m tussling for his sweater or something, but really I’m just trying to retrieve my phone from him. Fortunately, he drops it and it lands between my legs and I go to pick it up and he kind of walks away, but he’s still yelling.

I look down at my phone and I realize that he was coming back and I didn’t know if it was still recording or not, my phone. He just gets in my face and starts yelling and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a really tense situation.’ And I look down at my phone again after he’s done yelling and right then is when he just throws the hardest punch I’ve ever taken in my life.

The really disturbing part though was the people around us that were egging him on. … Some guy was saying, ‘I’m on your side, you’re winning this fight.’ It was just really demented. I don’t care who you are, what you believe, if I see you in a distressed situation like that and you’re being attacked, I’m going to do everything I can to help you out. I wouldn’t even think about mocking you.


Za
chary Greenberg was arrested and charged Friday for allegedly attacking Williams.

6. Van Jones Defends Working With Conservatives on Criminal Justice Reform

Van Jones, a former Obama administration official and...

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Parkland Activist David Hogg And His Sister Just Signed A Book Deal

The March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. received wall to wall coverage. But afterward, the high school activists and the gun control fervor seemed to die down. It’s been a while since David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, and Emma Gonzalez have appeared for a TV interview in primetime. Though their voices haven’t been too loud as of late, the young activists are still working to advance their agenda.

According to the Associated Press, David Hogg and his sister, Lauren, just signed a book deal, which in all likelihood will find itself on the best-sellers list.
Two students who survived the deadly mass shooting this year at a Florida high school have a book deal.

Siblings David and Lauren Hogg are working on #NEVERAGAIN: A New Generation Draws the Line. Random House announced Wednesday that the book would come out June 5 and that the Hoggs were donating their proceeds to charity and community organizations.

The Hoggs and other students at the Parkland, Florida, school have become leading gun control advocates since the Feb. 14 tragedy that left 17 people dead.

Random House is calling the book “a moving portrait” of a new political movement. The publisher will make a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization founded in 2014.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, will not be buying the book.

While the charity and community organizations are not named, it makes me wonder if the organizations are ones that will further the leftist gun control narrative. Random House’s donation will be purely political, as Everytown for Gun Safety’s mission is to promote gun control legislation.

Random House is calling the book a “‘moving portrait’ of a new political movement,” but that is inaccurate. As Tom wrote before, this gun control movement is nothing new,despite what progressives and gun control advocates want to say about it. The tactics are the same. The talking points are the same. The only difference is the political left has...

Thursday, March 1, 2018

As Broward sheriff touts ‘amazing leadership,’ a low grumble builds in the ranks

As the elected sheriff of Broward County, Scott Israel has been fond of self-promotion and found comfort among friends.

After he was first elected in 2012, he opened the Broward Sheriff’s Office pocketbooks to surround himself with campaign supporters. When he ran for reelection, he had his mug festooned on the facade of community outreach vehicles.

It’s a tactic that’s earned him criticism during his five-plus years as the top law enforcement officer at Florida’s largest sheriff’s department, but one that may come in handy now that he’s under intense scrutiny for the way his agency responded to a Parkland shooting that killed 17 — and how it handled calls and tips before the tragedy about shooter Nikolas Cruz.

If his crisis is of his own making, then his salvation may be as well.

“[Scott Israel] stood with us now we must stand with him,” Col. Jim Polan, one of Israel’s top lieutenants, wrote Monday in an email urging other brass to rally deputies. “It’s important that they are reminded about all of the great things that our agency has accomplished under the direction of Sheriff Israel.”

Now two weeks removed from the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Israel is on an island.

Republicans are demanding his ouster following the sheriff’s belated disclosure that a deputy assigned to the school waited outside the building where Cruz did his killing and “never went in.” Democrats are keeping their distance as outside investigators review how BSO handled dozens of calls and tips that painted a portrait of an armed, volatile teenager.

And as Israel deflects any responsibility for errors his deputies may have made — touting his own “amazing leadership” on CNN Sunday — the rank-and-file are beginning to “grumble.”

“It’s a low grumble now, but it’s starting to build,” said Jeff Bell, president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association.

The pressure — including a subpoena for documents issued Wednesday by the Florida House of Representatives — is forcing Israel and his allies to try and gin up support, relying on the sheriff’s skills as a politician in order to defend his abilities as a law enforcement agent. On Thursday, with conservative media painting him as “the Barney Fife of Parkland,” Israel’s supporters will gather at a Pompano Beach church to show their support for the sheriff.

Broward Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday the school resource officer stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was suspended without pay after he learned the deputy never went into the building when the shooting began. Broward Sheriff's Office

But it’s hardly an independent event: The gathering is scheduled at the Word of the Living God Ministries, where pastor John Mohorn is a former BSO chaplain.

If Israel has few people outside his department to lean on, it may be because he’s done himself few favors since Cruz killed 17 students and faculty on Feb. 14 and wounded 15 more.

Immediately after the shooting, for instance, the sheriff touted his agency’s swift response and said the tragedy was a reminder that the public has to help law enforcement identify people on the edge of violence.

“If you see something, say something,” he told the media. “If anybody has any indicator that someone is going through a behavioral change, or on their social media that there are disturbing photos, perhaps bombs or firearms or videos or pictures that are just not right, please make sure law enforcement knows about it.”

As it turned out, members of the public had done exactly that: In call after call, they warned BSO deputies, as well as the FBI, that Cruz owned weapons and was a threat to himself and others. He was a “school shooter in the making,” one tipster stated. He was posting photos with guns on Instagram, another warned.

But little was done.

The sheriff’s office — which has shut down the release of information while the investigation continues — has adamantly stated that none of the tips or calls it received...

Monday, February 26, 2018

Were Four Deputies Ordered To Stand Down During Shooting?

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel declined to answer when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him if four deputies were ordered to stand down during the Parkland school shooting.

WATCH:


It was reported this week that not only did school resource officer Scot Peterson not enter the school when he knew the shooting was happening, but three other sheriff’s deputies also waited behind their vehicles while the shooter killed 17 people inside the school.

Tapper first asked Israel if it was “policy” for the Broward County Sheriff’s department to “set up a perimeter” before going into the school to stop the shooter. Israel had said in an interview after the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting that he learned it was important for officers to set up a “staging area” before entering the premises, but he denied that such strategy applied to the Parkland school shooting.

“Jake, you’re completely talking apples and oranges,” Israel said. “When we have a horrific incident of any magnitude and the incident is over and people are arriving to help and we know we have 5, 10, 12 hours of work to do, we have our police officers, fire fighters, deputies go to staging areas.”

“An active shooter is completely different,” he asserted. “This is an active shooter, we push to the entry, to the killer, we get in and we take out the threat.”

However, Israel dodged when asked if the deputies may have received a “stand down” order that...

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Broward County FL Sheriff Israel Responds to Parkland Shooting Critics: ‘I’ve Given Amazing Leadership’

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Broward County, FL Sheriff Scott Israel fielded questions from show host Jake Tapper about his department’s actions leading up to and during the Parkland school shooting.

Israel said he had provided “amazing leadership” as the head of that agency.

Partial transcript as follows:

TAPPER: Are you really not taking any responsibility for the multiple red flags that were brought to the attention of the Broward Sheriff’s office about this shooter before this incident, whether it was people near him, close to him calling the police?

ISRAEL: I can only take responsibility for what I knew about. I exercised my due diligence. I’ve given amazing leadership to this agency.

TAPPER: Amazing leadership?

ISRAEL: Yes, Jake. There’s a lot of things we’ve done throughout this — this is — you don’t measure a person’s leadership by a deputy not going in to — these deputies received the training they needed.

TAPPER: Maybe you measure somebody’s leadership by whether or not they protect the community. You’ve listed 23 incidents before the shooting involving the shooter, and still, nothing was done to keep guns out of his hands, to make sure that the school was protected, to make sure you were keeping an eye on him — I don’t understand how you can sit there and claim amazing leadership?

ISRAEL: Jake, on 16 of those cases our deputies did everything right. Our deputies have done amazing things. We’ve taken this — the five years I’ve been sheriff, we’ve taken the Broward Sheriff’s Office to a new level. I’ve worked with some of ...

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Obama-Era Policies Helped Keep Parkland Shooter Under the Radar. Here’s What Went Wrong.

One of the most heartbreaking and perhaps infuriating aspects of the Florida school shooting that took 17 lives is just how many red flags there were surrounding the shooter.

The national debate following the shooting has mostly revolved around guns. Much ink has also (rightly) been spilled about the failed leadership of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in its moment of crisis.

What’s been lost in this discussion are the issues of school safety and discipline. Those issues are highly relevant to what took place in Parkland.

Prior to the mass shooting, Nikolas Cruz was involved in a huge number of incidents on and off campus, numerous calls were made to the police, and the was FBI even involved. He certainly appeared to be a ticking time bomb.

It would seem that somewhere along the way, he should have been stopped before the shooting took place.

But that wasn’t the case.

Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explained in City Journal how an Obama-era Department of Education initiative designed to put an end to the “school to prison pipeline,” combined with local mismanagement, helped allow the shooter to fall through the cracks.

“[I]n 2013, the school board and the sheriff’s office agreed on a new policy to discontinue police referrals for a dozen infractions ranging from drug use to assault,” Eden wrote.

A separate report by RealClearInvestigations found that Broward County was part of a “vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence.”

This was part of a larger Obama administration effort, launched in 2011, to reduce racial disparities in school discipline numbers, according to RealClearInvestigations.

“Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in ‘healing circles,’ obstacle courses, and other ‘self-esteem building’ exercises,” the report said.

“We must ensure that school discipline is being handled by trained educators, not by law enforcement officers,” said former Secretary of Education John King in 2016. “Some schools are simply turning misbehaving students over to [school resource officers]. This can set students on a path to dropping out or even to prison.”

Florida’s Broward County, which is where the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting took place, was a leader in adopting this new program and was even touted for it by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The number of school arrests dropped dramatically in the years that followed, but that didn’t mean serious crimes weren’t...

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Dick’s May Have To Close Stores Due To Anti-Gun Decisions

by Tom Knighton
I’ve written more about Dick’s Sporting Goods in 2018 than I ever thought I would. When the year started, we thought the company would have gotten the message that taking anti-gun stances wasn’t conducive to profits, but it didn’t.

So Dick’s doubled down after Parkland and purged the rest of the AR-15s from its stores and then instituted a discriminatory policy against legal adults.

And it’s biting it right in the kiester, too.
In remarks made to the Goldman Sachs Retailing Conference and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, CEO Edward Stack explained that the 3.9 percent decline in the company’s sales during the third quarter could be partially attributed to its ban on the sale of assault-style rifles and on the sale of all firearms to customers under 21 years old — both of which were implemented in the wake of the Parkland shooting in February.

“Well I think it’s definitely a factor, and it’s nothing that we didn’t anticipate,” Stack said of the sales downturn during the call. “As we put out kind of our guidance for the year and our earnings guidance for the year, we knew this would happen when — we’ve made some decisions on firearms in the past and we’ve had a pretty good idea of what these consequences were going to be. We felt that was absolutely the right thing to do. We would do the same thing again if we had a mulligan, so to speak, to do it again.”

In addition to the firearm-purchasing restrictions, Dick’s also hired a number of Washington, D.C. lobbyists in May to advocate for more-stringent gun-control regulations. Taken together, the restrictions and the lobbying effort led the National Shooting Sports Foundation to expel Dick’s and caused a number of major gun manufacturers to sever ties with the retailer — developments that Stack admitted were detrimental to its third-quarter performance.
I’d say, “Who cares?” but the truth is, I do.

Schadenfreude is a kind of caring, right?

Honestly, it couldn’t happen to a...

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Parkland Shooting Survivor: CNN Planted ‘Scripted’ Question At Town Hall [VIDEO]

Parkland shooting survivor Colton Haab said that CNN pushed him to ask a scripted question at their gun control town hall Wednesday night, overruling him on the questions he wanted to ask.

“CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted,” Haab, a 17-year-old student at Stoneman Douglas High School, told local news station WPLG-TV. “I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions.”

“Colton wrote questions about school safety, suggested using veterans as armed school security guards but claims CNN wanted him to ask a scripted question instead, so he decided not to go,” the WLPG-TV reporter said.

“I don’t think that it’s going to get anything accomplished, it’s not going to ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have,” Haab said of the town hall. The questions that were asked at the town hall were overwhelmingly slanted in favor of gun control measures.

WATCH:

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Student Journalist Says Discipline Policies Weakened School Safety Before Parkland Shooting

While the media continues to focus on gun control in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, one area student has dug into his school’s policies and found them wanting.

Kenneth Preston, a 19-year-old student journalist who attends high school in Broward County, Florida, has done an in-depth investigation of the superintendent and school board.

Preston’s thorough report, released on Tuesday, says that Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie and the school district failed to spend over $100 million of federal money intended for school safety upgrades.

Runcie once worked under former Obama Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in the Chicago Public Schools system.

Preston’s report says that the school had been sitting on this money since 2014, and that only about 5 percent of it had been spent.

“The findings of our investigation is [sic] two-fold. First off, a $100 million which superintendent and the school board had access to. Since 2014, roughly 5 percent of that money has been spent,” Preston said in an in-depth interview with Sirius XM host David Webb.

Preston said that Runcie gave him a “long-winded runaround” about what happened to the money.

In addition, Preston has called into question the school district’s use of the PROMISE program.

This program was aligned with a 2014 Obama-era federal initiative, which aimed at ending the “school to prison pipeline” as well as racial disparities in discipline by focusing on counseling and “restorative justice” instead of using law enforcement to correct on-campus misbehavior.

Preston spoke at a Broward County School Board meeting on Tuesday, but said during his remarks that just before the meeting started, his allotted time to speak was cut to three minutes.

The seven panelists Preston had lined up were removed from the schedule.

On the day before the hearing, Preston said he was forced to attend a two-hour meeting with...

Saturday, June 18, 2022

The Communist Plot behind School Shootings


The Uvalde, Texas school massacre did not happen because an 18-year-old had access to guns. Instead, it was a walking testimony to the moral bankruptcy of modern America and the hollowing out of the American home. A broken home, no father or father figure in his life, a mother who reportedly struggled with drug addiction, no church or community of any kind, no real friends except those he met through social media. We found such profiles in the school shootings at Parkland, Sandy Hook, and many other places.

This is more than a profile of a school shooter; it's an indictment of our entire culture. America has become an immoral society caused by "liberal policies that encourage out of wedlock child birth, divorce, single-parent households, and amoral values that undermine respect for life." John Adams, one of our Founding Fathers, understood the consequences of immorality: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

In my childhood, we always had guns in our house, as did my relatives. My father and young brother would head out to the woods in Tennessee on Saturday mornings to hunt. As an adult, I carried a gun to protect myself because I had been robbed twice.

Until more recent decades, boys as young as nine or ten were able to buy guns COD through mail order to hunt with their friends. High school students, who brought trucks to school, carried rifles on racks in the back. Yet we didn't have school massacres. What has changed?

For decades, Communists have been working underground to take down America. This was documented in the 1958 book, The Naked Communist, by FBI special agent W. Cleon Skousen. He provided research showing the rise of communist powers and presented the communist agenda for America. His list of 45 goals has become legendary, to the point of being officially read and recorded in the 1963 congressional hearing.

Nearly all of the goals have been achieved. Let's look at those that have more directly affected our children.

Because education is always a key vehicle for totalitarians to instill left-wing ideology early, Goal #17 calls for gaining control of schools and dumbing down the curriculum. Although subversion has been going on subtly for decades, it is now front and center with Common Core, Critical Race Theory, and the 1619 Project.

Goal #19 calls for student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations under communist attack. Public school students are taught how to become America's "Red Guards." Following the Parkland school shooting in Florida, teachers encouraged students to publicly advocate for gun control. Student negativity toward guns and our Second Amendment is not surprising. They are taught that there is no God and, therefore, there are no God-given rights, such as those enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Goal #42 is to create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition — that students and special interest groups should rise up together to solve economic, political, or social problems. We see this played out across the nation, with teachers encouraging students to protest gun ownership and youth engagement in the violent protests of...

Saturday, February 24, 2018

NRA's Dana Loesch: Liberals 'Call Trump a Tyrant’ But Want Him to Confiscate Our Firearms – ‘Figure That One Out!'

In her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, conservative author, radio host, and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch noted that in many criminal incidents, including the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Fla., "the government has proven that they cannot keep you safe."

Ironically, she added, the same people who "call Trump a tyrant " also want to confiscate our firearms. Try to figure that one out!"

“I want to make this super obvious point," said Loesch. "The government has proven that they cannot keep you safe, and yet some people want all of us to disarm. You heard that town hall [on CNN] last night -- they cheered the confiscation of firearms, and it was 5,000 people."

"I had to have a security detail to get out," she said. "I wouldn’t have been able to exit that if I did not have a private security detail. There were people rushing the stage and screaming ‘burn her.’ I came there to talk solutions and I am going to continue to talk solutions as the NRA’s been doing since...

Thursday, April 18, 2019

When a Hamas Front Group Lobbies Congress

Mere days after the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO, an Islamist umbrella coalition), descended upon Capitol Hill for National Muslim Advocacy Day, one of USCMO’s founding groups, the virulently anti-Semitic American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), returned to lobby Congress yet again. AMP and its partner organization, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), claim to be motivated by universal human rights, but the truth is more alarming; as a recent court case has made clear, AMP is the direct successor organization to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was sued into oblivion for being a propaganda front for the terrorist group Hamas.

While the USCMO lobby day focused on domestic issues of concern to Islamists, AMP’s fifth annual Palestine Advocacy Day focused on eroding American relations with Israel — complete with two days of training, and presentations from Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Arizona state representative Athena Salman — and an entire day of Hamas-connected activists holding meetings with members of Congress.

Ms. Salman is a relatively new addition to the AMP scene. She was first elected to the Arizona legislature in 2016 and is already serving as minority whip. Salman is an avowed atheist, but her father is Palestinian and Salman publicly defended the movement to Boycott, Divest and Sanction the state of Israel (BDS) during a contentious debate on an anti-BDS bill in the Arizona legislature in early April. (She had voted against the earlier version of the bill as well in 2016, which earned her the endorsement of the Arizona State chapter of SJP.)

Participants in the event seem to be more extreme. One example of excellence is Joe Catron — a blogger at the viciously anti-Semitic site Electronic Intifada — who calls himself a “reluctant citizen of the American empire.” Catron maintains a Twitter account emblazoned with images glorifying terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP), such as a map of Israel inside crosshairs, with an Arabic caption that reads, “Hell awaits you.”


Unfortunately, Mr. Catron fits right in with AMP. As has been established in court and in Congressional testimony, AMP’s board is composed of alumni from not only the Hamas front IAP, but also the terror-finance charities KindHearts for Charitable Development (shut down by the Federal government) and the Holy Land Foundation (its executives convicted in court), both of which laundered donations to Hamas.

Indeed, one major player in the event was AMP’s National Policy Director, Osama Abu Irshaid. Abu Irshaid previously served as the editor of Al Zaytounah, the official newspaper of Hamas front IAP. Abu Irshaid has written that the terrorist group Hamas is “an army for liberation” whose fighters “rise up for the blood of martyrs.” In another post, Abu Irshaid praised Hamas’s “steadfastness and sacrifice.”At a May 11, 2018 AMP speaking engagement, he parroted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory by telling his audience that most modern Jews are “not [real] Jews.”

Also looming large in the crowd were activists from the infamously Islamist Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), including Jinan Shbat, CAIR’s national outreach manager. Like Abu Irshaid, Shbat is an avowed supporter of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas, having tweeted her preference for that organization over the Palestinian Authority. As a spoken-word performer, she has delivered her poems at several Islamist events — including a 2017 “Muslim Law Symposium,” where she claimed credit for violence against Israeli Jews with the line, “My first act of defiance — a rock thrown.”

Shbat’s Twitter feed is replete with openly anti-Semitic statements. In one instance, she responded to a simple news headline about Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day with outrage, tweeting, “Wow. The nerve! Palestinians are now in a Holocaust!” In another instance, she responded to a photo of the Emirati cycling team’s training in Israel by tweeting, “You should burn in hell along with Israel.”

Shbat doesn’t reserve her ire for only the Jewish state. After the judge ruled in favor of Florida police in the case of the mismanaged Parkland shooting response, Shbat tweeted simply, “I hate my country.” That doesn’t stop her from maintaining a friendly relationship with some of its leadership, at least if you count Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Shbat was recently the subject of some internet buzz when a CAIR video showed her in an altercation with Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, who was attempting to record a group of Islamists visiting....

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

An FBI So Corrupt It Lets Mass Shooters Rampage Needs To Go




While the FBI has been failing to stop terrorist attacks by known threats, it has conducted numerous political operations on behalf of Democrats. It's time to clean house.


The New York Times reported on March 27 that Syrian-born Colorado mass shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa had been on the FBI’s radar before he murdered 10 people in a grocery store.

“The suspect’s identity was previously known to the F.B.I. because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau, according to law enforcement officials,” the Times says.


According to a police affidavit, six days before Alissa shot 10 people to death, he purchased a pistol. That would have required him to pass a federal background check also run by the FBI. It seems the FBI is not very good at this “stopping mass shooters” thing.

This is not an anomaly in the FBI’s history. It in fact appears to be a pattern of negligence. During the Barack Obama presidency, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., grilled FBI Director James Comey about the “known wolf” problem — of 14 Islamist attacks in the U.S. during Obama’s tenure, the FBI had been aware of at least 12 before the violence erupted, and did nothing.

For example, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, who killed 13; the Boston Marathon bombers of 2013 who killed three and injured 264; and the Pulse nightclub shooter who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more. All were known to the FBI and several had been interviewed by the FBI before they went on killing sprees.

The FBI had also been warned numerous times about the Parkland, Florida school shooter, before he killed 17 and injured 17 more in 2018. It also knew beforehand about the 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Waffle House shooter, who killed four and injured two more, and the 2020 Nashville RV bomber.


While the FBI has been failing to stop terrorist attacks by known threats like these, it has conducted numerous political operations on behalf of Democrats. The ones we know about include Crossfire Hurricane‘s use of federal spy power to affect election outcomes and prevent effective governance by elected Republicans. That operation included spying on Fox News.

In 2020, the FBI sent 15 agents to investigate a rope tied in a loop that hysterical people alleged was a “noose” after a black NASCAR driver was assigned a garage with the rope as its door pull. The FBI investigation determined the rope had been in the same shape and spot since at least 2019.

In 2019, the FBI executed operation “Varsity Blues” to shame rich people who attempted to buy their children entry into ruling class universities by means other than gobsmackingly expensive prep schools and SAT tutors.

The FBI also appears to have entrapped people into a ridiculous plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, by inserting agents into their social group who presented the plan and got them to appear to go along, at least on FBI recordings. The same appears to be happening with Democrats using the Jan. 6 riot to have the FBI investigate and prosecute their political opponents among the hoi polloi.

For that investigation, USA Today says, “agents in all but one of the FBI’s 56 field offices have been drafted to track down” people who attended the Capitol protest that day, the vast majority of whom peacefully protested. “Investigators who typically work cases involving the trafficking of drugs, child pornography and sex have taken calls from rioter’s angry ex-wives and former girlfriends and employers turned tipsters.”

Meanwhile, the FBI and other investigators appear to be hiding the truth about the one death that occurred in connection with this havoc that hasn’t yet been definitively proven to be an accident, besides the rioter a police officer shot to death.

It also appears the FBI is using its police power to prosecute people in connection with the Capitol riot who participated in no violence, including one who never went inside the Capitol nor harmed any person or public property, according to Julie Kelly’s reporting of court documents. His true crime appears to be belonging to a group in which some members believe, according to the federal indictment, that “the federal government has been co-opted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights.”

Parents of a teen who entered the Capitol and also committed no violence have been threatened by the feds for their political beliefs, Kelly reports. Their 18-year-old has been held in jail since the FBI arrested him in February, with 30 0ther inmates, and denied bail because he was homeschooled: “I don’t believe that home incarceration will work because he is...