Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon is already facing the distinct possibility of a recall election over his soft-on-crime policies, and I doubt this is going to be helpful to his defense. The liberal prosecutor has declined to file felony charges against the man who assaulted comedian Dave Chappelle during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl earlier this week after concluding that the actions did not rise to the level of a felony offense.
Isaiah Lee, 23, was charged instead by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office with single misdemeanor counts of battery, possession of a weapon with intent to assault, unauthorized access to the stage area during a performance and commission of an act that delays an event or interferes with a performer.
“This alleged attack has got to have consequences,” City Attorney Mike Feuer said in a video statement announcing the charges.
Feuer — a candidate for Los Angeles mayor — added, “My office takes protecting public safety extremely seriously and we are going to vigorously prosecute this case.”
I’m sure that Feuer, who’s a longtime anti-gun activist, will be happy to soak up the press attention that he’ll get for prosecuting Lee, who allegedly had a replica handgun that disguised a knife blade in his hand as he rushed the stage and tackled Chappelle on Tuesday evening. But should his office really be the one to handle this case? The misdemeanor charges aren’t likely to result in much time behind bars if Lee is convicted, and honestly, if his victim weren’t a celebrity the odds of him avoiding jail entirely would be in his favor.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Gascon’s office declined to pursue felony charges because while Lee had a weapon on him, he never had the chance to use it on his target, and since Chappelle wasn’t injured, the crime didn’t rise to the level of a felony assault with a deadly weapon regardless of Lee’s intentions.
This is a pretty high-profile example of Gascon’s alleged leniency towards criminal defendants, and it comes as the organizers of the recall campaign against the prosecutor announced they’ve hit a milestone in their efforts to gather enough signatures to get the recall on the ballot this fall.
Today, the Recall DA George Gascon campaign announced it has collected over 400,000 signatures as of May 1st, with thousands more being turned in daily. The recall campaign has now raised over $6 million to support the effort. To get the recall on the ballot, the campaign must collect 566,857 signatures from registered Los Angeles County voters (10% of the total current registered voters). The deadline for submission to the Registrar is July 6, 2022. “We are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel – there is a legitimate pathway to qualifying the recall by the July 6th deadline if we do not let up.”
The recall campaign might want canvass for signatures outside some of the comedy clubs in L.A. and ask patrons, employees, and comedians to sign on after Gascon’s decision, because while it might be legally defensible, it’s likely to be pretty unpopular at a time when crime continues to surge in Los Angeles and many residents say they feel increasingly unsafe.
Tombstone, AZ--(Ammoland.com)- On May 2, 2022, the New York Attorney General’s Office filed its Second Amended Complaint against the National Rifle Association.
Not only the Association but its Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre, Secretary, and General Counsel John Frazer, Former Treasurer and CFO Wilson “Woody” Philips, and Former Deputy CEO Josh Powell.
As with the original complaint and the previous amended complaint, this one is full of very specific, largely verifiable, and utterly damning charges against NRA’s top officers and executives. Many of the previous accusations have been admitted to by some of the various parties, while Woody Phillips has refused to answer most questions, based on his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
It needs to be understood that LaPierre and the others are not named in the suit based on their positions within the NRA, as when someone sues a state and names the Attorney General or the governor as a representative of the state. The four named defendants were named for specific actions each is accused of, and the NRA itself is named for failing to stop them. With that in mind, legal experts said early on that the NRA’s best defense against the suit would be to adopt the following policies:
Remove the named defendants from any position of power within the Association – particularly any position that would allow any of them to have any oversight or influence over the Association’s legal strategy in battling the suit.
Initiate a thorough internal investigation by a Board-appointed committee with the power to get answers to its questions.
Adopt a policy of full cooperation and transparency working with state regulators.
Institute strict policy and oversight rules to correct and avoid future problems, that would be backed up by consequential enforcement.
Plead victim status to the court, declaring that, if the named defendants (or others) abused their positions, then the NRA was the victim, not the perpetrator, and therefore should not be penalized.
A genuine response to the allegations would go a long way toward blunting the very real political motivations involved in the suit. New York Attorney General Letitia James is a highly motivated political actor, and she has not been shy about expressing her animosity toward the NRA, its mission, and its members. The Association should deal cautiously with her office, and request that the judge make sure that this personal and political bias doesn’t taint the case or cause undue injury to the Association.
This animosity on the part of AG James has actually been one of the strongest arguments from defenders and apologists of Wayne LaPierre. They point to James’s hatred of the NRA, and her political ambitions, and conclude that the whole case is just trumped-up lies and political theater.
The problem with that assertion is that LaPierre himself has admitted under oath that most of the charges against him are true.
He admits to billing the NRA for personal travel for himself and his family. He admits to improperly accepting gifts from major vendors, and awarding those same vendors multi-million-dollar contracts with no competitive bidding. He admits to giving multi-million-dollar severance packages to retiring and even fired employees, usually in exchange for them signing a strict nondisclosure agreement about NRA activities.
And he admits to giving contracts to family members and former staffers, often with little or no performance requirement attached. He also admits to doing all of this without clearing it, or even reporting it, through or to, the NRA Board, as required by state law and NRA policy.
His main defense in all of this, is to claim that either, it wasn’t improper, he didn’t know it was improper, and/or he didn’t know what other people were doing. Not a very impressive defense from a CEO who’s being paid in excess of $1.6 million per year.
One is reminded of Bart Simpson’s all-purpose defense: “Nobody saw me! I wasn’t there! You can’t prove a thing!”
So the big question is: Why is Wayne LaPierre still controlling the NRA?
Why would any organization facing existential threats – most of those threats based on accusations of misconduct and dereliction on the part of its chief executive – allow that executive to continue to hold inordinate sway over the organization? And why would any organization facing this kind of turmoil in its executive offices allow that same executive to retain control over the legal strategy of the organization in addressing the charges?
An equally perplexing question, is why the Board has so far not even attempted to rein in its rogue executives?
As noted above, NY AG Letitia James hates the NRA and all it stands for, and she wants to see it destroyed. The judge in the case has already taken dissolution of the Association off the table as a potential punishment, should the AG win her case. Her latest Amended Complaint focuses less on the NRA as a target, and more on the officers and directors – as it should – with the complaint calling for severe financial penalties and restitution payments from the Association’s wayward “leaders.” The complaint calls for the removal of LaPierre and his followers, but only as part of the penalty phase of the trial. That isn’t going to happen until sometime next year.
Meanwhile, LaPierre and company remain in control of the Associations resources, and most importantly, in control of its legal strategy – which amounts to shoveling millions of dollars into the pockets of New York lawyer William Brewer, who was originally hired by LaPierre to head off a threatened lawsuit from the NY AG back in 2018. Obviously Brewer failed in that mission, but he’s been very successful at extracting cash from the Association.
Brewer has reportedly been drawing over $2 million per month, averaging around $30 million per year, for the past 3 years. At the same time, NRA membership numbers have been in a nosedive, fundraising has collapsed, and the Association has cut practically all of its core programs to the bone.
If LaPierre and his enablers were to be removed from power now, the Association might do what they should have done from the beginning: Claim victim status and reorganize, without the crippling payments to the Brewer law firm. With that, they should be able to start recovering membership and see improvements in their fundraising, not to mention begin to recover the trust of its members. But that would not be seen as a good thing by Letitia James. Those steep legal bills, along with the potential of a court-mandated lawsuit against the NRA from the NRA Foundation, if things go as expected in a lawsuit filed by the AG of Washington DC, could totally bankrupt the NRA, and that would be a big win for Letitia James.
I’m not an attorney, but I’ve spoken with knowledgeable attorneys, and they keep coming back to the need for the NRA to distance itself from the accused “leaders,” even if only with temporary furloughs or compartmentalizing them away from certain aspects of the Association, particularly the legal strategy. They have also suggested that the NY AG could – and should – force this action by filing a request for partial summary judgment based on the admissions already submitted by LaPierre and some of his supporters. LaPierre has admitted to a variety of offenses, any one of which would fully justify his removal from office. Other NRA “leaders” have also admitted to various transgressions and failures in their fiduciary duties. With those admissions, it should not be difficult to convince the judge to remove LaPierre and the offending officers on the basis that they are using the NRA’s resources to protect LaPierre and themselves, rather than fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to the NRA and its members.
Wayne LaPierre, along with NRA President Charles Cotton, 1st VP Willes Lee, and 2nd VP David Coy, should be the subjects of a motion pointing out that they have all admitted to actions that should disqualify them from participating in the management of the Association, and especially anything to do with setting legal strategy.
If protecting the assets and interests of the Association’s members is of any concern at all to the attorneys in the NY AG’s Office – as the law states are their primary obligation – then they would have such a motion filed within days.
While we would hope that such a motion would be filed and addressed by the court prior to the Members’ Meeting in Houston on May 28, 2022, that seems unlikely, so NRA members must press the attack from different directions. The primary tactic must be to pressure NRA Directors to do what they should have done at least three years ago: Remove Wayne LaPierre. The best opportunity for the Board to take this action will be at the Board meeting on Monday following the Members’ Meeting. At that time, it will only take a simple majority of Directors to elect new leadership.
New NRA Leadership ~ LTC Allen West?
A group of concerned NRA members, including former and current members of the Board of Directors, want to draft former Director, LTC Allen West to run for the Executive Vice President position at the meeting in Houston. West has the support of many and could work with reformers to clean up the NRA and get it back on the right track, and he has a record of integrity and effectiveness.
Along with electing LTC West to the position of Executive Vice President, the Board needs to elect a slate of officers to back West in his reform efforts, and to lead the NRA’s legal strategy going forward. All of this makes it absolutely critical that every NRA Director attend the meetings in Houston, and be prepared to stand up for the membership. It’s equally critical that NRA members attend the Members’ Meeting on Saturday the 28th, 2022, to call out the lies and corruption, and to put some starch into the backs of the Directors. We also have a campaign underway to recruit, nominate, and elect a slate of reform candidates for the Board of Directors in the 2023 election.
Much more information about all of this is posted on our website, www.FirearmsCoalition.org, with both the first and second Amended Complaints, along with the Responses to the first one from LaPierre and the NRA. It’s a lot to digest, but it’s critical reading for anyone concerned about the future of the NRA.
I hope to see you in Houston.
NYS Second Amended Complaint against the National Rifle Association, May 2022
2020 People of the State of NY v NRA & Co May 2022 Amended
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona, and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
Navy sailors detail difficult working conditions after string of suicides
The USS George Washington had at least five shipmates die by suicide in the last year. Sailors detailed their struggles and the working conditions onboard.
Hannah Crisostomo attempted suicide when she was a sailor in the Navy.Alex Welsh for NBC News
As her one-year anniversary with the Navy approached last May, Hannah Crisostomo swallowed 196 pain relievers. Her organs shut down. Her brain swelled during multiple seizures and she stopped breathing.
She was on life support for eight days, during which time doctors had warned her family that she may never regain normal brain functions. When Crisostomo woke up, she immediately wondered why she was still alive. Her thoughts grew more despairing during the next few weeks in the hospital and then in the Navy’s psychiatric ward.
“If they keep me in the Navy, and they put me back in the same situation, I’m going to kill myself,” she recalled thinking, “and I’m going to be successful the next time.”
That spring, Crisostomo, an aviation boatswain’s mate handler on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, had been moved to night-shift repair duties. Amid disorganization on the ship during an extensive overhaul, Crisostomo said she was constantly berated for things out of her control.
Hannah Crisostomo holds her Navy portrait.Alex Welsh for NBC News
At the time, she was dealing with some family issues. She also said bipolar disorder that went undiagnosed had played a role in her decision-making. But Crisostomo, now 20, said 95 percent of the reason she tried to kill herself was work-related.
“The command pushes you to that point,” she said, adding that she had tried to get help but was belittled instead. And unlike a traditional corporate employee, she could not simply quit because she had signed a five-year contract.
“There is no putting in your two-week notice and getting out,” Crisostomo said.
Crisostomo and several other George Washington sailors said their struggles were directly related to a culture where seeking help is not met with the necessary resources, as well as nearly uninhabitable living conditions aboard the ship, including constant construction noise that made sleeping impossible and a lack of hot water and electricity.
On April 15, Master-at-Arms Seaman Recruit Xavier Hunter Sandor died by suicide onboard the George Washington, according to the Navy and the state chief medical examiner’s office. He had been working on the warship for about three months, his family said.
Xavier Hunter Sandor.Courtesy John Sandor
His death came five days after Natasha Huffman, an interior communications electrician, died by suicide off-base in Hampton, officials said.
The day before, Retail Services Specialist 3rd Class Mika’il Rayshawn Sharp also died by suicide off-base in Portsmouth, said his mother, Natalie Jefferson.
“Three people don’t just decide to kill themselves in a span of days for nothing,” said Crisostomo, who left the Navy in October 2021, on an honorable discharge with a medical condition following her suicide attempt.
In a statement, the Navy said, in part, that it was a “resilient force,” but “not immune from the same challenges that affect the nation that we serve.”
“We remain committed to ensuring our carriers are manned, trained and equipped to optimal levels including embedded mental health providers,” said Rear Adm. John F. Meier, the commander of Naval Air Force Atlantic.
Mika’il Rayshawn Sharp.U.S. Navy
Poor working conditions, high stress, long hours
Several sailors said poor working conditions were exacerbated by the fact that since 2017, the USS George Washington, one of the world’s largest warships, has been docked at the Newport News Shipyard in Virginia, where it’s undergoing a multiyear overhaul. Such an overhaul is done once during a carrier’s 50-year service life, the Navy said, and it includes significant repairs and upgrades, and the refueling of the ship’s two nuclear reactors.
While most of the roughly 2,700 sailors go home after their shifts, hundreds who live out of state or don’t have off-site housing stay on the George Washington, where they endure nearly uninhabitable conditions, according to a sailor, who still works on the warship and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
Constant construction made it difficult for sailors to fall asleep after long shifts. So some sailors, including Xavier Sandor, slept in their cars, according to Sandor’s shipmates and his father.
“They’re living in an active construction site, and half the boat is not livable at all,” the sailor said. “They don’t care about you trying to sleep.”
When he wasn’t working 12-hour night shifts on the George Washington, Sandor stayed in his car, where he kept a thick blanket and his clothes, according to his father, John Sandor.
During these overhauls, according to several sailors, most crew members are relegated to clean-up and repair tasks rather than the jobs they enlisted in the Navy to do. In her role, Crisostomo was originally supposed to help direct aircraft on the vessel. But because the ship was docked, she spent most of her workdays painting and doing other handiwork.
“We’re glorified janitors,” she said.
A second sailor who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation said he spent nearly two years sitting on a bucket with a fire extinguisher, watching other sailors weld, instead of directing aircraft on the carrier. That sailor, who was reassigned off the George Washington less than a year ago because of an injury, said he felt depressed during his time on the warship and lost over 80 pounds.
The USS George Washington during its mission in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in 2017.USS George H.W. Bush via Getty Images
“It’s a lot of stress and pressure, especially for people straight out of boot camp,” he said. “It’s mentally scarring to go through stuff like this.”
In a recent address to the George Washington crew, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith, the service’s senior enlisted leader, told crew members that he knew their working conditions during the overhaul were “not pleasant” or easy, and he acknowledged there was a suicide problem.
“Beating suicide is like beating cancer,” he said, according to a transcript of the address, released Monday by the Navy. “There are many different causes, many different reasons.”
Smith disagreed when a sailor said living standards on the ship were not “necessarily up to par.” He said that the sailors get to go home most nights and that they were not “sleeping in a foxhole like a Marine might be doing.”
“I think we probably could have done better to manage your expectations coming in here,” Smith said. “I hear your concerns and you should always raise them, but you have to do so with reasonable expectations.”
He said the overhaul should be complete in less than a year.
In a statement to NBC News, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Myers, a Navy spokesman, said a “certain number” of sailors have to stay on the ship to run essential equipment, maintain fire and flooding watches, and secure the vessel. The Navy has directed leaders on the ship to identify sailors who could benefit from morale and personal well-being programs, Myers said.
Nautica Robinson, 23, a former fire controlman who worked with Huffman on the George Washington, agreed that overhaul periods affect workloads, increase stress and cause sailors to work longer and harder to make up for schedule delays that are out of their control, as well as keep them from being deployed at sea. But she said the root of the problem is not the shipyard, or the ship itself, but “toxic leadership” on the George Washington.
“They just threw us back in the environment, like our attempted suicides didn’t happen,” Robinson said. “The things that pushed those sailors overboard didn’t exist.”
When Crisostomo first had suicidal thoughts about half a year into her tenure, she said she sought help from a superior. But Crisostomo said she was told she had to finish her work and seek help on her own time. Crisostomo worked night shifts, so by the time she had finished her duties, she said there was no one around to ask.
“Being in the Navy was all I ever wanted,” said Crisostomo, who enlisted when she was 17. “I wanted to be part of something big to help the country. I got robbed of that, and I didn’t deserve it.”
Hannah Crisostomo outside her home in Menifee, Calif. Alex Welsh for NBC News
A cluster of suicides, a search for answers
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The deaths have left each of the families searching for answers.
During daily phone conversations with his father from his car, Xavier Sandor frequently expressed his frustrations with living and working conditions.
“He always said it sucked, and I’d always say to ask for help,” John Sandor said. “He’d say, ‘Dad, they don’t give a f—. They don’t care.’ That was always his response to me.”
Every other weekend, Xavier Sandor would drive eight hours to his family’s home in Shelton, Connecticut, and he never wanted to leave when he got there, his father said. Nothing else but his job was upsetting him.
“He was such a happy, proud person,” John Sandor said. “What else could it be?”
John Sandor said he knew the conditions on the ship were “bad” but not to the full extent. It never crossed his mind that his son was considering suicide.
“If I would have known that, I could have changed it somehow,” he said. “That’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Jefferson, who lived with Sharp in Norfolk, Virginia, also said she didn’t think she had any reason to worry about her son’s mental health. She said Sharp, 23, had just gotten married last year and had plans to buy a house and start having children with his wife, whom he was “over the moon” about.
“He was the life of the party,” Jefferson said. “He never showed his pain.”
A sailor who was close friends with Huffman said she knew she had been suffering.
“We talked about it. She tried to get help,” the sailor said.
“She wasn’t getting any assistance from the Navy, as much as she tried,” the sailor added. “And then that’s when we got the phone call that she wasn’t with us anymore.”
Robinson, 23, said she had bonded with Huffman over their shared struggles, just before Robinson left the Navy this February following her own suicide attempt.
“She said it was draining, it’s tiring,” Robinson recalled of her last conversation with Huffman. “How going to the psych ward helped, but being sent back to the same place in the George Washington, we were both talking about that.”
“They really, really failed her,” Robinson added.
Besides Crisostomo and Robinson, two other current and former USS George Washington sailors told NBC News that they have either attempted suicide themselves, know shipmates who have, or have had suicidal ideations directly related to an increasingly grueling work environment.
Nautica Robinson while serving in the Navy.Courtesy Nautica Robinson
Before Robinson’s suicide attempt in May 2021, she said she had been grappling with mounting pressures and toxicity at work, which got worse after she said she was sexually abused by another sailor off-base in 2020.
Robinson said she repeatedly asked for better mental-health support from her superiors on the aircraft carrier, which she had served on since 2019. But she said she received little help and even less empathy.
She was hospitalized for her suicide attempt at the same time Crisostomo was on life support for her’s.
“It’s life-draining,” Robinson said. “It’s truly sad to see that the place you work for can take so much of you.”
At a news briefing on April 21, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby cautioned against “jumping to conclusions” about what might have led those sailors to take their own lives.
All three sailors had worked in different departments and didn’t appear to be in the same social groups, according to the Navy and some who had worked with them.
That decreases the likelihood that the cluster was due to a social contagion effect that occasionally occurs in tight-knit social groups, said Craig Bryan, a clinical psychologist and Air Force veteran, who specializes in suicide in the military.
Hannah Crisostomo’s boots from her time in the Navy.Alex Welsh for NBC News
While it increases the possibility that something is happening on the ship that is increasing the risk of suicide for all on board, it doesn’t yet rule out the chance that the deaths are coincidences, Bryan added.
“The question becomes what’s going on in the group?” he said.
More work to be done
After the three suicides this month, the Navy said it sent a special 13-person psychiatric rapid intervention team to counsel those serving on the George Washington from April 16 to April 19. Sailors on the ship are currently being provided tele-mental health opportunities and expedited appointments for mental health referrals, according to the Navy.
Before then, the sailors said there had only been one psychologist on the ship to serve roughly 2,700 people. The Navy said while there is one psychologist, there are also three chaplains, two licensed clinical social workers, and others who are equipped to handle suicide interventions onboard.
When asked about mental-health resources, Smith told sailors that the Navy would put more chaplains on smaller ships for the first time, but that it’s not easy to hire more psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health care workers, because they’re not “out there in abundance.”
“You can’t just snap your fingers and grow a psychiatrist,” he said, adding that the sailors should be “each other’s counselors.”
Myers said a larger Navy team is being built to assess quality-of-life conditions on aircraft carriers undergoing overhauls.
“Their recommendations will inform potential future action, identify areas for improvements, and propose mitigation strategies to optimize [quality of life],” he said.
In 2020, the most recent year for which full data is available, 580 military members died by suicide, a 16 percent increase from 2019, when 498 died by suicide, according to the Defense Department. Nineteen out of every 100,000 sailors died by suicide in 2020, compared to members of the Army, which had the highest rate, at about 36 per 100,000, Pentagon statistics show.
“Clearly, we have more work to do, and we know that,” Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, recently told reporters. “We don’t want to see any sailor harmed or hurt or lose their life, period, regardless of what the cause is. But I can tell you that the Navy has taken this very seriously.”
Crisostomo, Robinson and the other sailors disagree. They said they shared their experiences in the hopes that leaders would make a real change, especially as, one of the sailors said, suicide becomes “a normal thing” on the George Washington.
Today, Crisostomo has nearly made a full physical recovery. In Menifee, California, she is now attending college for the first time and plans to study psychology, partially because of what she experienced.
“Ever since I got out of the military, my mental health has been extremely better,” she said. “I can say that I am happier.”
——————————————————————————–
Why aren’t these folks in a barracks instead of being on board? This sounds a lot like some poor leadership to me! Grumpy
Recently released audio of phone calls with a Santa Fe detective reveals actor Alec Baldwin complained about how cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’ shooting on the set of Rust cost him jobs. Baldwin also badgered police to grill the film crew over a box of missing bullets.
The call with Detective Alexandra Hancock in the week after the fatal shooting of Hutchins shows Baldwin telling the detective that the incident has cost him jobs, and has been “really tough.”
“You know what’s really tough for me, is I have six kids,” Baldwin is heard saying. “We had to tell my older daughter today what happened, and she started to cry. She said, ‘I’m going to go to school, and everyone’s going to make fun of me.’ My eight-year-old.”
“Half the jobs I had lined up between now and the second half of the year, they fired me,” the actor added. “They didn’t want me to come.”
Watch Below:
Elsewhere in the audio, Baldwin is heard badgering Hancock to find a “missing” box of 45 Long Colts that he said mysteriously “disappeared and reappeared,” and begging the detective to “indulge” him on how a live round ended up in his gun.
“They were missing a single box of 45 Long Colts,” he said. “That box disappeared. It reappeared, I said, ‘What was the length of time it was gone?’ She said, ‘I don’t remember.’”
Alec Baldwin seen here in his Rust movie wardrobe. (Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office)
Baldwin went on to say that while he doesn’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, he wonders if “someone maybe tampered with this.”
The actor then implored the detective to grill Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.
“I’m dying to find out from Hannah — I don’t want to abuse Hannah or make her feel bad — but what happened to that box of bullets?” he said. “Where did that box, when it disappeared, what date did it disappear? How long did it disappear for? When it came back, where did you find it?”
“I’m just begging you to indulge me,” Baldwin continued. “I’m begging you to understand my intention here, which is how — what happened to that box of 45 Long Colts?”
Evidence in the Rust shooting. (Photo: Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office)
Baldwin continued to entertain the conspiracy, suggesting that someone on set who harbored a “malignant attitude” toward him could have “had something out” for him.
Other recently released footage shows the moment Baldwin learned Hutchins had died in a hospital after he accidentally shot her on the film set. In the video, the actor can be seen holding his hand over his mouth and softly uttering the word “no” as the news was delivered.
Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office
Meanwhile, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has said that “concerning” information has been found on text messages during the investigation into the fatal shooting. Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza has also warned that no one is “off the hook” for the October 21 fatal shooting Hutchins.
Biden’s plan is the same as ever: gun control. IMG NRA-ILA
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- From time to time, the topic comes up in which we are tasked with deciding if a Democrat deserves our vote based primarily on their support of the 2nd Amendment. I was in a discussion about this topic and realized that there’s a major problem with this.
Often, we hear Democrats announce that they are “gun-owners” and/or “hunters” prior to some sort of anti-gun statement. I have my doubts as to whether their “gun ownership” amounts to much more than a dusty old war rifle that grandpa left in the attic and their implication to be “one of us” is often a tactic used to gain some sort of “authority” in a gun-control debate, but let’s look at this from a practical perspective.
If I were to support a Democrat who claims to be “pro-gun,” (whether that be a Senator, Representative or even the President,) what other policies am I inadvertently supporting, and how high on the hierarchical scale of values are gun rights for this person?
Show me a Democrat who claims they don’t support universal background checks, red flag laws, magazine capacity restrictions, waiting periods, 21-year-old age requirements, semi-automatic rifle bans, bump-stock bans, suppressor bans, forced reset trigger bans & suing manufacturers out of business, and I will show you a liar.
What makes them a Democrat? Isn’t the very reason they vote on the left, to support the policies of those on the left? How many more left-wing policies do you want your children and grandchildren to be burdened with? Is it likely that they will actually go against their party on gun rights when you need them to? Have you ever seen that happen, and in the rare case it might, where else are they compromising your values? Some strong supporters of the 2nd Amendment are willing to support a Democrat who claims to support gun rights. Is this because they believe we are converting them? Good luck with that. The real question is, what else are we getting in that dysfunctional social package?
In an announcement on April, 11, 2022, on “ghost guns,” Joe Biden revealed this exact hypocrisy when he called firearms dealers “merchants of death,” yelled and screamed about “weapons of war” and then went on to say, “and by the way. It’s gonna sound bizarre. I support the 2nd Amendment.”
When we support a so-called “pro 2nd Amendment Democrat,” are we also supporting their position on open borders, abortion, CRT, bisexual bathrooms, “sex-ed” for Kindergarteners, the termination of oil drilling in America, the green new deal, ESG, the early release of prisoners, bail reform, never-ending medical mandates, the defunding of our police departments, welfare dependency and the overall forfeiture of our basic ability to make our own decisions? Because if so, I’m out.
So why are any of us being asked to put at risk, and most likely compromise, traditional American values and Conservative beliefs, just to get a “2A-friendly” vote in Congress by some politician who claims to support our gun rights? (Which by the way, probably wouldn’t happen when it comes down to actual voting behavior due to massive Congressional pressure from their peers.) Could it be Democrats recognize how strong the 2nd Amendment is and how protective of it, most Americans are? Could presenting a so-called “pro-gun Democrat,” be a way of coercing Republicans into unwittingly compromising at the voting booth with the hopes of saving our 2nd Amendment?
Sorry. The 2nd Amendment is not up for debate or compromise.
When I hear people suggesting that I should support a Democrat because they are “pro-gun,” I smell a rat. I have a problem trusting most Republicans with the 2nd Amendment. Now you’re asking me to vote for a Democrat? I don’t think so.
Dan Wos is available for Press Commentary. For more information contact PR HERE
Dan Wos is a nationally recognized 2nd Amendment advocate and Author of the “GOOD GUN BAD GUY” series. He speaks at events, is a contributing writer for many publications, and can be found on radio stations across the country. Dan has been a guest on the Sean Hannity Show, NRATV, and several others. Speaking on behalf of gun-rights, Dan exposes the strategies of the anti-gun crowd and explains their mission to disarm law-abiding American gun-owners
Yeah I know as its RACIST! Grumpy
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