Tag: NRA

The Latest Mass Shooter Seth Ator: Where liberalism has failed, they always call for gun control

It took nearly 24 hours after another gunman identified the 36 years old Texan Seth Ator as the Odessa mass shooter which led to many conspiracy theories right after the tragedy. What was different from this event was that the killer was pulled over by police and shot at as they approached his vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily a preplanned massacre as others have been, while using an AR platformed weapon to invoke mass destruction on innocent people. This time the guy was just doing his thing and when he was engaged by law enforcement that broke up whatever activity he was doing, it set him off into a volatile rage that turned deadly quick.

It was sad that immediately after there were already calls for gun control, and this time it was a bit different also. Anti-gun people revealed more what their intentions were, since it was obvious that Seth Ator had a bit of a criminal record. Just like with health care it was the Obama part of it that was sold with the intention of going to a public option and complete socialist takeover. Well, the red flag laws that have been proposed, as well as the background checks are just the beginning. Gun grabbers and solid political leftists want guns removed from society. They quickly were using this case as one where open carry wouldn’t have worked, and tried immediately to apply the shooters “white guy” status to support their attempts at gun control. Its all been part of their overall story, angry white guys are dangerous, racist and that they created America and all that needs to be erased from history. But to do that, of course they have to take away the guns because that’s what keeps such a rebellion from happening.

However, as I have said, and from what we know is directly applicable to this case, failed parental structures are what is causing these mass shootings, the values these kids are not getting in their families is far more destructive than any other element. Then as has been the case with every shooter lately, we are still learning about this one, but drugs both legal and illegal have played a part in altering the consciousness of the attackers. All those elements are foundations of liberal policy in the failed experiments of replacing the family with government and the results are exploding on our streets now that many of the basic foundations of proper behavior have been eroded away into this anarchy movement that we see everywhere these days.

There were early reports that this guy was on meth and was an Antifa member which I stated wouldn’t have surprised me at all. To be honest, at 36 he’s a little old for Antifa terrorism, but it would be closer to a reality than to say he was a good Christian kid from Odessa that just freaked out one day and killed a bunch of people at a traffic stop. Liberals want to remove guns from our society because they have made kids like this killer with their social policies and they are determined to use every tragedy that occurs to attack America’s gun culture, and they truly expect everyone to just take it, and go along with implied guilt for things they had nothing to do with. But the left did. As is typical of all these recent shooters, Ator came from a divorced home. While divorce has been around for a while, it only became common in our society over the last few decades. There was a stigma against it in the 70s and 80s. If a woman became pregnant prior to that period, you got married and you forced yourself to live happily ever after so that you could grow a family. And when you got older and couldn’t stand each other anymore, you still stayed married because it was the right thing to do for the kids. Because kids psychologically need parental structure, no matter how much they rebel. They need the structure of a father and a mother, and when that is replaced with something else, such as a government welfare check, a student loan program, or any form of handout that replaces a father as head of a family, we see trouble in the products of that family, the children.

Not that every young person who has a dad that lives across town and must watch their parents date other people and spend Thanksgivings with their new boyfriends and girlfriends, they don’t go out and shoot a bunch of people just for the hell of it. But it is a problem among a large portion of our population, just as heavy marijuana use is an indicator of psychotic behavior in a minority of their users. Not everyone who smokes pot becomes a killer just as not everyone growing up without a dad does, but it is certainly an indicator of future violent behavior.

I will be the first to say that the kind of world I want to live in, where we openly carry our guns, everywhere, that such a society would require the best of what our culture could produce. People in such a society would be well educated, would not abuse drugs and alcohol, and would come from solid families with loving backgrounds. The only reason we don’t have such a society is because left leaning activists want all the bad things, broken families, reckless—inconsequential sex, drug abuse, and an ignorant population. And to have those things, they don’t want guns so everyone can kill each other. They want the deviant behavior and they don’t want consequences. That is the real issue and no law proposed could fix that.

The anti-police stance of Antifa likely did have more to do with Seth Ator opening fire on the police as they approached his vehicle after a traffic stop. The solution for the political left is to take away all guns so that Seth Ator wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do such a thing. But of course the ignorance of that proposal is that it does nothing to correct the desire to shoot a cop in the first place. After the initial attack against the police, Ator drove around killing random people, but there clearly wasn’t a plan. It was behavior driven and the elements that created that behavior that was the real cause. If it wasn’t guns, it would have been something else. Killers and lunatics will use anything to invoke a menace on a population if they are unhappy, which is why guns are needed to keep such things from getting out of control. In an open carry environment, he would have been shot by a good guy with a gun sooner, but this was different because he was in a car driving around before people could really get a sense of what was going on.

Without question these shootings are more political than demanding a legal mandate because no law proposed, background checks, red flag laws, or even illegal drug enforcement will change these occurrences. They are the results of liberalism injected into an otherwise conservative society and the conflict that is the natural biproduct. At the very least in this case was the lack of a biological family that was stable and secure. Mom and dad were divorced, and some people just can’t handle that. Their anger may project outward to innocent members of society, but the root cause is the broken family and the disappointments of a child that was robbed of that basic security. We would do better to make divorce illegal than guns. But to admit such a thing, liberals would have to admit that their social experiment of removing dads from homes and attacking the core values of American life has been a failure. And they certainly won’t do that. They’d rather blame guns.

Rich Hoffman

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The Politics of Gun Control: Why Republicans shouldn’t give an inch to Democrats

It’s time that we talk about political strategy for a bit and where we go from hear on gun control issues regarding the Republican Party. It is obvious that the expectation from everyone after the mass shootings in Ohio and Texas recently that it is Republicans who have to come to the center and to move in a gun control direction. And I certainly understand the temptation to act on that pressure which is obvious on President Trump and the Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. In DeWine’s case, I like the guy, but he is not what I’d call a solid conservative. He’s wavered on lots of things over the years including the recent gas tax that he put forth to pay for our roads in Ohio. He’s a generally good person who wants to do something just like everyone else when a mass shooting occurs. For most people a law seems like a good idea even if it would be just a token measure. And for east coast liberals who have learned to be conservatives over the years, like President Trump and his sons, they are thinking like negotiators, where our side gives a little, then their side will give a bit too. But that’s not how this game works and we all know it, especially in the middle part of the country where I live. Rush Limbaugh gets it and he talked about it during his first hour on the show he did on August 9th, and I agree with him emphatically. President Trump and Governor DeWine should not work with liberals to pass even more background checks and to start down the path of “red flag” laws. Authorities should have been doing their jobs in the first place. More laws won’t do anything to save anybody in the future. But it will strengthen the anti-gun liberals who will control the message and for that, it will be a very negative thing for Republicans.

Remember several years ago, I’m pretty sure it was 2016 if you want to look it up in these archives that I predicted on WAAM radio the end of the Democrat Party by 2021. Well, we are right on path. I also said then that the country would split into two more political parties that would come out of the Republican side. You can see now how that party would evolve, with politicians like Mike DeWine becoming the new liberal side of the party where someone like me would be on the conservative side traditionally recognized. As Democrats move further to the left ideologically most people won’t want to go with them leaving the anarchy wing of the party to flounder with little support and an eventual collapse. Joe Biden doesn’t have a chance in spite of what polling is saying. He will struggle through the primaries and if he meets Trump head to head, he’ll implode due to his tired old nature. And he’s the best that Democrats have. When they don’t win back the presidency or the House Democrats will implode as hopeless fanatics.

Not to mention what is coming out of the Bruce Ohr 3025 release. It is going to take most people a while to digest what the FBI did against an American election that saw Trump win in 2016 in spite of their efforts. The bodies are really going to fall in liberal circles on that one because it was the FBI that had become politically active in helping elect them at the cost to Republicans. Democrats are going to have big problems as a party coming out of this next election and the legal reality of the FBI fall out. The Democrats are blowing apart so the history of any bipartisan support will fall on deaf ears. There is no reason to do it. There is nothing politically to gain by working with Democrats this year or next year. The photo opportunities will be a liability not a help and even though it makes sense to Trump and others to give a little on gun control since more than 60% of voters support some measure of it, the battlefield of politics is changing dramatically and it is quite clear that in the aftermath that 60% number won’t mean the same thing. It is far better for Republicans to push for the causes of social failure for which Democrats have played such a large part than to feed them with bipartisan debate to make them feel like they are at a table that they lost long ago.

The problem with gun control is that it is not the right of government to give or take it away. Reading recently the Ohio Constitution again, which I posted one of my favorite sections on Instagram, the right to own guns and to use them not just within my state, but the 2nd Amendment in general is to retake control of our government if it should go asunder. And when the FBI gets caught doing what it did to President Trump the evidence is obvious that we are already there. If our election system doesn’t work and the government employees for whatever reason feel that they have a right to manipulate that election and pick winners and losers abusing the vast power that we have given them, then they aren’t going to give that power back when they get caught. They are going to abuse that power to continue to use it and if they have to kick down the doors of their political enemies to do that while calling CNN so they can record the embarrassing details, as they did with the aide to the President, Roger Stone, that practice will continue and even get worse. Guns aren’t there as a right given by government. They are there to keep an honest government with the threat of taking that power away if they become corrupt. Nobody is going to leave a public office at the end of a barrel of a BB gun. No, we need the kind of guns if not more so that the military uses, because the military operates on behalf of our government that is supposed to be working for us. But if that changes, there is no other recourse but removal from office at gun point, because laws at that point fail to inspire good conduct.

Working with Democrats on gun control only feeds them political power which Republicans have no reason to surrender. I personally blame Democrats for all this violence, entirely. They are always talking about dog whistles that Trump is flashing to his base in speeches, which I understand the psychology behind it. But its not him that’s doing it. Trump reflects his base. Democrats use dog whistles all the time and usually it’s the Hollywood actor community that dispatches it into popular culture through entertainment channels, such as this whole issue on plastic straws and environmentalism in general, or the toxicity of masculinity in the culture of the sexes. It was dog whistles controlled by Democrats that set off those shooters and they know it. The chances of all three of these recent mass shootings occurring as close together as they were in time, and by the age ranges and personality types of the shooters themselves, they are creations of the political left and they heard the whistle. Not to get conspiratorial about CIA mind control devices or anything. But the kind of hateful rhetoric that came from the mouth of Democrats with no answer to Trump’s many victories is enough to push young shooters like those kids over the edge and into a mass killer category. There were plenty of red flags, but when you have an organization like the FBI willing to help Democrats, how can you trust them to do their jobs correctly when we know better now. If we don’t want to look at the evolving case of Bruce Ohr, then lets look at the San Bernadine murderers where the FBI allowed the destruction of that crime scene by the media to cover up the obvious case of domestic terrorism so that the story wouldn’t explode with even more damning evidence that would have been embarrassing to the liberal ledger. Its not just a few people at the top as hard as it is to admit, but all through the organization.

The bottom line is that things are changing, dramatically in politics. We are looking at the end of a political party and DeWine and Trump would do well to let it die. Don’t give them a little false hope by working with them on bipartisan gun control that will be Republicans giving away value where Democrats have nothing to give, and never will. They will not help with the wall, or any infrastructure. They only want to say that they forced Republicans to move on gun control against the warnings of the NRA. That’s all they care about. So forget about them, destroy them in the upcoming election, then lets see how the country settles its new political landscape. The best gun control is to improve the social aspects of our people. Stick with that, we certainly don’t need more laws that nobody cares about or respects. Don’t empower Democrats by showing the world that they still have command of anything. Let them die the death they have made for themselves, then, and only then, can we have a real conversation.

Rich Hoffman

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: Understanding why America has a gun culture and to the level that it needs

Not that I ever questioned the meanings of our various constitutions, the United States one, and the one from my home state of Ohio, but it was good to read them anyway fresh off the calls for gun control that occurred recently in Texas and Ohio, even by members of the Republican Party. In some cases, it was even Trump supporters who were trying to justify new bans for “assault weapons” and mental health red flag laws. I’m glad that I particularly read the Ohio Constitution again because it is written so beautifully and is so clear on the matter. Guns were never gifted out by a nice government for target practice recreation. They are part of our constitutions both state and federal because there is likely going to occur many times in the history of our country a period where we would need guns to take back our government and instill new management. And with them controlling our military, people would need equal firepower to rise up against them and stop them. That is why there are 100 round magazines available for people to purchase and why there are silencers that sell next to beef jerky. Because we may need them to rip our government out of the hands of bad people and return it to a constitutional republic instead of some chaos driven democratic socialism that is hell bent on anarchy then total control of our way of life.

I am not one of those ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ types who are tattooing the words on my body or flying a flag in my garage warning off the government with the words “come and take it,” asking for a fight. The Greek phrase comes from the Battle of Thermopylae, which was recently popularized by the movie 300. It’s the battle where the Persian Empire of Xerxes was attacking Greece out of revenge for the previous defeat of a Persian emperor and they were met with a small force that did well as they were greatly outnumbered but ultimately fought to the death. Our modern equivalent to that statement and sentiment is “Remember the Alamo” for much the same reasons. In both of those cases the emphasis is on death and being outnumbered and I reject both of those ideas. In our present state, we outnumber them by a lot and I have no plans on dying. When you are better than they are, smarter than they are, and all other things are equal, why would we be the ones to die in such an engagement? So I am not one of those who use such phrases to articulate my position on guns. I’d rather them not come and try to take it because I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.

However, what is being proposed by all sides of the political discourse on gun control as a result of these mass shootings is talk of government buy backs, and expanded back ground checks by the same government that obviously is doing everything it can to get rid of Donald Trump as president just aren’t on the table. For them to be we would have to trust our current government completely and just do whatever they tell us which obviously would be a dumb idea. I would argue that we are in a civil war right now. Donald Trump is the result of that war from my side against the government forces who have been making a joke of America for a long time. I prefer the election method as opposed to the armed opposition to something like what we have learned about the FBI, that they have been dirty cops picking winners and losers in the political theater, and they have been caught only because Trump was president. Many of us have known for a long time that such a thing was possible, but now we have proof. Gun control and more legislative turmoil isn’t even in the realm of consideration. We are one election away from open and hostile conflict similar to the first Civil War, the people against the government forces rather than North and South, so especially now, it is not the time to talk about gun control. We are presently fighting to keep our Republic intact from a socialist incursion. That is essentially the case of the mass shootings and why they are happening more often, the results of social decline similar to what we have seen in Venezuela. The gun violence is there to mask the Democrat failures just as Nicolas Maduro does in Venezuela.

It’s not that a liberal dog whistle was cast to inspire these Manchurian candidate type shooters to go on mass shooting rampages just hours a part in a period where Democrats are obviously losing in a big way to the Trump administration, and they needed to change the story. But all the kids who led these attacks are products of our liberalized public education system and are fringe leftists with limited intellectual development that I would consider deliberately functioning from clipped wings of brain development in our young people with bad educations, addictions to sex, and an over reliance on drugs, illegal and prescribed. Most of these modern victims won’t grow up to be mass shooters, but liberals know a certain percentage will, even if they don’t know them personally. It’s a numbers game and when those kids snap, Democrats are ready to make the tragedy an advantage for their side, and way too many Republicans are willing to share in the guilt and go along with the proposals to look like they are playing a bipartisan game. But its not about cooperation at all, its war and everyone knows that deep down inside. And if our government fails to protect our interests from internal domestic enemies, then we have to rely on our guns to hold our ground and take back what belongs to us—our country.

In my interactions with people, as I’ve said, I can read the Ohio Constitution or the federal Bill of Rights and understand the intent without a supreme court justice telling me what they mean. I get it, and I participate in the political system to keep the peace. I write on this blog and do many other things to do my part to keep things from getting out of hand, but to ensure that my side wins. And when I say my side, I mean the side of our founding documents and a rejection of progressive politics and the generalities of global liberalism. I also know that there are vast amounts of people who are tattooing ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ on their arms and across their backs and they mean it when they say, “come and take it.” Undoubtably when the police come to try to take their weapons away because they may be victims of some future “red flag” law they will turn them over without incident. But some of them will make the Waco incident and Ruby Ridge looking like a preschool coloring book project. There isn’t any outcome where America does like Australia or New Zealand, or anywhere in Europe and just gives over their guns and puts their blind trust into a government when we know better. Its just not going to happen.

What needs to happen as a result of these shootings is an educational issue, not a physical law that puts everyone back to sleep and gradually erodes the Second Amendment. Our founding documents specifically warn against just these kinds of intrusions on our liberties, especially by a political class that is so full of hatred and class warfare as the Democrats are. It was their activism that has turned up the pressure for which these shooters acted, whether we are talking about the psychedelic effects of marijuana legalization, broken homes where the mothers are married to government welfare checks instead of good, solid male role models, or failed liberal policies that have turned up the tension to the degree that potential mass shooters want to do something to help their “people” such as the Dayton shooter did. But their activism becomes our problem when one of these pimple-popping young people takes up guns and tries to kill a bunch of innocent bystanders. When that happens we have an obligation to stop them. And clearly the state is not equipped to protect us from such acts. We need expanded carry laws so that we can all defend each other on a moment’s notice. Because these killers are just getting started. I predict much more carnage rather than less, and the fault is in our education systems, not in the guns themselves. We have a failure of government and we are at a point where we need to replace it. We have taken steps to do so with Donald Trump. But that may not be enough. If that proves to be the case, we will need a lot more guns, a lot more ammunition capacity in our clips, and more power behind them.

Rich Hoffman

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Guns and Teachers in Florida, an answer to a problem that won’t go away by itself

It passed the House in Florida with a comfortable vote of 65 to 47 after hours of debate. Now it goes to the desk of the governor, Ron DeSantis to be signed. The bill that has now passed and will become law in Florida is their answer to the long debated question about guns in schools, and now at least their teachers will be able to take a course and qualify to carry guns to protect students which is the ultimate answer to the whole school shooting debate. I personally have never thought it was a debatable situation and have said so in my own school district in Ohio. Guns are the answer to the tendency of violence, not the cause. But just like other aspects of culture that involve liberal input, the government tampering on the matter has created a more dangerous situation, not less of one and the only thing that needed debate was how people are afraid of guns are going to have to deal with a world that made them in the first place, out of necessity. The eradication of guns from society was never an option. Having guns in more places more often is, because of the nature of humanity, which invented them for a reason.

Listening to the debates against guns in schools in Florida was interesting. It was all emotionally driven and largely preprogrammed. The fear based diatribes were not conducive to a proper sentiment. In essence, we know from trial and error that we cannot trust the government network to protect us, and that includes police, firefighters, FBI agents, the military—if given the opportunity to fail, they often will. As it is true that we do hire those types of people for our government the truth is that they are often too slow to react or when they do, they don’t have enough skin in the game to act properly. So when there is the potential for danger, those with the most to lose and who are at the heart of a matter should be armed with deadly force so that they can protect whatever threat might come about. It’s a perfectly logical element to a problem that permeates human thought, the temptation to abuse other people for failures of others.

During the recent California synagogue attack by a nineteen-year-old kid it was a border patrol agent who was in attendance who was able to put a stop to the rampage and thwart the advance of terrorism, otherwise a lot more people would have died. There is no way to deal with mass shootings but to confront them at the point of the attack. Waiting for a 911 response simply isn’t an option. Violence has to be confronted, not avoided, and the fantasy that guns can be removed from society and that therefore opportunities for attackers to conduct themselves in such violent ways will be diminished, is simply a false hope evolved under a premise of utopia that is grounded in reality as a fantasy story. Guns are not the villains; they are the answer to villainy.

As everyone knows I have a long history with public schools and feeling that the teachers are overpaid and are dangerous in what they teach our children. But I have been willing to say that I’d support pay increases for teachers in my school district in Ohio if they are willing to carry guns while on the job, and taking on that extra responsibility. That would prevent mass shootings. It may not prevent the intent to violence, but it could minimize the impact such as what happened at that California synagogue. When the danger erupts a person comfortable with a gun needs to be there to confront the attacker. And in essence, that is the only logical answer. Nothing else will work, not metal detectors, not more school security because like the police, it’s just a job and that doesn’t always promise that in a tenuous situation, they will act properly—and certainly not more gun laws. The reliance on more centralized authority, which is always the liberal perspective gives precisely the opposite result. Only people who are highly motivated to solve a problem like that, who are in that life and death situation can really be trusted to act in their own self-interest. And when they do, they need a gun to perform that task. It was out of protecting self-interest that guns were invented in the first place and why they are such an important part of American culture.

Schools and places of worship, or any place where would be attackers know that people do not have guns are made so much more dangerous by the insistence that gun restrictions be present. Anywhere that a lot of people conduct themselves, guns should be frequent. To my experience even at bars and nightclubs, people who become gun owners don’t go around trying to shoot everyone. Guns require discipline and those who learn to use them become better people not worse in the exchange. Most of these young attackers such as end up in these school and synagogue shootings do not have that background. Even in a bar fight it’s not the NRA supporters who pull out a gun and start firing. Using guns tends to make people more responsible, not less. So gun owners are less prone to suddenly become a lunatic while at such places. More guns are better for society, not the other way around. Most gun owners who carry are by default much more careful about engaging in a conflict with another person because they are aware they are carrying deadly force and that responsibility tends to regulate irresponsible behavior. Even for that driver who cuts you off at an intersection and they give you the finger in anger provoking you. Gun carriers tend to blow it off because they know that they have the ability to control the situation and that self-assuredness brings about a much more mature outcome.

The problems occur when you take away that natural tendency and replace it with government enforcement which not even they want. The responsibility for good conduct needs to fall somewhere and experience tells us that people who carry guns tend to be the type of people who will take responsibility for a situation quicker than waiting for a centralized authority to respond to danger. So in all public places guns are the answer to less violence. Not fewer guns and more government authority. The difficult things for liberals to admit to themselves is that more government isn’t the answer. More cops in schools, more people to work security who might end up paying union dues for their job at a metal detector—those are not options because they cost too much and they do nothing to solve the problem. We’ve seen it too often, when gun fire does erupt, cops aren’t always willing to throw themselves in front of the bullets. To some of them, often a ratio that is not acceptable, it’s just a job to them and like the cops in Parkland Florida, they run and hide like everyone else. But not everyone is like that, some people are naturally inclined to leadership and those are the people we want carrying guns, everywhere. And its good to see that Florida is moving in that direction. Maybe the rest of the country will get it and follow before more school shootings occur.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need Guns for Civilization to Work Properly

The Democrats continue to propose this notion of impeachment of President Trump and to be honest, this makes the best argument for the Second Amendment that could be provoked. President Trump was elected by an honest election process, and with all the legal scrutiny that could be generated against him, he was found innocent of any wrong doing, yet the calls for his removal from office continue on, and have even increased as Democrats realize they are losing power at a rapid rate. It is a reminder why we must have the Second Amendment, because if a president of the United States can be abused the way that Trump has been, it can happen to any of us and the only way to defend ourselves truly is not in a court of law, but with the barrel of a gun, as is obvious by the antics of our present circumstances. I put my message to those who want to impeach President Trump on Instagram and for me it would be a last resort but its safe to say, that if Trump were to be impeached, I would consider the law and order of our governing system to be too far gone to hold any merit, and the only thing that would hold our society together would be our guns.

Not having guns as the foundation of our country and our entire legal system is simply not an option. I will never trust anything mankind proposes by way of justice without a gun being somewhere nearby. People are fallible and they often abuse words on paper if they can get away with it to obtain power at someone else’s cost, and that is just not permissible. I’m not going to allow it, and the only way to enforce that is with gun ownership. Guns are the stabilizing factor of western civilization which keeps us free. Without them our society would have fallen apart a long time ago. Guns keep everyone honest and that has been a good thing. But let’s face it, the Second Amendment isn’t for hunting, it’s for taking back our government from the powerful, if we need to. And if Trump is impeached, then when would we declare that everything is too far gone to deal with things without violence? There are elections every four years, and that is the time where the opposition can knock out someone from power if they can. That’s how our system is supposed to work. But if someone cheats and tries to do it with legal gymnastics and an abuse of the law, which is clearly what happened to President Trump, then what other recourse do any of us really have?

I propose that guns should be a greater part of our lives, we should wear them openly and allow all those we are dealing with to know that we are all functioning from an equal footing. Guns are the great equalizers, they are what makes us respect each other, not some words on a page. Guns are an invention by mankind that have brought in the notion for equality in the first place. Without guns, we would not have had many of the social revolutions that we have had in the United States. Guns have played a much larger role than many people give them credit for. There has been no political figure that we’ve had in the world that would convince me that guns were not needed to keep everything balanced and in order.

The shame of it is that we’ve allowed a political class to define gun ownership and their use as dangerous and a safety hazard, as if they were in the same category as tobacco and alcohol. From a government perspective they know they can’t truly rule over our society without having guns removed from the discussion, and truly, deep down inside, that is what “government” as an entity wants to do, they want to control us. That’s sort of their job title. But what keeps the tendency for human failure from harming us? Well, it’s the fear that if government abuses its power that the people they rule over will shoot back. I would contend that without guns or at least a culture of weapons, that no foundation of law and order would persist in any culture.

I have been around the world a few times and visited some of our greatest cities on earth and I can say honestly that the lack of guns have made most of them armpits. In order to have a gun free society work the intellectual aptitude of the inhabitants must yield themselves to the weaknesses of their culture because that is the only way that peace is achieved. Whereas in cultures where guns are openly worn and discussed, the intellectual curiosity of the world around them tends to go up. As I write this I’m thinking of England, a place where they clearly don’t understand gun ownership in a personal way. They love their institutions in England and they are willing to trade their personal freedoms and security away toward a trust in their authority figures. But at a cost, they are a declining culture that is limited to the whims of their government, and that is a dangerous place to be.

Then there is the example in Paris, which I have called many bad names due to their present state chaos. They have their yellow vest protests which have been going on for a long time and are the result of the failed socialism there for many years. After the fire at Notre Dame over 900 million dollars were contributed to help restore the cathedral prompting many of those weekend protestors to question why similar contributes didn’t flow toward their pockets. After all, it was gas prices and taxes that were keeping them poor and middle class. Why couldn’t “the rich” just give them all 900 million dollars so they could sit around their homes all day and play video games? What isn’t understood by these people was the value Notre Dame had to so many people around the world, and that value was reflected in the contributions. Notre Dame had value. A bunch of dirty, stinky, lazy socialists do not have value, so nobody wants to give them 900 million dollars to sit around complaining and playing games all day. It is that lack of understanding that can often make governments dangerous because they seek to appease those types of dumb, shortsighted people in elections which means that the mobs of the angry can then confiscate the wealth of the hard-working. In Europe this is a real problem, which is why more people don’t have more things. A culture that embraces gun ownership tends to be one that also understands the nature of value and it prevents more violence, it doesn’t act as an agitator of more instances.

Gun ownership I consider to be the foundation of civilization. Without it governments and the people they are supposed to represent fall apart quickly. So it’s a great benefit to have more guns in more places in any culture. And it’s what keeps the bad guys away. It’s also what keeps the temptations to impeach presidents from getting out of control because we know from history that people in power will do just about anything to stay there. And when they feel they can abuse others to keep their power, or to advance it, they certainly will. What I can say is that if my president is impeached, I’m not going to be very happy about it, and I will look toward the Second Amendment to restore balance, and order. Yielding to authority is simply not an option. I never see a day where guns aren’t the center of civilized discourse, because of their equalizing effect. It puts everyone on equal footing which should be encouraged, not discouraged. But then again, people who want more gun regulations are not really interested in peace and equality. They want power and they want us disarmed so they can have their way with us. And that is the deep, dark secret nobody wants to talk about.

Rich Hoffman

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Guns Teach Responsiblity, if we want a safe world, ban liberalism

I was just a little impressed that my youngest grandson wanted desperately to see what I was doing at my workbench and decided to help me reload some ammunition for my Cowboy Fast Draw practices. It’s kind of a reload 101 type of thing that isn’t difficult for an adult to learn, but for a 2-year-old, I wouldn’t expect him to put a wax bullet into a .45 caliber casing then put a primer in place for shooting. I thought it was just a little advanced. But the young guy wanted nothing to do but what I was so he sat up on my bench stool and went to work helping me eventually taking over all together loading up 50 rounds all by himself. We had a great experience together and so it has been like that in American life really since the beginning. Young people learning from older people the basics of survival in the world and having fun with the exchange of information. It was a reminder to me exactly what guns mean to our culture and how important they have traditionally been in teaching young people basic values and skills in life.

Guns have been in a lot of talks lately and most of the diatribes I have found disgusting, especially the case where the liberal Colorado legislature has voted in a Red Flag law for which the governor is expected to sign. Sheriff Steven Reams from Weld County has indicated that as a member of law enforcement, he will refuse to enforce the law even if he must go to jail for it. I would hate to see that happen, but the Sheriff’s position is the correct one, the Colorado Red Flag law is an abomination of legal abuse, grossly anti-American Constitution in its premise and deserves serious scrutiny on a national level. The premise for the Red Flag law is that judges would be allowed to take guns away from people who are found to be a danger to themselves or others. The provocation of such a status would purely be the word of mouth of family, friends or neighbors. So if some such person recommends that you are a menace in some way, a judge can take away your guns and put you as a gun owner in a position to prove your innocence just to maintain them.

This law literally comes from a state that has gone to pot. Colorado as everyone knows by now has turned into a state turning toward recreational marijuana to raise additional revenue but also to fulfill a long time progressive dream, the legalization of mind altering substances such as pot which in my opinion is far more dangerous than any gun would be. Sure, guns shoot bullets that could kill people, but destroying a person’s mind is far more catastrophic toward the ambitions of mankind than any gun could or would be. That makes this Red Flag law in Colorado that much worse because it likely won’t be a sane person making assessments about the danger of an individual and whether or not a judge should get involved in gun ownership, but the chances are it will be some drug crazed lunatic high on life with a barely functioning mind induced by the effects of marijuana. Imagine the illusion this gives the typical stoner, handing them judicial power over their neighbor so that protection of private property would be stripped away in favor of the loser hippie and their fenceless world view of free love, free education, and free money. All these pieces fit into the same ugly puzzle so its good to see a sheriff willing to put up a fight. But the real punches have to come from the nation at large. Colorado used to be a nice state, but it is becoming like California more and more, just a cesspool of liberalism that is going out of fashion, but not fast enough to leave behind some residual damage.

Ohio is getting gun laws right with its own approaches which is moving toward not even needing a permit to carry a gun. I personally don’t see any danger in guns, they are the paramount foundation of western civilization and they protect intellectually the premise of our republic. (We are not a democracy) Gun ownership has typically been the foundation of good family upbringing and served as a natural bond between generations such as the example I proved regarding my grandson. That activity is a normal thing for an American family to do together and it has been since the start of our country. The people who are against guns happen also to be against families and are pro-abortion. They are for drug use. They are for wealth confiscation and redistribution. They are for open borders and a loss of American sovereignty in the world. Essentially, they are against everything that makes America a great country because they want to undo the nature of it and change it into something much more European.

Guns should be carried everywhere and used when needed to stop bad guys from ruining the world. Sure there is great responsibility in gun ownership but that’s part of the beauty of it. The act of learning about guns from a responsible adult has been paramount in shaping the young minds of particularly boys in our culture. When things go wrong such as they do during mass shootings it’s not hard to identify why people become lunatics and use guns to hurt people maliciously, the failures are often in liberalism, in defunct fatherless homes where a loose mother loses control of her son because there is no father, or the men in the young boy’s life are losers that can’t help the young person affirm himself into adulthood. Or that the people who have lost their minds put too much trust into public education, public wealth redistribution, and functioning as a mindless automaton high on drugs and not taking responsibility for their own lives. The real solutions to a dangerous society is to ban liberalism, inspire families to stay together for the sake of the family as a whole unit, and to put guns in the hands of children as soon as possible and teach them how to use them and make that understanding one of their first acts of responsibility in the world. Once they learn to handle guns correctly from a father, a grandfather, an uncle or even a family friend, they will then as young men and women be able to go out into the world and act responsibly in other aspects of life. That’s how things are supposed to work and Colorado is going in the wrong direction.

It was for me nice to see the lights coming on in my grandson. For him sitting at his grandpas work bench reloading ammunition and watching me shoot a bit was a treasure he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life and he’ll likely continue to want as much of it as he can get. And it is my job to make sure he gets it and gets it right. Guns aren’t dangerous, they are great teaching instruments of how to live responsibly in the world. We can’t look to government to decide what kind of world we should live in the way that liberals propose it. It’s not a judge’s responsibility to take away guns off the whim of some pot head’s opinion. And it’s not for government to step into a family and rob them of the intellectual discourse that often does happen when the older generation teaches the young how to live in the world with the basic skills learned during the transaction. At the heart of the gun control debate is on how we control danger in our world. Liberals want more centralized control. Conservatives want more individualized control. But what we end up with shouldn’t be a combination of the two which most case-law on the Second Amendment comes to. There is a right and wrong answer. Both sides aren’t partially correct. And you can see that correct answer on my grandson’s face, and that is all lawmakers need to know.

Rich Hoffman

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The Neccessity of Gun Ownership

The problem with all progressives in government and in society in general is that they are functioning from a false assumption, that history is a linier exercise that progresses day by day, week by week, and year by year from one accomplishment to another for all recorded history. They believe that once a society learns something that it has it forever and that all ideas and concepts progress off one another toward a more enlightened understanding of the world. They are wrong, what in fact does happen is that the human race is continuously climbing and falling and relearning things it long ago forgot and that the reality of progress and understanding is that gunpowder essentially broke the Vico Cycle for which we all followed for many thousands of years and from that invention of a new philosophy took root and America that was born as an opportunity to truly change the course of history. This gave way to the idea of self-rule and the American Constitution which in our present time is a deeply philosophic work that would have never emerged if not for the personal ownership of guns to protect it. That makes Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to President Trump’s national emergency declaration to secure funding for a border wall along the southern states touching Mexico a serious blunder driven from a lack of understanding about the nature of reality. A national emergency declared by some future Democrat inspiring any restriction to the Second Amendment is not comparable to what President Trump did and will not be allowed under Constitutional consideration.

There are a couple of facts that must be addressed in relation to Nancy Pelosi’s progressive position and the general attitude of her insurgents in the current congress, that likely some member of the Trump family or the current cabinet will continue to be president of the United States well into the future, well past President Trump’s eight terms. I don’t see people turning away from the prospects of a good economy to hurt themselves with the progressive notions of social justice wealth redistribution. The American presidency has changed forever under the Trump White House and I just don’t see any Democrats or Republicans understanding at this point what happened. In some cases it will take them decades to figure it out and by then there will be several Trump spawns who will inhabit the White House and will continue the work that has been started, in Making America Great Again. The second aspect of Nancy’s meanderings is that it is the Second Amendment that essentially holds together the concept of law and order created by the American Constitution. It is rather funny that Democrats spend so much time with their counter-culture fantasies of breaking and even ignoring laws then they think that if they were in power, that people would automatically follow their laws. Sorry folks, it doesn’t work that way. If Nancy’s clan ever managed to put restrictions on the Second Amendment those laws would be ignored because they are not based on Constitutional principles and would be therefor worthless.

Part of the beauty of gun ownership is that it is directly responsible for a period of law and order in the United States that has been very successful and allowed a culture to flourish under the natural autonomy of its citizens. The stability of the law under the American Constitution is unique in the world and is largely responsible for the success of our economy over a long period of time. It wasn’t that long ago that Japan was an enemy of the United States functioning under a tyrannical emperor, or the Soviet Union was openly communist, Iran was free and taken over by communism as was Cuba. France was actually a territory of the conquerors in Germany. How many times have the countries of Europe, Asia and Africa been invaded and reinvented by rival factions always changing the nature of their law and order? Even in South Africa consider the changes to their society under the communist Nelson Mandela. Most places in the world have been around for a long time as societies, but they have not had stable governments to carry from one generation to the next ideas and understandings built on philosophy that lasted well into the future essentially because their people could not protect their laws and order from invaders, either from outside their countries or from within. That is not the case in America. With more guns than people it is impossible for some insurgent to take over mass population centers in America and to therefor eradicate Constitutional concepts from the minds of our population.

Losing gun rights in America just isn’t permissible under any conditions because it is the fundamentals of gun ownership which preserves the nature and intent of the American Constitution. Gun ownership is one of the most wonderful aspects of our culture because it has allowed the philosophy of good law to provide rights to individuals in ways that has never occurred before in history and allowed for a true break from the grasp of the Vico Cycle. So gun confiscation is simply not an option under some future Democrat president or any other political attempt to remove them from the general population. Without gun ownership there is no law. So giving them up will never happen. If such a proposal were actually made, breaking that law would become quite fashionable and if troops were sent home to home to grab them, there would be open gun battles to stop the incursion. Guns trump laws of a progressive nature because the foundation document of the original Constitution understood the need for the protection of individual liberty.

When gun laws are proposed what is being asked or demanded is an expansion of federal powers over the natures of individual citizens, which is a loss of legal concept which protects the very idea of American laws. The way many police react to CCW holders or homeowners known to have many guns on their property is completely beyond the scope of their business and in violation of the nature of American law, hedging dangerously close to a police state mentality where government has more power than individuals. The nature of the American Constitution is to limit the powers of government and when Nancy’s gang of lunatics propose even offhanded the idea of Second Amendment restrictions, they are championing efforts at federal expansion of rights over the rights of individuals citizens which is not a permissible concept.

Guns and their ownership have been proposed by power grabbers as being part of a backwards way of thinking by the uneducated and stupid. The way that Democrats speak about gun shows and NRA supporters is actually quite an insult. The truth is quite the opposite, gun ownership is part of a sophisticated concept of modern legal understanding and enforcement and is directly linked to the wealth of our nation. Without gun ownership it is unlikely that the American Constitution would have lasted for 50 years let alone more than 200. And it is also unlikely that America would be as wealthy as it is, because wealth is a creation of individual free people, not the nations themselves. And that is not a negotiable position, no nation is permitted to make laws that power themselves, so therefore no national emergency will ever supersede the need for gun ownership and the philosophic advancement that they provide to a society of individuals.

Rich Hoffman

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So You’ve Played Red Dead Redemption 2 and Loved it: Be a gunslinger in real life, join the Cowboy Fast Draw Association

As much as I talk about other things, I am not completely lost like a lot of people my age might otherwise be on the magical world of video games and their relatively new impact on global entertainment. But let me just say to my usual readers, its big business. I finally finished the story mode of Red Dead Redemption 2 after around 100 hours of game play, taking my time when I could and I have to say that I was absolutely amazed by the result. The game is such an astonishing technical achievement and it is by far the best thing that could have ever happened to the entertainment format of the American Western. As a story and experience it really is like taking a real-life cowboy experience like the movie City Slickers and placing them into a 1960s spaghetti western with all the high drama of something like Game of Thrones. It is big, bold and beautiful in so many ways. And I knew that as I completed the game and all the epilogue missions that there was going to be a Red Dead online coming at the end of November. I planned to revisit the game at that time but wasn’t expecting much. But let me say that I have been pleasantly surprised. It looks like as massive as Red Dead Redemption 2 is as a game with sales well over a billion dollars already and something like 20 million copies sold before the Holiday season, that the purposed of the online play is to use the game as a kind of training experience for the online world that they have created. It is just vast and ultimately never-ending in what it allows players to do and interact with one another.

I couldn’t help but think as I was playing missions with other people the other day, most of them much younger than I am, that this game is really their only experience with a real American western and for many they are very touched by it. The game itself is a very moral story about good and bad and the many quandaries of the critical decisions that went into exploding life across the American frontier. But at its core it’s about gunfighting and is clearly one of the best arguments for the real-life problems of the Second Amendment. A lot of young people may not be paying attention to the real political problems going on in the outside world, but they sure care a lot about earning enough money in the game to purchase upgrades for their guns and dress in the coolest gunfighting outfits. But I couldn’t help notice that many of them probably didn’t know that they could do all the things they are doing in Read Dead Redemption in real life with Cowboy Fast Draw as seen at the following link:

http://www.COWBOYFASTDRAW.com

Belonging to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is one of the groups I am most proud to affiliate with, they are really a good group of people who meet all over the United States to compete in real life fast draw competitions using real guns. It’s what I think of as one of the coolest sports in the world right now as other countries are trying to participate but have too strict of gun laws to actually do it. But in the good ol’ United States it is much easier to participate in. Yet I have noticed that most of the members are well over 40, largely because guns and holster rigs are expensive so it takes a little upfront investment to get involved. But once you do, it is infinitely rewarding. I enjoyed the original Red Dead Redemption enormously and getting my own fast draw rig was always something I had planned to do. But raising a family every last dollar that I made went into family needs, a car was always breaking down, a kid always needed a school fee or band instrument. Someone needed braces of a family member across the country wanted us to visit them, so there was always something for like twenty years that kept me from getting my own fast draw gun rig.

I ran across a substantial amount of money for a big job I had been working on so I treated myself to my gun rig and have been practicing at Cowboy Fast Draw for several years now, and am getting pretty good at it. After probably 30,000 to 35,000 shots at a fast draw target, I am starting to feel good about my speed and accuracy. It did take a while. It was something that had been on my mind well before I ever played the first Red Dead going way back into my twenties when I was going through a really tough time. Westerns and western music really kept the zest for life alive in me. On their most basic foundations westerns are about the meaning of life so they always had great appeal to me so when I grew up I wanted to be as much of a gunfighter as society could endure. Ironically, I had acquired my gun rig and some advanced fast draw skill before Red Dead Redemption 2 came out which had even more meaning for me because of the new hobby I had.

Traveling around the online world it has become very obvious that many young people are deeply touched by Red Dead Redemption 2 and likely would like to have a similar experience as I have. So let me put this little invite out there. If you are unsure of how to get involved in Cowboy Fast Draw because you are enjoying playing Red Dead Redemption but would like to take everything up a notch, don’t hesitate to ask me. I can help you get started on something that would be infinitely rewarding. While my regular audience here is much older than the people playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I would personally love to see more young people getting involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. It really isn’t any different from what you do in the game, but that it never ends. While the content of Red Dead Redemption does eventually run out, the challenges in real life never do.

In the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, you get to dress up as a gunslinger for real, and have a reason to do it. You have a reason to buy fancy guns for real and learn to take care of them. And the scoring format is safe and fun. Its one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in my life and I would recommend it to anybody. I had been thinking that membership in the cowboy sports may just flicker away because new generations just do not have many positive western entertainment venues that are cool enough to hold their attention, that is until Red Dead Redemption 2 came along and inspired millions of people to live in that world quite authentically. And for those who just want to climb into the world of Red Dead Redemption for real and live it in real life I’d point you to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association at the link shown here. If you have any questions, just ask. I’d love to help as many new people get involved in the sport as possible. While I personally love the world of Red Dead Redemption, it is no match for having a real fast draw rig on your hip which is an experience I have every day. And wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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A Gun Trick to Save Schools: Vote No on the Butler County Safety Levy

It had been a busy week this past week and I had the opportunity to spend time with a lot of very smart people to get their thoughts on various challenges that are percolating in our community and across the nation. And all this thoughtful discussion pointed to the central issue as proposed by the current White House to deal with school shootings, and gun violence in general—to expand armed citizens to deal with any crises much sooner than presently is happening, especially in schools. This put me in a unique spot to frame the discussion in a way that demonstrated what the opposition most feared about guns and gun safety especially as a kind of first responder. Typically, when I want to talk about precision as a metaphor for something broader I crack out a candle with one of my bullwhips to show people that what seems like an impossible probability was in fact quite doable, and the best option available. Since I’ve been doing the bullwhip work for many years it has been my primary utilization tool to articulate the abstract. However, because specifically the issues over guns and the Second Amendment being properly implemented to solve the school shootings problem and gun violence in general I decided to take another sport that I am involved in and to take those skills and modify my candle snuffing techniques. I’ve been doing Cowboy Fast Draw for several years now and have been doing some trick shooting with those techniques so it was only appropriate to apply those abilities to discuss why it is preferred to have teachers armed in public schools to deal with unwanted gun violence as it occurs at the point of the threat.

One of those events where many smart people were present this past week was the 52nd District debate for the Ohio House seat that George Lang currently holds. I was pretty stunned that George’s opponent didn’t even know about the Butler County Safety Levy that was on the ballot, especially because the 52nd seat has school districts affected by it. Essentially five of the ten schools in Butler County, Fairfield, Hamilton, New Miami, Edgewood, and Monroe are seeking a 10-year 1.5 mill levy, which is $53 per every $100,000 dollars of property evaluation to avoid arming teachers and instead hiring guidance counselors, more safety personnel, and mental health specialists. It surprised me that Kathy Wyenandt didn’t know about the levy since that was the entire scope of her campaign against George Lang—school funding. She was the one who in 2013 ran the Lakota levy campaign which only passed by 1% of the vote and she was making that issue her entire calling card to running for the 52nd district. Yet when the panel of questioners asked her about the Butler County Safety Levy she had to say she’d do some research. George Lang however gave a really good answer which can be seen by CLICKING HERE. Essentially, he reminded me of the story of the Sandy Hook principal who engaged Adam Lanza armed with nothing but a shoe during that school massacre. She died but likely saved many other people. If that principal had a gun, she’d likely be alive today and many more people would have been saved.

Every time there is a story of one of these mass shootings there always seems to be someone willing to charge the gunman to put an end to it. Even with school security officers, like what was employed at Parkland in Florida, or even security and police at the Las Vegas massacre, there have been trained armed personnel nearby to stop the shooter but not everyone is so bold as that principal from Sandy Hook. Sometimes it’s not enough to just be paid to put your life in danger—you often can’t buy heroics. It is typically a natural trait in people and it only comes out under duress. Sometimes safety personnel that we hire to guard schools find that when the bullets start flying they aren’t so brave and they hesitate to engage the target. But impassioned teachers, which there always seems to be a percentage of them in every school, those are the people who should have guns and be the first to meet a threat when they are presented. Principals and teachers like the lady at Sandy Hook are those who should be carrying guns and using those tools when danger presents itself.

That is what we are talking about in Butler County, Ohio and all the way up to the Trump administration in the White House. Impassioned teachers who are the type of people to throw themselves in front of bullets are the people we should pay a little more to be responsible gun carriers. The concealed carry class is a good beginning, but we are talking about making shooting part of their lifestyle so they know how to use a gun under duress as a second nature. That kind of thing isn’t for everyone, but for people who do adopt that type of lifestyle carrying a firearm is a very life enhancing endeavor. But there is no question that the best way to deal with gun violence is to have good people with a gun to be the first to stop bad people with a gun. The Butler County Safety Levy doesn’t deal with that aspect of gun violence, it is only focused on the aftermath. It is a cowardly way for school boards to approach the problem since most educators are functioning under the opinion that schools should be gun free zones, such an assumption isn’t conducive to reality. Luckily in my school district of Lakota we have a few conservative school board members who get it, and they opted out of the Butler County Safety Levy.

The other incident I was speaking of was a Second Amendment Celebration (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW) at the Premier Shooting and Training facility in West Chester. Big name politicians like Jim Renacci and Warren Davidson flew in from Washington D.C. to be a part of the event which evolved into a kind of NRA rally. It wasn’t a huge gathering, but the people there were all passionate about the Second Amendment. One thing that I noticed was that there wasn’t a bunch of security, there were no metal detectors or safety people sweeping people down like you might expect when big name people who typically get a lot of security in public are walking around mingling. That was because almost everyone there was armed with a concealed carry. There were probably more guns there than in any public place in Southern Ohio at that time, and as a result it was one of the safest places to be. Nobody had to worry about being gunned down, because all the people there were responsible gun carriers.

One of the people there who spoke to the public about specifically the Butler County Safety Levy was Sheriff Jones who has been against the money grab and has worked with the Trump administration to implement arming teachers to immediately solve the gun violence situation in soft target regions like public schools. As the lead law enforcement officer from our county there and certainly the head cop at that event, you didn’t see him panicking about all the guns that were freely being carried by so many people. It didn’t concern him a bit, because gun ownership tends to bring responsibility out in people. That’s why you never hear about gunmen attacking people at NRA conventions and gun shows. Having more guns in public makes a much safer society and Sheriff Jones understands that. But I did feel for him a bit when he spoke about being the lone voice in Butler County speaking out against the ridiculous safety levy. It was quite clear that the media and the schools were hoping to keep the issue away from voter’s minds so that when they did show up to vote they wouldn’t understand what the vote was. There hasn’t been much press on it in spite of Sheriff Jones calling out school districts on billboards for not adopting gun carry proposals before someone does get hurt. If the levy passes, school boards in Butler County will feed off that and not act, and will waste money on more personnel that they don’t need. The schools will still be soft targets and in danger, and taxes will go up. If the levy fails however, school boards will have to adopt a policy of letting teachers arm themselves to protect kids as a first responder in the classrooms and in the halls of our schools.

I understand its easy for me to say, I’ve had guns in my life all my life. Everyone I knew as a kid had them, and it was just something you learned growing up, all men knew something about guns. Learning to use them was a rite of passage into adulthood. To preserve that way of life I have been involved in Western Arts most of my life, certainly all of my adult life, so I have a lot of experience to draw from, as opposed to timid people who grew up with a liberal view of the world who simply are terrified of them. But being terrified isn’t an excuse for not acting. And being terrified isn’t an excuse to raise taxes either, just to say later that a school had additional safety people available to deal with a school shooting. We actually want to stop the violence before it happens and that means that not even calling the police will stop such a thing. The best way to stop a school shooter is to have a teacher in every hallway in every school there to engage a threat. And it should be the most impassioned teachers, people like that principal who threw herself at Adam Lanza. But we should not ask such teachers to throw away their lives to save other lives, we should give them the tools to walk away from the experience and that is what arming teachers in public schools is all about—making sure the right people walk away from the danger and ending the situation in seconds, not minutes.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote HELL No on the Butler County Safety Levy: It’s a money grab for ineffective school board members afraid to make hard decisions

Essentially if the school safety levy fails for the combined efforts of Fairfield schools, Hamilton, New Miami, Edgewood, and Monroe—Hamilton will vote to allow teachers to arm themselves. And the other school boards will have to follow because doing nothing simply isn’t an option. Out of Butler County, Ohio’s 10 school districts five of them are looking for this safety levy to hire more employees to keep the school boards from having to make a hard decision on how best to protect schools. At the core of the argument especially among young and inexperienced parents who have been taught all their lives that guns are bad, school boards are trying to appease them with a more centralized process. This involves spending millions of dollars on additional resource officers, mental health assessments and similar employee staffing increases which of course cost more money. Yet we know now from experience that the real solution is a more decentralized process where teachers can act as first responders the moment a crisis breaks out. And the good thing about that approach is that it doesn’t cost more money.

At the heart of the problem is that the basic assumption about public education is that it should not involve guns—because the aim of the progressive education philosophy is to live in a world where guns aren’t needed, value judgments are surrendered to equal rights and the people being educated are subjects of the state. Guns do not fit that view of the world. But in no way is that vision aligned with life in the real world, it’s an idea that mostly people who think politically left of center strive for. Most parents enroll their children in a school without thinking about politics or danger, because their primary concern is that their child is safe, and they want to believe that the schools themselves are free of any turmoil. School boards love to spend money, because its easy and when collections of people are in charge of administering finances, spending money is the only real way to get along because everyone loves to spend money, especially if it is other people’s money. So this issue is particularly challenging for school board members. The only way to make panicky parents happy is to give them more safety personnel, mental health specialists, social workers and counselors—because buying those types of employees give people the illusion of safety. It gives parents the feeling that the institution itself can keep their children safe, and as school board members yielding to that fantasy is safe in itself, until there is a real problem and a deranged shooter comes into the hallways that none of the new government employees could see coming.

Many of the gun rampages we have seen just this year, not to mention year’s past involved people who were considered mentally deranged in some form or another and the institutions of our society proved they were completely ineffective to stop such people from acting in a deadly way. To stop such a deranged mass murderer before the act occurs requires a decision based on judgments, and this is something that our modern institutions just don’t do, because they are so politically charged. Our modern institutions for which public schools are a part are more prone to trying to make a deranged lunatic feel more at home by attacking the normal kids into unnatural acts of compassion than in removing the threat from society by implementing a judgment that might seem unfair. So public schools are powerless to protect children from those who decide life isn’t worth living and they take to becoming mass murderers. By their reasoning, if they are going to kill themselves anyway, why not take a few people who made them feel terrible along the way pay too.

All the methods of implementing school safety as proposed by the Butler County safety levy is to deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting, not to prevent it from happening, and that is what needs to be clear about what people are voting for. There is only one way to ensure that a mass killer doesn’t gain an advantage over a student population of unarmed kids is to have teachers be the first responders to end the threat seconds after it has started, instead of minutes. That is the only way to properly protect students in a school from deranged killers which are becoming more common place these days from many influences. This idea that guns will be legislated out of existence is simply another liberal fantasy that they haven’t come to terms with yet. Guns are part of American life and children should learn to live with them, how to properly use them and what function they serve in the context of society. For instance, a serious course of study could be made of how the invention of gunpowder has changed the nature of human existence politically. Americans are living proof of that evolution, but the path to the political philosophy which created that American experiment is confirmation that no human society will retreat back into the compliance of a communist state, which as China is now and the Soviet Union used to be. Once people have tasted personal freedom, there is no way to erase it from their minds and over the last thousand years mankind has marched toward more personal freedom and much less aristocracy. Yet that is not what schools are teaching and that is also what makes them dangerous—because they are not aligned with the world around them.

For many the history of firearms and the nature of why people love them isn’t relevant to this discussion of school safety, but unfortunately for those utopian minded liberals, such an understanding is mandated for resolution on the safety issue. Is the security of a school more effective if it is more centrally controlled, or is it more effective if it is decentralized? The obvious answer of course is decentralization, we know that from lots of experience as a society. Guns are a part of world culture, they were invented out of human necessity to protect individual rights and that is why history says they are here to stay. We aren’t going to “uninvent” them. Therefore, to have a safe society we have to have a means to defend ourselves from people who may use them for malice and especially in education institutions, such instruction and awareness is paramount for tomorrow’s next generations. To defend them from harm, guns must be part of the solution, not mental health specialists, social workers, and counselors. Those are investments into what happens after a tragedy. We want to solve such problems before they become deadly.

Parents and teachers who are not comfortable with guns are going to have to adapt. Their sensitivities cannot be the contributing factors to making schools less safe due to their emotional condition toward guns. For those people I would suggest some classes on firearms, and to learn more about them aside from what they have seen in Hollywood productions over the last twenty years. Guns themselves are not dangerous, they are precision instruments which defend individual rights. If a teacher is responsible for the safety of a classroom and a crazed gunman is outside their door looking to commit mass murder against harmless, innocent people, that teacher should have the ability to end the threat right then and there. There won’t be time to call the police. A counselor or mental health specialist won’t stop a killer in the hall and talk them out of committing violence, only equal or superior firepower can do that. And that is the way of things in a free society—decentralized first responders who can slow down or stop a threat until the professionals arrive, just like in CPR. The only thing stopping this safety measure from being implemented for the good of everyone is the sensitivities of those who insist that guns not be part of a solution that only guns can solve. And not just guns, but guns in the hands of everyday people who are on the front lines and most prepared to take action when threats arise.

For many, obviously the case with the school boards of the participating schools, the responsibility for such security in their minds fall on the professionals we hire in society to deal with these kinds of things. But it is that over-reliance on institutional safety that many of these mass killers exploit to instigate their wrath. Guns are not a particularly American idea, but the personal use of them is, which means that in order to have a properly safe society that is living in harmony with the invention of guns, that personal participation of guns is something we should use to solve the gun violence problem. The solution is in decentralization within our institutions so to make them safer. More centralization will give us the opposite, the likelihood of more violence. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shootings, especially in public schools, and especially in Butler County which is the focus of this unique tax increase for the five-schools mentioned, then we need to allow teachers to be that layer of security. Throwing more money at more centralized control will do nothing but waste money, which the school boards participating in this horrendous tax and spend approach should have already had in their budgets to begin with. Ultimately what the school boards are asking for in this levy request is for Butler County voters to bail them out of having to make a hard decision—whether or not to cut some expenses out of their budget to hire more safety personnel, which is what they should be doing. Or in having to make a decision in arming teachers which would hurt the sensibilities of some neurotic parents who need an education of their own to get up to speed with the modern world. But nothing about the Butler County safety levy will make schools safer from a potential shooter who might want to attack schools and the children within it.

If I had loved ones in these schools, which I personally do, and a lunatic comes to that school with a gun to shoot up the innocent, I expect a teacher or administrator to be carrying a gun and to stop that situation before mass carnage occurs. There isn’t time to call for help when something like that happens. The situation must be dealt with right then and there. I don’t need a counselor to talk me through the grieving process after a bunch of kids have been killed. I don’t need a mental health professional to rationalize the mind of the killer before the smoke has left the scene of the crime. I just need the threat neutralized and that loved one home safe every day. And just having teachers carrying guns concealed during their professional business makes the chances of a safe day at school much more of a reality.
Vote not only NO on the Butler County Safety Levy, but………………………….HELL NO!

Rich Hoffman

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