“It was an attempted coup that happened that day.”

— Aquilino Gonell, U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant partial testimony before the January 6th Select Committee, about the 2021 domestic terrorist attacks upon our nation’s government at the U.S. Capitol.

In their testimony today, Tuesday, 27 July 2021, the U.S. Capitol police have made NO MISTAKE describing what the Trump supporters are who attacked our U.S. Congress at the Capitol Building that day —

TERRORISTS.

The only mistake that the U.S. Capitol Police made that day, is that…

Gun Control Now A Matter Of National Security

Why Gun Control Is Now a Matter of National Security

Opinion
By Steven Simon, Jonathan Stevenson
04/22/2021 06:30 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/22/why-gun-control-is-now-a-matter-of-national-security-484323

Steven Simon, an International Relations Professor at Colby College, served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama administrations, including as Senior Director for Counterterrorism.

Jonathan Stevenson, a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Managing Editor of Survival, served on the National Security Council as Director for Political-Military Affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.

For all the tragic mass shooting headlines this year, the American gun control debate seems permanently stuck. Last week, nine people were killed by AR-15 fire in Indianapolis; before that, 10 died in Boulder, and eight in Atlanta. Despite the anguish over the past month — and despite a push by President Joe Biden — Congress looks unlikely to take any immediate action.

We share Biden’s view that the level of U.S. gun violence is a “national embarrassment.” But as National Security Council veterans who have specialized in counterterrorism — with direct experience involving far-right American terrorism, burgeoning jihadism, and Northern Irish extremism in the 1990s — we also see a new threat rising, one that has the potential to change the urgency of the debate: the growing, and heavily armed, American militia movement, which made a show of force on January 6.

Armed demonstrators protest outside of the Michigan State Capitol on January 17, 2021 in Lansing. – Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Increasingly, as militias acquire and stockpile weapons, they’re turning guns from a public-health concern into a threat to national security. And it’s possible that if proponents of reform — including advocacy groups, congressional leaders and Biden — began addressing it that way, they’d have a chance of energizing the debate against the National Rifle Association and its allies. Indeed, the shock of the insurrection has increased the political burdens of an NRA in internal disarray and offered a new perspective on the need for significant gun control legislation.

As America learned on January 6, anti-government militia groups are more than willing to jump walls, break doors and disrupt the underpinnings of our democracy. These groups, with transnational ties, also enjoy easy access to high-power, high-capacity, small-caliber semiautomatic weapons—many of which can be converted to fully automatic. The concern isn’t that these weapons will somehow enable militias to challenge the U.S. military on the battlefield, which they certainly will not. It is that they make mass casualty attacks against political or cultural adversaries both easy to carry out, and easy to frame as inspirational events of the kind that mobilize insurrection.

The executive orders Biden issued earlier this month imposing restrictions on gun kits and devices that turn pistols into rifles are marginal safeguards and rather thin gruel overall. But his call for reviving the federal ban on assault weapons is more promising and an acknowledgment that serious action is required. An important additional measure would be more rigorous required background checks. At least one key Republican senator, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, has expressed openness to working with Biden on a gun bill.

Generating bipartisan consensus for an effective crackdown on firearms will always be difficult. While gun control is now unlikely to lose existing supporters, it is also unlikely to win many new ones. But reframing the issue as a national security imperative could galvanize passive backers now focused by the assault on the Capitol on maintaining political stability in the United States. A plausible objective would be to

Roy Moore: Threat, Or Savior? Examine his history to see!

First of all, let me state for the record: I am no fan of Roy Moore, nor have I ever been. So  if you’re closed minded enough to shut me out at this point, it’s your loss.

As a native, and long-time (almost lifetime) Alabamian with numerous family & friends still residing there, I “have a dog in that fight,” as is said. And to be certain, I love Sweet Home. What’s NOT to like about a state with one of the nation’s most significant diversity of flora and fauna, with mountains and beaches, clean water (for the most part), and moderate climate? It’s her politicians I loathe.

Sure, whenever the word “Alabama” comes up, most folks outside the state simply roll their eyes, and shake their heads. I mean, after all, who could forget George C. Wallace who once infamously said following his 1958 gubernatorial electoral defeat, “I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.”

Who could forget the host state where horrific actions by former Governor George C. Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural infamously said “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and his notorious stand in the schoolhouse door a few months later at Foster Auditorium on the campus of the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa on June 11, 1963?

Who could forget the deaths of 4 little girls in the KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the Bus Boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, Bloody Sunday, Birmingham’s cruel Police Chief Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, high-pressure fire hoses, police dogs, and the Selma to Montgomery March?

There’s no question that it is

What is it like to be a Woman Business Owner & Inventor Terrorized & Threatened by Right Wing Extremist Gun Owners?

More power to you!

The GOP has been hijacked by extremist elements.

It’s time to put those sorry, low-life punks in prison for collusion, terrorism and anti-American activity.

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‘Smart’ Firearm Draws Wrath of the Gun Lobby

By JEREMY W. PETERS
APRIL 27, 2014

Belinda Padilla is trying to market a new .22-caliber handgun that uses a radio frequency-enabled stopwatch to identify the authorized user so no one else can fire it.
Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Belinda Padilla does not pick up unknown calls anymore, not since someone posted her cellphone number on an online forum for gun enthusiasts. A few fuming-mad voice mail messages and heavy breathers were all it took.

Then someone snapped pictures of the address where she has a P.O. box and put those online, too. In a crude, cartoonish scrawl, this person drew an arrow to the blurred image of a woman passing through the photo frame. “Belinda?” the person wrote. “Is that you?”

Her offense? Trying to market and sell a new .22-caliber handgun that uses a radio frequency-enabled stopwatch to identify the authorized user so no one else can fire it. Ms. Padilla and the manufacturer she works for, Armatix, intended to make the weapon the first “smart gun” for sale in the United States.

But shortly after Armatix went public with its plans to start selling in Southern California, Ms. Padilla, a fast-talking, hard-charging Beverly Hills businesswoman who leads the company’s fledgling American division, encountered the same uproar that has stopped gun control advocates, Congress, President Obama and lawmakers across the country as they seek to pass tougher laws and promote new technologies they contend will lead to fewer firearms deaths.

Lately, there has been little standing in the way of the muscle of the gun lobby, whose advocates recently derailed Mr. Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, a Boston doctor who has expressed alarm about the frequency of shooting deaths.

And despite support from the Obama administration and the promise of investment from Silicon Valley, guns with owner-recognition technology remain shut out of the market today.

“Right now, unfortunately, these organizations that are scaring everybody have the power,” Ms. Padilla said. “All we’re doing is providing extra levels of safety to your individual right to bear arms. And if you don’t want our gun, don’t buy it. It’s not for everyone.”

In Georgia on Wednesday, Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law a bill that allows people to carry guns in bars, government buildings and even some churches. The National Rifle Association called the measure historic.

In West Virginia, one of several

“These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror.”

At the 1964 Republican National Convention at Cow Palace in Daly City, adjacent San Francisco, CA, then-NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller was granted five minutes to address the delegates. He was booed for over 16 minutes.

At the time, the Republican party’s sweetheart was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, and the party was in jeopardy of being hijacked by subversive ideologues from the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, Communists and others whom Goldwater and the party at large refused to repudiate. Appealing to racist elements, and Southern Democrats, Goldwater later became the party’s presidential nominee, only to be resoundingly defeated  in the November General Election by incumbent LBJ – Lyndon Baines Johnson – whom had become president upon JFK’s death. Goldwater’s defeat was one of the widest margins in American political history.

Ku Klux Klansmen rally in support of Barry Goldwater, 1964.

In his later years, having resigned, then re-elected and succeeded by John McCain, Goldwater’s extremist libertarian ideals included abortion, gay rights, and anti-religious sentiment.

I wonder – to what extent have those same subversives successfully infiltrated the party, our airwaves and national governance today?

The following is the text of Governor Rockefeller’s remarks from The Rockefeller Archive Center, and are available online. See http://www.rockarch.org/inownwords/nar1964text.php.

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FOR RELEASE AT 6:00 P.M., PDT, TUESDAY, JULY 14, 1964 ROBERT L. McMANUS, PRESS SECRETARY TO THE GOVERNOR

TEXT OF REMARKS BY GOVERNOR NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER PREPARED FOR DELIVERY BEFORE THE THIRD SESSION OF THE 1964 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION IN MOVING ADOPTION OF THE AMENDMENT TO THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF EXTREMISM, COW PALACE, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA JULY 14, 1964

Mr. Chairman, fellow delegates, I move that the following language be inserted in the proposed 1964 Republican Platform