Tag: corruption

Let’s Ban ‘Grand Theft Auto’: How many hours of video games did the Parkland shooter play?

After listening carefully to the Parkland school shooting victims and the many other high schoolers around the country that so quickly jumped on a proposed ban on “assault weapons” and took their anger out on the NRA specifically, then getting up close and personal with some of them at my local school board where their ideas were decidedly dangerous, I think its time we address the elephant in the room and come up with a real strategy. These same kids were all too comfortable with breaking Supreme Court decisions regarding the 2nd Amendment, but where quick to retreat to Supreme Court decisions protecting Grand Theft Auto under 1st Amendment considerations. The weakness of the entire progressive battlefield has been revealed—and as gun owners, moralists, and gun rights advocates, we’d be crazy not to utilize it—and we’re not crazy. So let’s let the ammunition fly, quite literally. Only this ammunition isn’t bullet trajectories coming from guns, but the great love and obvious corruption that fans of Grand Theft Auto—who are also some of these protestor kids, have for that most violent game in the gaming industry. It’s time we push for a ban of it—any store selling it, anybody buying it, any media given to it deserves the wrath of the NRA members.

I personally like Rockstar Games who makes Grand Theft Auto. I think their Red Dead Redemption games are fantastic, but they obviously meant to push every boundary possible with their Grand Theft Auto series of games which make murder and mayhem the essential plot points for young impressionable minds, and without question have had a degrading effect on our culture in general. Where is the proof you might say—where are the statistics? We’ll anti-gun advocates have no problem ignoring statistics when they preach for gun bans, but then cling to them like a baby clinging to a mother’s breast when the tables are turned toward the video game industry, something they care about. So why start now? Actually, speak to any teenager these days and in most cases, especially if they play Grand Theft Auto a lot, you can tell instantly that their minds are toast. The game certainly helps make them that way. I have no reservations about it. Grand Theft Auto is an evil game designed to bring out the dark side in its players and it’s not good to even allow yourself to think such things. The effects on our society have been devastating.

Well before there is ever a ban on AR-15s, which have a legitimate personal property protection necessity in some aspects of our modern culture, Grand Theft Auto should be banned. States should put proposals immediately to their state houses banning the sale of the product by Rockstar Games and if they want to take the case to the Supreme Court, then let’s take it to court. I have a VERY STRONG feeling that the Parkland shooter played Grand Theft Auto a lot. Early in the case USA Today reported that a neighbor of the kid played video games up to 15 hours a day, and I’m sure his gamer tag is well-known which games he played the most. How much do you want to bet that one of them was Grand Theft Auto. If that were the case shouldn’t that be part of the debate on the cause of school shootings. If we look at the gamer profiles of all school shooters what are the percentages of them who play more than 20 hours of Grand Theft Auto per week? I’m sure someone knows the answer to that question. Take that information to the Supreme Court. I have the privilege of knowing a few state Supreme Court justices and let me just say this—with such evidence presented, the video game industry would be toast. The only reason that evidence has not been yet presented in such a case is due to that lack of will from the progressive community—which the video game industry is filled with. They don’t want to know the answer to that question because once they know, they would be complicit with the knowledge provided.

I’m all for freedom of speech and I think most gun owners don’t call for such boycotts because they are respectful of the Constitution. They have no desire to impose their view of the world on people who might enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto even though I am certainly not afraid to speak my mind on the subject. I think Grand Theft Auto can only serve one purpose and that is to help make people inclined toward evil more of it. It reminds me a lot of the very good television series West World. Grand Theft Auto allows people an unrestricted way to be their ultimate self. If people are truly good Grand Theft Auto won’t make them evil. But if you are on the fence or have a few things lacking in your life regarding proper ethics, then that video game can allow you to exercise that deficiency without restriction making those traits much worse. The controversial orgy scene in West World I think shows best this nature in people. The good characters were not partaking in the truly degrading circumstances of their environment, but plenty of people were. They were thinking those things before they ever visited West World, but the park gave them an outlet, which is what Grand Theft Auto does for disturbed people like the Parkland school shooter. But if we sit on our hands and do nothing we will lose this 2nd Amendment fight so because of the aggressive actions of the gun grabbers, we must take aggressive action and attack something they enjoy. We cannot let the gun grabbers determine the ground for battle.

It’s not just out of revenge for trying to initiate boycotts against the NRA and pushing politicians into instant bans on AR-15 rifles, it’s because if there is a cause and effect, without question Grand Theft Auto has much more influence over young minds than any gun law. What good is gun control legislation if a huge part of our youth population is playing a video game that encourages breaking the law and murdering people as a way to get points? Guns by themselves do nothing. But this Grand Theft Auto game actually promotes illegal activity. Yes its free speech but if we are talking about social engineering than how can anyone propose banning guns without first talking about banning video games, because the games actually allow players to simulate violent tendencies.

I think the NRA would be wise to take aggressive action in this direction—take these cases to court and let’s fight. I want to hear the leftists from Silicone Valley try to provide testimony in defense of Grand Theft Auto when the data their companies have been collecting for decades say otherwise. I am pretty sure that the right to play video games which promote violence against our society is not in the Constitution. Murdering people for points, raping whores, and stealing cars may fall under the banner of free speech, but we are certainly free to decide if the harmful effects that such things do to our youth are worth avoiding legal entanglement, and I’d fully support more contributions to the NRA if they would take that fight to the enemy instead of waiting for the enemy, “the gun grabbers,” to come after our 2nd Amendment rights. Because if we do nothing and live and let live, they will stop at nothing until gun confiscation is the law of the land while our progressively raised youth sit around playing games all day fantasizing about murdering authority figures in a mess that will become our future if we fail to act. I’ll write a big check today to the NRA if they want to take up that fight and get the lawyers on the case. What is there to be afraid of. Pandora’s box has already been opened by the opposition.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Why Trump’s Trade Policies are Brilliant, and Bold: Resetting value from gross wealth redistributuion practices that have supressed economies

I am a little surprised that so many people are against Trump’s tariffs on foreign aluminum at a rate of 10% and a 25% rate on steel. Critics are declaring that Trump is messing with free market concepts and that utilizing an America first policy will drive up prices and harm industries needing cheap aluminum. Rather the opposite will turn out to be true, a lot of the great wealth that China has enjoyed as a communist nation is this international propping up through wealth redistribution that has been occurring for several decades now. China has enjoyed a different kind of crony capitalism that has used regulation and trade policies meant to harm American interests and transfer the wealth to recipient countries, which they of course have enjoyed tremendously. But in any situation the way to determine who will win and who will lose in these types of engagements is to understand who has the leverage position and who doesn’t.

As if we are supposed to care but The Beer Institute, a trade association and D.C. lobby firm said that a 10% increase on aluminum would cost the industry $347 million and more than 20,000 jobs. Really? People who drink beer even if the cost per can did go up like they say it will of .20 to .24 cents per can aren’t going to stop drinking the product. Ever go to an NFL game where beer is $8 a cup? People who drink beer really don’t care how much it costs so how are beer manufacturers going to lose 20,000 jobs? People just got a raise in their weekly checks. Granted, they should net a weekly profit, but if they are going to drink beer, they don’t care if the price goes up .24 cents. If anything, I would think beer consumption would increase because people’s expendable income has increased under Trump and that’s the real issue.

Obviously, the trade imbalance has been a real problem for many decades and people have come to get used to it—and accept that the United States would just get the short end of the stick. As the richest capitalist country in the world there were many jealous countries that wanted very much to ride the coattails of North America to greater prosperity for themselves—primarily China. China with even its billion people still has an economy that is behind the United States and that is due to the fact that everything is state-run. Russia has a similar problem, this past week it was released that they had some kind of invincible weapon that could attack the United States without detection. Well, why does anybody think they released that information—for the same reason that North Korea does, to scream like a child to let people know they are at the negotiating table. But they have nothing to offer, so what is there to talk about?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-impose-tariffs-steel-aluminum-imports-article-1.3849233

When we pick something up that is a material possession do we say—“hey, that was made in Russia, or China, or even North Korea. Look at that great craftsmanship?” We don’t. Russia and China occupy most of the world’s land mass together yet they are behind countries like Japan and the United States in economic output per capita and the only reason it’s never pointed out is that the stunted growth is due to the history of communism in those two places. Many in the media markets still hope that communism can find its way in the world but it never will, because the epistemological premise of economic philosophy behind communism is incorrect. The world has literally tried to fake it for most of the last century and they’ve used the United States as a way to prop up the concept with looted wealth.

I’m not anti-China, but I am very much anti-communism. China is a pretty neat country and has always been before they turned to communism in the aftermath of World War II. If China would like to adopt capitalism I think they could truly explode as an economic force around the world. The same as Russia, if they would truly become free market capitalists, they’d have a lot more to work with than the United States has had to work with.

I would recommend to anybody interested in economic matters of any kind to read the great book by Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. I have the older 1976 copy of its many renditions, and on page 364 paragraph 3 it states “The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.” For instance, if some Chinese person is making baskets and they can make three in a day by hand, the way to increase those baskets would be to either add more workers to make baskets, or to make it so that the basket maker can produce more per hour. The productive work has a measurable value and the Chinese and Russian markets have an abundance of people who want to inject more “labour” to a task, but the problem for them is that the need for that product is created by American capitalism. So the only way that there can be a global market of shared wealth in this present world where communism has destroyed much of it economically, is to have the needs for products arise in America and to have the job fulfillment going on in the communist countries. Since China has an abundance of people they can afford to throw their labour at the market demand and charge a cheaper rate—whereas in the United States the per capita output is necessarily much higher meaning the labor demand for each product garners higher value because that labor value is being divided over many market trajectories. In short, labor is cheaper in markets that have parasitic economics and that ratio has been encouraged by world leaders who still believe that the way to social fairness everywhere is through various philosophies of socialism and communism.

There isn’t going to be any trade wars with the world, not in China, not in Europe, not in Russia. China needs the food the United States produces so they’d be hurting themselves by jacking up the price for their own people. They can’t feed all their people because the incentive for work has been taken away from their economy by the state-run communism which mandates all their policies. That leaves people to do only what they must, which makes them staff all their labor needs in the most inefficient means possible. Without basic capitalist ideas like private property ownership and incentives for innovation, the cost of labour is mandated by bodies, not innovation meaning a state-run country always gets only the minimum of that effort because of the human predilection to only provide what they must since the state is the entity which collects the efforts for its own economy. Yet product is developed for those who can possess it, and that is why all the lucrative markets are still in the United States which puts all the leverage behind Trump’s tariffs.

Given all that understanding it is incorrect to artificially bring down the price of foreign goods at the expense of American wealth, because the wealth of the nation was created by the United States under the means of capitalism and that wealth has been looted to prop up the failed philosophies of tyrannical dictatorships—and that is what China has been for quite a long time. Russia is also too authoritarian which is left over from when they were one of the largest communist countries in the world. Apple has more value as a company than most of the Russian economy which is very sad considering the vast wealth that Russia has that is underutilized. When they were allowed to feel like the big kids on the block by charging NASA to fly into space and were pandered to on the world stage it made Putin look legitimate as the former KGB officer turned politician. Now under Trump all that artificial leverage has been taken away leaving him to be just another saber-rattling despot threatening global destruction if someone doesn’t give him some money. China will be the next, but the real matter on the table is that these countries can do nothing, because they don’t have the money for it. Russia barely has enough money to launch a missile, let along build a lot of them, just like North Korea doesn’t. And the best way to keep China from sneaking money into places like North Korea is to cut them off from American wealth as well. Then when they are faced with the failures of communism compared to nations that aren’t so limited will they be forced to change. They might scream and threaten in the meantime, but they are harmless, because they don’t have the gold that rules the world. America does—and it’s not because we are functioning from raw imperialism. It’s just because we adopted Adam Smith’s economic philosophy and the rest of the world hasn’t yet. But they need to.

A few years from now people will realize how brilliant Trump’s tariffs really were. They will re-establish balance around the globe for economic value without propping up communist regimes, and the truth will finally be revealed. America will of course prosper, people will still drink beer, buy cars and build things. Costs will align with the practice methods of innovative business means to combine the efforts of labour to the effect of national GDP. Some costs will go down, some may increase, but the net yield will benefit America for the better and that’s all that really matters. The parasites will have to adapt and if we really want to see an end to communism in the world and free people from its tyrannical effects, we will let the tariffs destroy it for the good of the people suppressed under it. We don’t need tanks and troops to do that—all we need to do is let market forces do their work and that is how the world will be much better and freer at the end of Trump’s four years than it ever was before. And that will be good for everyone—except the tyrants.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Video Games are to Blame for the Parkland Shooting: A neighbor reported that Nikolas Cruz played online shooters 15 hours per day

Gun confiscation is a goal of the political left, but in regard to these school shootings any gun control measure will have little effect because as I’d argue, there is a new element to our society that is much more to blame. About twenty years ago a video game called Goldeneye, based on the recent James Bond movie of the same name hit the Nintendo 64 home video game console. It was considered the first real “first person shooter” game which changed the industry forever. For the first-time players could play multiplayer death matches in the way that is common today with poplar games like Call of Duty, Battlefront, and even Grand Theft Auto. Two years after Goldeneye was released, there was the infamous Columbine School shooting in Colorado—and there have been occasional mass school shootings since. The connection to the video game industry is much more guilt associated than with the gun industry because there were guns before all this happened. What was new and different was the ability of young people to shoot guns in the world of computer gaming where the typical skills of learning to shoot and the consequences that were once taught to young people have been removed. These modern video games are slick, and fast. The guns fire ballistically in a very similar fashion. I used to tell my daughters who grew up on the next generation of that Goldeneye game experience, Perfect Dark, that what they shot on video games was the cheapest shooting that they’d ever do. And for most kids, they can handle it—but they love to shoot at each other in first person shooters. I’d say that there is an intellectual need people have to play this way. But for a kid that is just a little crazy, it is far too tempting to live out the fantasy created in the video game culture of gunning down lots of people, because for a fleeting bit of moments, it makes them infinitely powerful. And for some kids trading that moment of power for their lives either in jail or in death is a worthy one.

We learned from USA Today that the shooter in Parkland, Florida was a heavy video game player. A neighbor of accused shooter Nikolas Cruz told the Miami Herald that Cruz “escaped his misery” by playing video games for as much as 15 hours a day. “It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,” he said. Well, that really hasn’t been talked about in the news—the only line of thought that has been this proposal to confiscate guns. The biggest problem with that besides it being flat-out unconstitutional is it’s also not relevant to solving the problem. What is even worse, the way the media used those kids from the Parkland shooting to advance their liberal gun agenda, in the same way that Michael Moore did when he released the film Bowling for Columbine hoping to press the nation into a gun confiscation policy similar to Australia—the media completely ignored the video game problem. Most of the kids they were parading out in front of the cameras were shooters themselves in the world of video games. Because these days, most kids are. Most young people don’t learn about guns from their grandpa or their fathers anymore where they really feel the gun shoot, understand the recoil, and the expense of firing a lead projectile at a target—they only see them in video games under the new social world of online multiplayer battles—which are as common as the milkshake was to teenage kids in the 1950s at the local car hoop. Talk to just about any high school kid and they are playing games online at home.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/20/after-parkland-video-games-back-critics-crosshairs/356654002/

I know a little bit about this world because I am still very much a part of it. I have always played lots of video games and I’ve watched this evolution, and personally I love it. The PlayStation network for which I’m a member reported to me the following stats for the year of 2017. I was a little shocked by them because as people know, I am a very busy guy. I work professionally 60 to 70 hors per week. I read at least one book every week. I shoot real guns often as well as fulfil many interests that I have. In addition I spend a lot of personal time with my family so I didn’t think it was possible to play as many hours as my PlayStation gamer tag said I did last year. Here’s a bit of the report:

Over the months of 2017, you played
768 hours

over 17 different games, while making the most progress in November with 118 hours of gameplay.
The average PlayStation gamer played for
218 hours

The most-active month in 2017 for PlayStation gamers was July with 1.13 billion hours.

So I played roughly three times more gaming on PlayStation than the average video gamer. And as seen by their own stats, people play about 1 billion hours a month in online gaming, most of which are first person shooters like Call of Duty. My thing is Star Wars: Battlefront. Now consider that these stats are just for PlayStation. Xbox has an equally vibrant following as does Nintendo. Presently in our house we have both the PlayStation and the new Nintendo Switch which get tremendous workouts all hours of the day. Video games are the number one past time of young people these days so if any reforms should be tackled, it is in what happens in the world of online shooters. That is the first place to start.

A gun ban will do nothing to curb the violence because the desire to violence is nurtured in online gaming. The need for a human being to decimate other live players is something very inherent in us all, which is what first person shooters are all about. Until that desire is eliminated from all human beings, there will be mass violence occurring. For well over 99% of the population they can play these games and not go out into the world and engage in mass violence. But for some the temptation to do in real life what they can do in the video game world is just too enticing—so they carry out the fantasy like Nikolas Cruz did in Parkland.

These video games are a global phenomenon, people are playing them in Europe and Asia as well, in live time. Guns aren’t so easy to get in those places so the killings that occur are other methods, knives, cars, bombs—whatever terrorists can get their hands on. I would be willing to bet that if most ISIS terrorists were tracked down to their gamer tags, we’d find that they play all these video games religiously in their countries of origin. I’m sure PlayStation and Xbox know who is playing what and how often. If they are tracking me, they are tracking everyone. And you can bet the NSA and the FBI have profiles on certain players and their online abilities and connections.

In real life one of the measurement systems I use to make multimillion dollar assessments of something is the lean manufacturing technique of Gage R&R which is a type of MSA—Measurement System Analysis. Gage R&R (repeatability and reproducibility) are typically only 30% to 50% accurate even with the best inputs that can be acquired so getting the best information to collect is of utmost importance. If I were to run a Gage R&R on mass school shootings putting all the data into a nice big beautiful spreadsheet taking into account the age of the shooter, the back ground of the shooters, the types of guns used, the social circumstances for which they functioned, the political beliefs, the amount of times they had sex with females—was their a father in the home, etc., we’d find that it was none of those elements that would point us to the obvious problem of what causes school shootings. What they’d all have in common to some degree or another was the direct result of the video game industry and the romance that gun violence has been perpetuated by the Hollywood product. Even the music industry would show up on our Gage R&R to show a repeatable influence over the last two decades for desensitizing people to the realities of the world and encouraging violence to instigate social change. The fault of school shootings statistically speaking have nothing to do with gun manufacturers or the NRA—it has everything to do with Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. The MSA analysis points only to the video game industry followed closely by movies and television as the prime drivers of social violence. Even if all guns were confiscated and the NRA were out of existence today, mass killings would still occur because the cause of the violence has not been yet dealt with. The desire to kill lots of people can be done with a gun or a car, but it’s the problem of our modern society that such desires are there to begin with—and video games assist that desire with a role-playing element that makes the weakest and less disciplined of us seek out that sensation in real life.

You will never hear from me to ban video games. I love them too much and I am willing to put up with the occasional violence that we see because I think there are benefits to what video games bring to people. Violence is a byproduct, but so is the thinking that goes on which is changing us as a species and allowing us to process information so much faster than we ever did before. There is much more good about video games than bad. But if there is something to blame for the Parkland school shooting, it was video games that Nikolas Cruz played which likely pushed him over the edge. If you are harboring resentments in an aggressive setting and losing grips with reality—killing hundreds of people a day online is likely to create the fantasy of doing it in real life. Most of us know how to turn off that switch and to only keep that desire in the video game reality. Obviously, Cruz didn’t have that switch. But if people really want to solve the problem of school shootings, you have to start with the video game industry. Because there are a lot of Nikolas Cruz kids out there just waiting to snap. I think we are headed for a period over the next two decades where there will be many more killing attempts—because kids like Cruz play kill so much online that they want to try it in real life. And because they don’t have strong fathers to hold them together, or a family structure, a church, or even good media influences to look up to, there is nothing to keep them from testing themselves in reality once they have grown tired of killing in the world of video games. Not being able to buy a gun at Dick’s sporting goods or the Kroger stores won’t prevent them from some other method. If they want to kill, they are going to find some way to do it, and when they do, we have to be ready for them.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump is Smoking Crack: The case of Julius Malema–if I have to pick between the president and the NRA, I’m with the NRA,

As much as I like Donald Trump, if I have to pick between him and the NRA, I’m with the NRA.  If there was anything good in Trump’s move to the far political left with his fantasy talk about due process second after gun confiscation, it’s that he made the point for gun rights pretty apparent. What Trump had said to a bipartisan group of legislators during a White House meeting shocked me as it did many others and even considering that it might just be typical Trump talk to move an issue in debate, the fact that he even thought it proves a long-held understanding about the very nature of the 2nd Amendment. There has never been an administration that I trusted more, or felt that more closely represented my intersects than the Trump administration. I have maybe for the first time in my life a trust that my government will work for my interests as best as a Republic of representatives can. But even an administration, any administration, all through the history of our nation is prone to make mistakes and when those mistakes occur, it can’t be my life, or anybody else who should suffer. The gun protects private property—the efforts of a lifetime, whether it be a spouse, children, a dog or the contents of a home, car or business. Nothing in life supersedes the nature of our private property for which our lives are paramount in value.

Over the years there have been many instances where the federal or state governments have done just as Trump suggested, which is probably why he thought he could get away with saying it–that if the police or military is called out to your home in the small hours of the morning, that they have a right to confiscate all your guns and whatever else they may wish and that they have the right to take over your life for which you must surrender willingly to for the “greater good.” There is no greater good than my life, your life, and the life of our neighbors. Government certainly doesn’t eclipse our lives and our possessions which are the products of those lives. It is the mutual understanding that the protection of property is a basic foundation of American existence which keeps everyone from killing each other, which is a basic concept from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and is the very structure of American society. And the great equalizer of protecting those values is the gun, which is how the Second Amendment ended up in the Bill of Rights to begin with. To take away that basic right is to essentially destroy the premise of American civilization—which is why foundationally the political left wants to abolish the Second Amendment. Even though the typical leftist doesn’t know why they think what they do–as they’ve been taught without truly understanding the concept—their epistemological understanding of the world as liberals recognizes that through mob rule at some point they are going to want what others have and they want those others disarmed so they can then seize that property for their own consumption.

For instance, in a surprising vote just a few days ago, South Africa’s National Assembly voted to evict white farmers from their land and seize their property, justified by the country’s past apartheid policies. The vote was led by Marxist activist Julius Malema, who is head of the political party Economic Freedom Fighters. They feel that the seizing of land is part of delivering justice to the discrimination black farm workers have faced in the past. Marxism has become a powerful political force in South Africa since the government abandoned its apartheid policies. Few realize it today but Nelson Mandela was a Marxist, and his political legacy that has continued among radical black activists who have followed him continue to erode away the basic foundations of South African society. Not that any form of discrimination is appropriate, but the lenses of history is always defined by the political groups that seize power at any given time. Thus, a weakness of any democracy is the concept that mobs can rule so far as a majority of everyone believes something, and they can then justify the acquisition of other people’s values at a whim—because they desire such things as a collective group. Using that logic what if a bunch of Seattle Starbucks customers sitting around sipping on their lattés decided that their lives were terrible because they spent all their time smoking pot, playing video games, and bitching about the world around them, and instead of taking action to improve their condition decided that they were going to storm out into the suburbs to take the homes of the wealthy people who lived there—because they had a need for which a majority of the losers desired? If they desired to do so, what keeps them from doing it? Not the police. Talk to a loser sometime, if you go into the inner cities and feel like killing a few hours of time, pick one and offer to buy them breakfast and listen to what they tell you. You’ll find that most people in such a state think just like Julius Malema does. Because of our liberal education institutions American society now has a lot of people who think in the way of traditional Marxists and if they want something, they don’t understand why they can’t just have it. Guns in our society allow for people to have different political attitudes without those forces being able to bulge into an ideology that robs individuals of their basic property rights—which represents foundational value.

https://silenceisconsent.net/south-africa-votes-seize-land-white-farmers-heres/

Without guns in America all the various groups that emerge under group association would impose itself on the unwilling without question. The wonderful thing about America is that just because there are elements of our society that is just as crazy as Julius Malema is, or Barack Obama, because we have guns and can protect ourselves from when those mobs of losers might arrive at our doorsteps wanting what we worked a lifetime to acquire, it is our guns which keep them from acting on their fantasies. The typical welfare recipient in America isn’t far from the thinking of even the craziest radical from around the world such as the South African Marxist leader. They want guns eliminated from society, they see bump stock bans, and assault weapon restrictions to be great policies in their favor of outright repealing of the 2nd Amendment. People in need, which is usually a condition derived from bad decision-making, always look with jealous eyes at those who have things in their lives worth protecting and without the ability of every individual from having the aptitude to protect themselves with lethal force, it is the only real stabilizing factor in our society that allows it to advance.

Even as Trump suggested that the feds would have the right to break down our doors in the middle of the night and have their way with us because the government represents something bigger than our collective efforts, he need to only look at the American FBI and previous justice departments for why such trust can never be extended beyond the possession of personal firearms. If my door gets broke open in the middle of the night I don’t care who it is, or what court might have given such a warrant to intrude on my life—people are going to get hurt because I don’t grant power to any outside force that seeks to dominate my existence through government interpretation of the basic philosophy of individual will which governs my life. We know that the FBI didn’t want president Trump to settle into the White House and they used their power to attempt to stop that process from happening—by illegally obtaining a FISA warrant to build a case for impeachment before he could even move into the White House. America is a first world nation—really is the best of the best and we can’t trust our own government, let alone others around the world. Not even the Trump government. Even though it might work better with Trump in the White House for the next 7 years, eventually he won’t be there and we could end up with someone like Julius Malema running the country. Honestly if we weren’t a society in America of guns and the Bible I doubt that Barack Obama would have been much different from Malema. Their basic desires for life were very much the same. The difference is that every American farm is likely protected by the firearms of the owners, and nobody is coming to steal a few pigs for slaughter without having their lives threatened—which is the only thing that keeps the peace in such a world.

This is a topic which could go on forever and I’ll likely explore it from many different angles. But the basic premise is that governments of any kind cannot be trusted and that they do not have the right to rule over us without some measure of checks and balances to counter their mistakes. Without that power to inflict pain back at those who are up to no good, any society crumbles. As gun grabbers point around the world to places like Europe and Australia and say that those places of gun restrictions are successful I would also point out that they have degrading societies that will not endure far in the future from this point in time because of the lack of value they have in the basic idea of private property. So as much as I like the Trump administration, Donald Trump is smoking crack if he thinks people like me who are his most solid base is going to stay with him if he talks like that. Rhetoric or not, talking about confiscating guns then entertaining due process is reprehensible. If that is the best that government can do, I’ll just take care of these problems myself, and because of gun ownership millions of us can say the same thing—which is why we have a society that is still functioning out of fairness, and kindness.

Rich Hoffman
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Samuel Ronan the Progressive Extremist: What we learned at Lakota by the CNN star about why teachers should be armed

I didn’t know who Samuel Ronan was when he stepped up to the microphone at the very contentious Lakota school board meeting on February 27th 2017. My first impression of him was that he was just another overly emotional kid speaking against arming teachers in our public schools. The typical thing in these types of exchanges is to be respectful of the audience, even if they don’t agree with you, because it is the battle of ideas which sifts out the truth of a matter. When I spoke nobody heckled me or made comments from the audience, so I provided the same sentiment and that’s how it should be. However, there was something very fishy about the young man who quickly provided an address that didn’t seem to match anything within the Lakota district and instead of addressing the school board, the kid turned and addressed the crowd. We all sat stunned that he had crashed an otherwise civil meeting on a contentious topic. He had to be stopped because he went over the three-minute speaking limit. After Ronan spoke, the kid disappeared quickly before I had a chance to talk to him, which was fully my intention. I went out into the hall to see if he was anywhere about. He had left as quickly as he came. So I did a little checking to see who he was and what I discovered was rather revealing.

https://www.ronanforcongress.com/

My desire to confront the kid stemmed from a couple of things he said during his speech, namely what I took as a challenge when he said that he was trained on the AR-15 platform and he doubted that any teacher would want to face him during a rampage. Those aren’t his exact words, but that’s what he was essentially saying. I’d have to watch the tape of the meeting to get the exact dialogue which actually may have been more suggestive. Of course my answer to him is “hell yeah” I’d be willing to engage an active shooter—especially if it was a kid like him—disrespectful, aggressive, showing a disregard for the rules of conduct of the established practice of a forum—those are all alarm signs that such a person is up to no good. Now, you wouldn’t shoot someone like that without provocation, but if a person will bust in on a school board meeting and not reveal what their true intentions were, taking it for granted that everyone around him would be too nice to confront him, then he made the precise argument as to why we should arm teachers. That’s what I was going to tell him until I realized after he had left that the kid was actually a progressive Democrat from Springboro, not even from Lakota, and that he had switched parties to run against Steve Chabot in the upcoming 1st Congressional District race. Even more, this wasn’t just any progressive Democrat upset about the national trend toward gun rights—especially arming teachers in schools from domestic terrorist threats—this guy ran for the Democratic National Committee Chairman seat. Not your typical anti-gun protestor.

I typically have a soft spot for young people, especially charismatic young people who involve themselves in the events of the world—but there was something creepy about Ronan that came across as startling. He wasn’t a listed speaker for the evening, he simply took the opportunity during the public comments portion, after the scheduled speakers had concluded, myself being one of them, and proceeded on with an uncomfortable rant that was misplaced for the event.  He wasn’t even speaking to the crowd, the board, or even a single individual–he was only interested in the cameras.  What was odd was that he gave his camera to a Muslim woman sitting in the middle of the crowd to record his video, then when he took the podium he addressed the crowd directly instead of the board and during his speech he edged as I said on confrontational language talking about his military background and how he knew how to use such dangerous weapons giving him an advantage over average teachers. It was an odd mix of euphemisms that had what to me contained ominous undertones. As he was talking I just took it as the talk of an overly anxious and political kid looking to be the next Dave Hog, maybe to get on the many television cameras that were present. Then for some apparent reason he included discrimination against Muslims which had no place in the discussion—only that he injected it out of nowhere. It wasn’t even relevant to the topic. Those of us present were mystified by his behavior which left us scratching our heads as he left.

It was only after that I did some investigation into the kid and discovered that he was quite a national activist, and that his presence there at Lakota showed to what extent the school district in my neighborhood was going to play in national politics yet again. Being one of the largest schools in the state of Ohio in a state that Donald Trump won by 11 points, which went his way even with the establishment Republicans at the time led by John Kasich working against him, the district of Lakota is conservative even for conservative standards. It would be Lakota where the issue of guns in schools would live or die, and this progressive activist put his sights on Lakota to leave his national mark. My instinct said to engage the kid, which I tried to do after the meeting and find out what his story was. And as it usually is, my instincts were correct—this was a kid up to no good.  Yet he hadn’t done anything overtly bad enough to mandate a confrontation.  We all just politely let him ramble on hoping he would come to reason on his own, which of course he didn’t.

He misled people about who he was to speak that night at Lakota. He stepped into the heart of Lakota management and trusted that we’d all be too nice to really engage him, and he was right. Even I was so respectful of his right to speak that we let him go on for over 3 minutes breaking all the rules that such public speaking at Lakota required. But even more than that he was misleading people on his printed campaign literature, listing himself as a Republican of the 1st District which includes the equally conservative Warren County, Ohio. He knows he stands no chance of winning a congressional seat unless he runs as a Republican in his town of Springboro. Yet just last year he ran for the DNC Chairman seat—the head of the whole enchilada and was on many debates on CNN. He was bold, and audacious—and very experienced at an early age in the art of radicalism. If you took away just a few layers of sanity from such a person, he might be the next school shooter—a person who pretends to be an innocent visitor to a school to get past the first layer of security, then when everyone was content that he was a safe person, that would be when the guns come out and a rampage would begin. If he was bold enough to crash a board meeting that has pretty strict rules of conduct and behave like he did, a similar person would work their way through official security protocols to unleash their ill intentions. That’s why we need that extra layer of security—a teacher comfortable with firearms discreetly hidden from view could engage such a radical saving so many precious seconds which likely would mean the difference between life and death.

That’s not to say Samuel Ronan is a terrorist—I think he’s a very progressive radical looking to make a name for himself. But if you consider his behavior and the way he exploited goodness, and the trust of good people there in the room with him at Lakota—a seriously deranged person would use the same tactics to get to kids in a school to satisfy whatever instability might inspire them into such a dire action. And instead of making the case for why teachers shouldn’t carry guns in the school, Ronan showed us why they should. When people can’t function on the basic elements of trust, our protocols rooted in honesty make us all vulnerable to villains who don’t observe such rules of conduct, and that is the way of our modern world, like it or not. People like Ronan who don’t tell you honestly who they are and pretend to be something when they are really something else are obviously up to no good—otherwise there would be no reason to mislead people.

The reason we are required to give our name and address as speakers before the board is to protect the process of debate for just this kind of outside intrusion of politics, and Ronan was no small-time flunky from Springboro. He was a regular on CNN who had no intention to address the school board of Lakota—he went there to record himself on a stump speech trying to cause trouble. And he came and went largely without confrontation. The point of the matter is that good people trusting that everyone attending that night had good intentions either for or against the debate in question and were operating with a basic level of respect. What Ronan taught us at Lakota is that–it is that very trust a school shooter would exploit to make a menace of our children contained within our buildings. And by the time we figured out who they were, it would be too late. That’s how 17 people died in Parkland, Florida and many other places, because there wasn’t someone there on point to stop a hostile agent of terror—even as they stand sometimes right in front of us with an offering of peace and civility, when they really intend carnage.

Rich Hoffman

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Stand and Fight: Boycotts, Planned Parenthood, Scott Israel Corruption and people deciding to be lions, not sheep

I don’t typically pay attention to boycotts but this one against the NRA by Alamo, Delta and many others bothers me due to the hypocrisy. Why is it that large organizations will rally behind a cause that is conservative, but will continue to do business with people who support Planned Parenthood? Those same people will say that the NRA is killing our babies in schools when Planned Parenthood is actually killing our babies! Can someone illuminate this topic more succinctly? Planned Parenthood is all about relieving the responsibility off a female who happens to get pregnant by killing the child that she may accidentally find herself impregnated by while the NRA is about defending life with the Second Amendment—protecting value. Yet companies like United Airlines, Metlife Insurance, and First National Bank will take a stand against the NRA due to “customer feedback” but they will continue to do business with many thousands of customers who have recently had abortions at Planned Parenthood. Doesn’t that seem just a little hypocritical?

I take it personal when I see people attacking the NRA. It’s a group I happen to love. I don’t require everyone in the world to think the way I do, but if you attack something I care about, there are going to be problems. I’m alright with public assembly and protests if that’s how people want to spend their time, but I’m not OK if those protests turn against something I care about, like the NRA. Personally, I heard enough last week regarding people blaming the NRA for the school shooting in Parkland, Florida to last me a lifetime. Boycotts bother me because they run counter intuitive to some basic ideas I have about the world. I’m a person who keeps like a Bible everywhere I go around my home a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations which articulates free market ideas in a very pure way. Many years ago when I was working on public education issues from a financial standpoint a series of mad mothers who wanted to pass higher taxes threatened to boycott the restaurant of one of my supporters which changed forever my tolerance for such people. It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, packs of angry supercharged moms demanding free things for their kids in school that we all had to pay for, then threatening a legitimate business owner who supported a cause I was responsible for with financial ruin if that owner didn’t comply with the demands of the mob. After that experience it forever changed how I viewed public education. And in a very similar way, this Parkland shooting has changed how I view a lot of things especially those who support abortion with great fanfare, yet point to the NRA and proclaim death. It’s the other way around, and we’re not going to let this one slide. If those big companies cutting their support of the NRA really mean it, they’ll cut ties with anyone who participates in the death and degradation of life at Planned Parenthood with the same gusto.

What fueled this anti-NRA hatred in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting was the Sheriff of Broward County, Scott Israel essentially blaming the NRA for the intent of the shooter—for allowing an anti-NRA dialogue to develop as if the gun advocacy group had inspired and trained the shooter to commit the action, when in fact it was the failure of that Sheriff’s entire department which drove up the death county—needlessly. Scott Israel did not have his employees prepared to deal with such a crises, because when it did happen four of his deputies that were on sight at the shooting took up positions outside of the school and failed to engage the shooter. Meanwhile the shooter was inside the school taking the life of 17 people, and this was the fault of the NRA? It should come as no surprise that Scott Israel is a registered Democrat, so mismanagement is to be expected to a certain extent. But to deflect that failure away from him and to the NRA is reprehensible.

https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/23/broward-county-sheriff-scott-israel-accu

The NRA as an organization has stood for morality and good clean American lifestyles for as long as I can remember. My son-in-law as soon as he became an American citizen signed up to be a life member of the NRA because that was one of the things he most wanted to do as an official American. In England where he came from people don’t have guns and they certainly don’t think to defend themselves in the midst of aggression. A typical Englishman might send a strongly worded letter to their local law enforcement if some villain harasses them and their property but they don’t have something like the NRA to protect their right to do anything about a crime. They just endure it in the way that the criminal underworld was portrayed in the film A Clockwork Orange. Scott Israel when he was confronted for the high salaries of some of his employees in a corruption allegation that was politically motivated the Sheriff said, “lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” That’s why apparently his office failed to take action 18 times regarding the behavior of the shooter Nikolas Cruz—because he viewed the complaints as coming from the sheep of his county.

In a lot of ways, the stupidity of Scott Israel is why we need the Second Amendment, because the way he functions as a person helps breed the behavior of killers like Cruz. The NRA is there to preserve our right to be the last line of defense in protection of our own lives. Because all too often there are idiots like Sheriff Israel out there who bring danger to our doorsteps just because they mismanage the affairs around them. Scott Israel, because he was a bad sheriff that let a killer destroy the lives of many people in a school shooting should have never been on CNN arguing with Dana Loesch trying to deflect the responsibility of the killings onto the NRA, he should have been cleaning out his desk in disgrace for the many failures he contributed to the matter. And as the crowd cheered after that set-up CNN debate for which Israel participated, it was these many companies pulling away from the NRA to show the public they were on the side of the Sheriff—a failure of a person who couldn’t even train his men how to engage in an active shooter situation, that acted based on his public statements. I mean if you are going to wear a gun on your hip, you better damn well be willing to use it when danger presents itself. Most five-year olds would have done a better job in that situation than Israel’s men, because they at least know right from wrong instinctively. These slobs of the Broward County Sheriff’s department were too busy thinking about lunch, they surely didn’t want to get killed saving a school full of kids.

The NRA has about 5 million members, and that number should be greater not less. I look forward to everything I get from the NRA because I respect what they do. If not for the NRA gun laws would have been wiped out a long time ago leaving us completely at the mercy of losers like Scott Israel who think they are lions among men and the rest of us are sheep to be slaughtered at will. As much as we’d like to trust authorities to do that right thing—and many around the country are good—we can’t always expect them to do so. Israel’s department is the perfect example, they were commissioned to protect our society and when danger came, they hid behind their cars allowing many people to be killed and wounded in a school of all places. Then when they were caught they threw their aggression toward the NRA. The logic would further deteriorate drawing out a sinister hypocrisy, how could a bunch of anti-gun protestors point at the NRA and declare them to be an advocacy group for death when many of those same people support abortion and the efforts of Planned Parenthood? It is in that kind of logic that mandates we must always have the NRA to defend our rights against those very kinds of encroachments from corrupt administrators who are so grossly incompetent that they are a danger to themselves and others. When they fail, it is not our burden to follow them into the depths of oblivion, it becomes our task to Stand and Fight. Because we as American gun owners certainly aren’t sheep—the people who decide to join the NRA make quite explicit decisions to be fellow lions—which is what people like Sheriff Israel are really afraid of.

Rich Hoffman

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The Answer to Sam Zeil’s White House Question: Why we can buy “weapons of war” at the local store

I was impressed with the 18-year-old Sam Zeif who spoke at the White House after the Parkland, Florida school shooting. He lost his best friend and was very sad about it. He spoke very intelligently and was extremely articulate. But he asked a question that deserves an answer, and a lot of people who don’t shoot much, or understand the philosophic premise of the Second Amendment are asking the same question. Young Zeif said it a couple of times, he wanted to know why he could still buy “weapons of war” at the store and suggested that we’d all be better off if America adopted a similar policy as Australia—and had a general gun confiscation policy. I heard that and a natural tension went up my spine wanting to defend the basic assumption. However, I don’t blame the kids so much for not understanding the scope of the situation, they have learned it in their schools and in the temperament of their intuitional interaction. Yet most gun owners know and understand otherwise, and that knowledge is often traditionally transferred from generation to generation for a reason that is specific to American culture and is why we can go to the store and buy weapons of war. Young Sam apparently has not had the benefit of this generational exchange, so I’ll offer it here for him and those of a like mind.

Whenever I buy a new gun it is always a magical experience. I love every single new one and the thrill of it never stops. Guns always represent power and strength and the bigger and meaner the better. Being weapons of war is a very foundational way to look at them, but what they represent is aggression and defense. Yet ultimately, they stand for freedom, freedom from aggression, freedom from authoritarian rule, freedom from any sinister forces that might want to steer your life in a direction of their choosing, not yours. Having big, mean, powerful guns means you are on equal terms with even the most vicious aggressor out there in the world that may have ill intentions toward you, and having an option against those forces brings about freedom that only a gun can yield.

The world that many rock stars have sung about, and what Sam Zeif by default articulated does not exist. There is no institution in the world that is completely trustworthy, especially with our lives. We may wish for that to be the case, but even in the Parkland school shooting there were so many hired people who failed from the institutional point of view that no reasonable argument in their defense can be made. We would be fools to trust completely that the FBI would do their jobs 100% of the time. We’d be idiots to assume that local law enforcement will get it right in every circumstance. In the Parkland shooting there are reports now that up to four officers near the incident failed to confront the shooter, so even those officially sanctioned to use guns get it wrong a lot of the time—more than is acceptable. That doesn’t mean we should scrap our society into anarchy, but it does mean that we need another layer of security in our lives that is individually driven. We should leave it to the professionals—those we pay to worry about security and the laws we make as a society, but we should always look to ourselves first.

To assume that if all the guns in the world were confiscated that we would all by default fall into a society of peace is just ridiculous. Human beings probably have at least 100,000 more years of evolution before the basic natures of our existences change for the better, where aggression isn’t part of our interaction with each other. People are always competing with one another, there are always bigger people, smarter people, faster people, better looking people, etc., who will leverage their talents and abilities against others to acquire what they think they need to live. It was only through the invention of the gun and the general distribution of reading through the printing press that freedom from static institutions began to falter and the cultures of individuality began to spring up around the world, most notably in the early American colonies for which our Constitution was written. Before people could read things for themselves and defend what they acquired through that knowledge with personal defense, societies were strung together through kingships and nobility. The gun freed us all from that enslavement.

But go to any corporate environment and you will see the same primitive mechanisms at work, people using whatever skills of superiority they have over others to acquire advantages for themselves. War is a trait of human beings, even two nicely mannered women will fight over who has the best flower bed, the best pie, or even the largest diamond ring. It is in the nature of human beings to be competitive, even if the foundations are rooted in destruction. But when a person has a gun and they are smaller than another person with a gun, they are both suddenly equal. Guns are the ultimate equalizers, having guns puts everyone on the same footing essentially making firearms a major contributor to the furtherance of a human species working toward objectives that supersede the typical primitive motivations of past millennia. Many of the advancements made in America are because of the gun, not in spite of them. People who might in any other society be pushed to the back of the pecking order line were able to profess their ideas about things knowing that they wouldn’t be gunned down in the street for professing them, because everyone is armed and retaliation is always a possibility. For the first time in the history of the world, individuals had power over the institutions so they could contribute to the nature of existence. If the threat of retaliation is not present, such as a big person being tempted to abuse a person of smaller stature, too often with humans an abuse of that relationship will take place because the larger person can, then the smaller person will find themselves in a weak position individually. If the smaller person has a gun, suddenly the size of the other person no longer gives them an advantage and a more equal exchange of information is possible leading to a better relationship.

Owning weapons of war even though nobody of a right mind ever thinks of using them for a destination of violence eases a mind that may always be concerned that the size of institutions may inhibit their options in life. Having big scary weapons in personal possession means that the big scary authorities who have lots of weapons of war will think twice before kicking down your door in the middle of the night to abuse their authority—just because they can. When there are people out in the world carrying around big scary weapons to prevent terrorists from attacking the foundations of our society there must also be checks in place to keep law enforcement from using that power to abuse their authority to take the possessions of people they are supposed to be watching over. We all hear of cases where traffic cops pull over a car full of girls and have forced them to perform sex acts to get out of expensive fines. Or cops detain an attractive woman and force them into a state of undress accusing them of carrying dangerous weapons just so they can have the power to strip down a beautiful woman. It happens much more than it should. The people we pay to protect us are much less prone to abuse that relationship if they have to worry that people might shoot back if they abuse their authority. We’d hope that such a thing might never happen but just looking at the abuse of the FBI against the Trump administration tells us that even at the highest levels of our government that trust is only as deep as the threat of danger that might come back at the perpetrators. Without that threat, abuse often happens in any relationship.

Ironically weapons of war are the foundations to a civil society. You will never see a lot of pushing and shoving going on at gun events where everyone is armed with a gun. Big people, small people, smart people and dumb people all treat each other respectfully because in those meetings everyone is truly equal because it’s not the biological gifts that we have which make us that way, it is the invention of the gun that takes over and puts everyone on equal footing. By taking away the temptation for aggression it forces everyone to treat each other fairly and with great respect. That’s why you don’t see mass shootings at gun shows or NRA events—and why those people tend to be very polite and respectful. The gun is an invention of equality and it works wonderfully.

So to answer Sam’s question, why can he go to the store to buy weapons of war, well, because those weapons are needed to keep human beings on an equal playing field. Institutions by themselves cannot be trusted, they often do abuse their power and so long as that is the case, which isn’t necessarily a learned behavior, but a biological one, equality must be achieved between people through an inventive process. The beauty of a fine weapon that is big and scary is that it gives the owner the ability to function in life with a level of equality that has never been possible prior to the invention of the firearm. Having that firearm forces others to deal with you at a level of respect that is unmistakable and takes away the temptations to abuse relationships for the gain of a one-sided exchange. If young women had more guns in an open carry part of their fashion, they would get harassed sexually a lot less. Because the natural relationship between a large man of 250 pounds is to show superiority over the 120-pound woman. But when she has on her hip a nice Glock or a Smith & Wesson revolver, the large man will treat the woman differently because his size and strength are no longer assets that he can claim superiority over. She is just as strong as he is just because she has a gun. If he has a gun as well, then the two are truly equal.

Traditionally when a father or grandfather gave a young man his first gun, the gift wasn’t just a weapon of war, it was an assignment of equality that let the youth engage with the world on an equal footing—even among his parental peers. For instance, the implication of the dad to the son, “you are now as strong as I am and I trust you enough to give you this gun.” Many such people never use their guns in any kind of aggressive manner, but they know if they needed to, they could and that leads to a society of greater respect in personal exchanges. If the behavior of Nickolas Cruz, the shooter in the Parkland massacre, were to be studied correctly it would be revealed that the kid was small, had been picked on for much of his life and his parents failed to give him a good philosophic foundation to live with. So he turned to the gun to become superior to his oppressors. If people at the school also had guns, then Cruz would not have such a claim to superiority that he had on the day of the shooting. But taking guns away doesn’t solve the problem—Cruz was still a kid who was picked on for being such a small person, humans are always looking for leverage over one another. Only in an equally armed society do we actually have the basis for a proper interaction based on fairness. That is why we have weapons of war for sale at an area store. They are essential to a proper and justice-based society.

Rich Hoffman

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Why to Love the NRA: Give Wayne LaPierre the credit to stand tall when everyone else failed

If you really want to piss me off then drag me into the insanity of what I would consider very stupid people desiring to engage me into their bad decisions. I’m pretty open-minded about what people do with themselves and how they live—that is, until they try to make me a part of it. Then I have no tolerance, because if there is one thing I truly desire in life it is to live well, and the way I want to. My life is not the possession of anyone else. Its mine, and I love it. Honestly, I don’t need a firearm to protect myself. But if someone threatens my life they’d be an idiot to think they are going to walk away from that engagement alive whether or not I happen to be carrying a gun or not at that moment, because I know how to protect myself and the people I care about. However, a gun is the most efficient way to equalize a conflict with someone with ill intentions, and these days due to many social breakdowns, that threat is greater than its ever been before. Even in a week when President Trump has let us down with a move to the left on gun control and I find myself at odds with people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the issue, it was so nice to hear Wayne LaPierre speak on behalf of the NRA at CPAC.

My membership to the National Rifle Association is one of my most treasured memberships. I am proud every time I see the words, “NRA.” I am equally proud of my membership to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, which is an NRA affiliate. Those are some of the finest people I know and not to brag too much, but I know a lot of people. I’m a business professional that does work with many hundreds of people all over the world so I’m not living in some cave in Montana when I say how much I love the NRA. It’s not some wacko group of right-wingers like the gun hating press would like you to believe, they are good people who want what America has always been about, the pursuit of personal freedom—and the support of guns is the most efficient way to protect that freedom.

The gun haters want, and expect that society at large has all the answers that an individual may need in their life, which is pure fantasy on their behalf. If you’ve ever been to Europe or get a chance to go you will quickly get an idea what left leaning people want to do to the United States, they’d like to replicate European culture. But what Europe has is a deep history that is at the heart of everything that they are—they are a people always looking back at what they were, not what they want to be. America is different, it is a country always looking forward at what individualized potential might drive forward culturally. And to facilitate that optimism, individual freedom is encouraged and treasured, whereas in Europe its frowned upon. Even on the topless beaches of France and Spain where women declaring themselves liberated and equal to men sunbathing with their breasts exposed we see the basic foundations of collectivism, because the women are cheapened into a collective entity as opposed to a sanctimonious specimen of a treasured loved one holding her treasures for the father of her children in the most idealistic individual fantasy of love, honor, and privacy. In America we don’t necessarily like to share ourselves with the world as we guard against the unwanted appraisal of others as innovation pours forth from our minds hoping to ride the waves of capitalism to a better life, and we protect that life from encroachment by parasitic personalities with a gun.

If we look just at the case of the many institutional failures of the Parkland assassin Nikolas Cruz, who was rejected by his school, kicked out so to preserve the sanctimonious public school. Over a seven-year period the local sheriff’s office visited Nikolas Cruz 39 times due to concern over the kid’s behavior. 39 times! The FBI directly had tips on Cruz and failed to act on those observations. When the shooting happened a hired gun that was supposed to be protecting Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by the name of Scot Patterson took up a defensive position outside the school never engaging the active shooter for over four minutes. Patterson resigned in the aftermath in disgrace. His failure cost 17 lives. But then there was the tape delay on the security cameras and the slap stick cops’ scenario of the police radios trying to figure out what was happening. While Cruz had already killed his targets and was having a sit-down meal at a local McDonald’s, the police were viewing videotape that they thought was live of the shooter moving from the third floor of the school to the second, only to be embarrassed by the revelation that they were watching something in past tense. The killer had already come and gone. It was only by luck that one alert officer an hour later thought correctly that he had spotted Cruz apprehending the killer. It wasn’t just one failure that caused the death of 17 people and wounding many others, it was several—really a failure at every level of the supposed safety nets that were supposed to be in place. Yet the anger leveled at Marco Rubio at a CNN anti-gun forum was astonishingly brutal as everyone there advocated for more of that kind of mess. More laws, more police, more mental health screening, more, more, more institutional control mechanisms when we just observed that even the ones in place had failed at every level.

When it really comes down to it we are all we really have. We must guard our own lives with responsible action and through that effort, others around us are saved. The only real solution to most of our modern problems is an improvement of individual action. If everyone took care of themselves and declared responsibility for their lives, then a lot of these problems would go away. We don’t have a gun problem in America, we have a responsibility problem. And the reason things are so dangerous these days is that responsible people, good people are at risk from the many lunatics out there especially on the political left who are starving for attention and salvation created from their rotten lives and they want what good people have. Guns have always provided a barrier of protection for individuals against those who would seek to take from them what they personally possess—even their very lives. At the most fundamental level, our lives are our most treasured possessions, and the destitute of our species do not have any collective right to the merits of our lives. They don’t get to walk across our yards unimpeded, they don’t get to drive our cars. They don’t get to molest our children, our wives, even our mail boxes without the threat of engagement—because all those things are products of our individualized lives and the hours of hard work it took to build such a life. The world of our institutions may have good intentions, but as we have seen, when lazy minds inhabit those institutions from the FBI to the local police, to the ultimate failure of Scot Patterson we can’t trust them and there has never really been any evidence that we ever could.

Every gun grabber who ultimately wants to confiscate all our firearms in America and send us to the league of nations around the world drowning in socialism and repressed governments perpetually looking into their own pasts—to their better days—expect us to trust completely the many intuitions that failed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School case. They have president Trump’s ear about stricter background checks, but what about the crazy ex-wife who wants to burn her husband with false accusations of misconduct because she is jealous of the next woman? Would that husband pass a background check if there is a pending case with a traumatized former wife? What if she is really jealous of his guns and she makes up some story of abuse, and acting on that the police come and take all his guns away? Is that fair to the man who did nothing but decide he didn’t want to be married to the woman? And those are just a few examples that most people can relate to in some way or another—there are countless ways that someone’s background check could be corrupted to lose their Second Amendment rights, and that is what the NRA is fighting against. The NRA stands against all those left leaning encroachments because ultimately the gun is there to protect individuals from a world that has a tendency to fail under institutional control. Our best hopes for the future are always in the conduct of individuals. So even if a man makes a mistake and runs off with a girl half his age and the ex-wife is upset about it, he shouldn’t lose his right to possess firearms. He may need that right for other things going on in his life—because all life has value, and deserves to be protected from the aggressions of others who might have intentions of dark design.

It is for all these reasons that I love the NRA so much and because of this aggression against the gun culture of our nation, I feel compelled to make more gun purchases, to support the industry. Gun makers, sellers, and the people who buy them are some of the best people you will find anywhere in the world. Not very long ago I was on the balcony of a very rich man in Japan overlooking some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This was a guy at the top of the world and could literally have anything he wanted, but do you know what he desired? He was in love with images of a Montana rancher who had a big pickup truck and a shotgun in the back window, and even a concealed carry gun under a warm jacket overlooking a vast plain of endless horizon. The NRA protects that very specific lifestyle from the jealous hordes around the world who secretly want what America has, and will do anything to get a piece of our lives. And the only real protection we have is ourselves and the guns we carry. Because as much as we’d like, we can’t trust anything else.

Rich Hoffman

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The New Han Solo Book Covers Look Great: But isn’t Disney against guns?

To say I’m looking forward to the new Solo: A Star Wars story would be a mild understatement. I am enjoying each new piece of information that is coming out now rapidly for the upcoming May release of the highly anticipated movie. Just yesterday the new books for the movie were teased which largely come out in May and on most of the covers were images of Han Solo holding his famous blaster in what I think are very traditional cowboy artwork reminiscent of the 1940s to 1950s0—the “golden age of Hollywood.” They are the kind of thing that many of us older than 50 grew up on as kids and I find it refreshing to see. But the mother company of Disney who is benefiting greatly from all this Star Wars merchandising, everything from Star Wars figures sold at Target and Walmart to the films themselves has positioned themselves in this new #onelessgun movement prominently and most disgustingly where another one of their companies, ABC showed a lady cutting up her gun in a workshop so that nobody could use it again. The anti-gun stance of Disney is extremely hypocritical and is worth a bit of analysis.

As I’ve said, I’m a fan of the Disney product and I like Disney as a company—especially in the traditional sense. But what is disgusting is that the head of the company doesn’t seem to understand what the tail is doing, they don’t connect cause and effect at all. Concerning the new Han Solo publication art, what if they didn’t have characters holding guns in their promotional material—do they think they could sell the movie? If kids couldn’t buy action figures to shoot at each other would they even want to play with them? Of course, Disney knows that young boys aren’t going to by Star Wars toys unless there are cool guns to play with. Kids aren’t buying Star Wars toys to simulate cooking, or domestic needs in playing house. Guns are as much of what makes Star Wars popular as anything is, and without guns, the story would be pretty boring.
This brings us to the broader issue of Hollywood taking a stance against guns yet producing in nearly every blockbuster they make a story that prominently features guns. It’s kind of like a porn actress preaching celibacy before marriage. You can’t play this issue both ways. The stories we like as human beings are typically about the drama of life and death situations for which the gun plays a key narrative. To the young boy who looks at covers of Han Solo brandishing a powerful looking gun, the fantasy is to use that gun to fight for the kind of personal independence that everyone wants. The gun is the means to personal protection and asserting oneself in a dangerous world. This is typically what is at play when children play with guns to shoot at each other, they are creating the roots for their primary foundations of independence which will go with them for the rest of their lives. Disney understands this basic concept in marketing strategy which is meant to reach into people’s subconscious and inspire them to go see the new movie that has a cool gun on the poster.

Yet out of the other side of their mouth they support these gun control measures which run counter to everything that the human race stands for. From their elevated progressive vantage point that isn’t based on any kind of reality, but only in hope and personal desire from their timid vantage points, Disney hopes to use their media position to change human behavior—which is where they go wrong. This is also why the mainstream media and entertainment companies that have moved so radically left of center are struggling to figure out why they can’t move the needle on Donald Trump or the gun issue in the slightest. Not with all the protests, or all the programming they commit to the matter, people love guns wherever they are in the world. Guns sell movies, books, comics—just about anything they are put on because what the gun represents is personal freedom which every human being craves in some form or another. Therefore, we can conclude that companies such as Disney are not culture shapers so much as they are cultural reflections. They can make money and benefit off the art they produce so long as it is aligned with human need, and guns are. But if they think they can change the human need from their art, they don’t appear to be able to.
Disney as a company has not had much success with original material, often they have made most of their money off pre-created ideas—fairy tales that had already made their mark in our human mythologies. What they’ve done best is to take those stories to the next step of marketing and consumer reach—which is what they are doing with Star Wars. True, the new Star Wars films and television shows are not as good as they were original creations from George Lucas, but they still offer people something in the realm of entertainment and mythology. Disney isn’t powerful enough to change people’s minds about guns, violence, or political desires, but they can feed the needs that are already there.

That’s of course is not always the case, sometimes a truly great artist can change the minds of people and they often try, such as in the case of the musical group, The Beatles. They were obviously advocating for a left of center political world, and they did pull people in that direction. What seems to be happening in entertainment is that artists judge each other based on their social impact in the art they create. For instance, people might look down their nose at Dwayne Johnson because he makes so many blockbuster action movies and is getting very wealthy off them, but he doesn’t seem to be trying to change human culture for the better, and until he announced that he wanted to run for president against Trump in 2020 he was not considered much of an “artist” in Hollywood. In the entertainment community being an “artist” means being a “change agent.” It is the ultimate power of their ability to manipulate mass audiences—to actually change the behavior of the human race, and it appears to be a grand fantasy that most in entertainment have. Even with all their wealth, they still judge each other based on their “change agent” appeal.

This obviously seems to be the case with ABC News, they want to think they can move the needle on gun control by featuring some overly emotional woman who cuts up her gun in a workshop and wants to be featured prominently as a hero for it. That might be fine if ABC and their parent company Disney were consistent, but they aren’t. On the very same day that ABC featured the crazy anti-gun lady, Disney put out the art work for the new Han Solo movie which featured the hero on all the book covers holding a gun. You can’t have it both ways Disney. Unfortunately, you have to pick. Do you want to give the public what they want and hope they continue coming to your theme parks, which I enjoy doing? Or do you want to be a “change agent” using your media platform to change the human race? In doing so you will likely lose most of your core audience, because they will reject your philosophic premise. I will go see the new Han Solo movie enthusiastically, because he is a hero who uses a gun to instill a brand of justice that I can agree with, and its good entertainment. But if Han Solo were to become a bleeding-heart liberal and anti-gun zealot—you can bet that I’d be the first person off the ship. Because that’s not entertainment to me, its political propaganda from a bunch of spoiled brat artists. And I don’t want anything to do with them—or their beliefs.

Rich Hoffman
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The True Intentions of Gun Control: What’s really behind the protesting strudents of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Unwittingly, the suddenly very articulate and activist students who were all over the Sunday shows in the wake of the shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida have identified why schools are vulnerable to violence and why there will be a lot more if the correct solution is not put in place. The kids, bless their little hearts, have no idea what role they play in the whole experience—they are young minds just expressing what they’ve been taught in public school and it is rather shocking to see how quickly they organized around the matter—and how quickly the anti-gun lobby grabbed onto their innocent hides to ride a magic carpet to reform for their cause. These kids who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting are planning a march on March 24th in Washington D.C. to impose gun restrictions and an assault weapons ban on the rest of us for the primary purpose of social change to reflect the collectivism and desire for a primal order articulated in our education system. Guns represent a social commitment to individualism whereas the banning of them represents a surrender to the order of the masses, the herd mentality that constantly wants to forgo social advancement and return to the campfires of yesteryear. It reminds me of the relevance of an Ayn Rand quote from her classic work titled Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

“When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power and the preservation of the moment’s “stability,” of peace at any price, is their goal–the winner, necessarily, it is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so. If there were no communists or other thugs in the world, such a system would create them.” Ayn Rand 1965 commenting on the Berkeley riots in California.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/18/students-organize-to-fight-for-gun-law-changes/?utm_term=.d7110a2fe10e

From the early part of the 20th century to the present our education system by a default of philosophic interpretation adopted the mode of gang rule to suggest the furtherance of our future as a civilization and no matter what mass effort we name it, labor unions, communists, socialists, progressives, liberals—the intent was always the same derivative of the philosophy for which people functioned—their core ideas in the face of a challenge. As a hobby I study the rise and fall of ancient civilizations and I can say emphatically as archaeologists are just starting to come to terms with the idea—that societies don’t fall because of crop failures, flood, or even cosmic events, they fail because they always follow the Vico cycle back to the primitive states of our existence. At a certain juncture they make the decision to head back to the fire, the hunter and gather mindset where a tribal leader guides people to salvation or death and everyone is in it together to be unceremoniously buried in a pile of dirt at the end of their lives—or eaten by some wild animal. America went through this period at the turn of the last century and made the decision in the public education system to adopt the views of the primitive instead of the resolute individuals which typically advance society always forward with valor and great invention.

Public education as it was conceived and formulated later by mass labor union influence and political dystopia is a group think concept. It isn’t about developing individuals to function well in the world, but in adopting to the pressures of group associations and learning to navigate the peer pressures of those groups. So it should come as no surprise that the young students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were poised so quickly to become front line activists against gun ownership—as they were taught the foundations from the time that they were all little kids functioning within the liberal group environment of public education. Without even thinking about it while shock was still roaring through their community they fell to their default modes of operation and became anti-gun activists that the institutions of our day sought to use in order to further their goal of returning society back to the primitive, pre-gun state of the world. The fantasy of the political left is to turn each nation into a big collective tribe where the intellectuals of our institutions serve as grand tribal leaders, so their hopes always are to demean individual rights in favor of group acceptance, because their primary strategy is always to use the numbers of opinion to leverage reality against morality.

Thus, there is no solution to the gun problem in schools because the schools themselves create the entire problem. It was the schools which failed to convert the shooter into a productive citizen. When the assassin Cruz was then a student at the same school, he was expelled, which is an ultimate rejection of his peers and sent off into the world to fend for himself as a troubled young person. Since the school’s mode of operation wasn’t individualized care for the philosophy of its students but mass acceptance of peer pressure and a kid like Cruz was too damaged and likely too independent to adhere, the kid fell through the cracks to become a social menace. That same system of insanity that is ultimately at fault for creating the problem in the first place then had their peer groups already formed to advocate against any blame they might have in the matter by also furthering their own cause against individualism—the gun.

By attacking gun rights—the school which represents the same institutional failed philosophies of the past going back to Ayn Rand’s quote about the Berkeley riots are using every tragedy possible to further their strategic objective against the basics of American morality to substitute numbers for the basic ethics of reason. To suggest that this many hurt and scared students marching on Washington D.C., and that this many Republican donors, and politicians, and angry-scared moms means that gun reform should occur. The question of whether or not gun reform would actually work is not a topic of consideration because we are measuring success or failure on the panicked masses which were inspired to be in such a lackluster state because of their public educations in the first place.

The main issue isn’t whether or not we have laws against bump stocks, or “assault weapons” its if we have a society that truly is driven forth by individual responsibility and endeavor or group consensus in spite of what reality defines. What gun control advocates are for which these kids from Florida are now a part of is that we must define reality based on group opinion. If enough people believe something then we are supposed to accept that new reality regardless of what facts might say on the matter. This then becomes the aim of our entire public education system for at least the last hundred years, likely longer—that mankind was wiser when we were primitives sitting around a campfire taking orders from a tribal chief. The political left in the modern sense wants to be that new tribal chief and they have prepped our society to take orders without question and to rally to their cause when a crisis occurs. By taking away guns in even a small form, the political left inches closer to a victory they have forever sought—the destruction of individuality and personal opinion which exists outside of group consensus. Here is another quote from the same book mentioned earlier:

“Some went so far as to maintain explicitly that intellectual certainty is the mark of a dictatorial mentality, and the chronic doubt–the absence of firm conviction, the lack of absolutes–is the guarantee of a peaceful, “democratic,” society.”

What that means is that the political left has protected itself from the kind of scrutiny that I am proposing here for when they are caught in this grand scheme toward reversion. They call it progress, hence the term “progressive” but in actuality when it truly is “regressive.” The political left and their hold on our education institutions are meant to create enough absence of firm conviction, where individualized efforts are challenged and even eradicated to preserve their intentions of taking mankind back toward a tribal mentality—and they’ve been trying to do that in North America since frontiersmen on the fringes of civilization confronted the Indian and beat them in battle after battle essentially because one had the gun and the other had magic dances and arrows that they forged with flint rocks found in river beds. The gun is the key to further human advancement, the abandonment of them is the path back toward a tribal status fulfilling the Vico cycle of our modern time from a democracy, to anarchy back to a theocracy. And that is the core issue at the very foundation of gun control.

Rich Hoffman
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