“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” —John Adams (1770)

A year ago today, we were all grieving for the families and friends of three nine-year-old children — Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney — and three adults — Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, and Mike Hill. They were murdered by an assailant who entered The Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church in America elementary school in Nashville. Many of our staff have deep ties to PCA churches, and many friends here have ties to The Covenant School.

As you recall, in this case, the 28-year-old emotionally disturbed female assailant was killed by two Nashville police officers, who did exactly what they are trained to do: Enter the building, engage the assailant, neutralize the threat.

The brave actions of these officers prevented the loss of additional lives — in stark contrast to the police response in the last high-profile school assault at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, which also involved a gender-confused assailant.

It is no coincidence that the Nashville attack came just days ahead of the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance.” Trans Vengeance is part of a larger movement advocating that “LGBTQ+ People Take Up Arms.” Predictably, however tone-deaf, another Nashville-area Trans Day of Vengeance is planned for this Easter Sunday.

Turns out that the Covenant School assailant had a “manifesto” of sorts, but homosexual advocates have successfully lobbied to have it concealed. Fact is, the delay in releasing the assailant’s writings is because she is among the Left’s prized “protected class” of gender-confused constituents. If her rantings indicate the motive for her attack was hatred for those who disagreed with her “identity” and that she targeted Christians for that reason, the Department of Justice would be obligated to classify it as a “hate crime.”

(For the record, as I have repeatedly asserted, ALL murders are hate crimes.)

However, last week, a federal judge ordered that the FBI release the documents to local officials. That being said, what we already know about her deranged rants would indicate her actions were more about self-hatred — as are many similar cases that result in “suicide by cop.”

The Covenant School attack will never be technically classified as a hate crime because the assailant and victims don’t fit the Left’s political narrative for a hate crime. Joe Biden will vigorously reject any effort by the DoJ to label this as such because that would result in immediate blowback from the leftist Rainbow Mafia.

However, Demos determined in a nanosecond which of their other favorite political agendas to shove it into.

You guessed it — their anti-Second Amendment crusade.

Before the blood of the Nashville victims had dried, Biden predictably found an open mic and called for more laws to solve the “gun problem,” demanding that Republicans in Congress join with Democrats to pass another so-called “assault weapons” ban, their boilerplate gun-confiscation scheme.

Democrat Party protagonists are masters at using the coffins of murdered children as political platforms for their gun control agenda — and using their grieving families as fodder for that agenda.

On rare occasions, as was the case at The Covenant School, when the victims are white children, that creates a more favorable opportunity for crass leftist strategists. And they took advantage of this opportunity by launching a template for “gun control” that is designed to attract emotive support from mostly wealthy white suburban women.

I outlined in great detail this “Red State Gun Control Trojan Horse,” and if you live in a conservative state, you had better read about it because your state is next.

White suburban women have been besieging the offices of Tennessee state legislators, all of them pawns of a statewide leftist gun control charade that calls itself “Voices for a Safer Tennessee.” This week, Safer TN is rallying suburban legions to Nashville to “Link Arms for Change.” The group is following Barack Obama’s “community organizing” template, forming their gun control clubs in counties across the state.

The “Safer TN” subterfuge is largely organized and funded by wealthy white suburban folks and a few celebrities, and it promotes itself as “nonpartisan” to a fault, raising the specter of a political ruse. Indeed, it has sucked some “Republican” folks down its rat hole.

Despite its “nonpartisan” self-promotion, this leftist group is advocating a very partisan agenda. Most of its local groups are populated by angry leftist women, and somewhere behind the façade, there are some radical leftist rats.

The leftist in charge of the group is Claudia Huskey, who was the Democrat campaign manager for the disgraced former Nashville mayor, Megan Barry. Before that, she was director of scheduling for ultra-leftist Al Gore and had a long record of working for Demos before Gore.

Huskey is the definition of “partisan” and is a well-heeled fundraiser who claims she has already raised more than $600,000 for their political agenda.

“Safer TN” is promoting three legislative initiatives, all nicely packaged to seem benign, which is how the group has been able to dupe a few unsuspecting Republicans into joining regional fundraising host committees. But there is nothing benign about its partisan agenda, and “members” of the group across the state are highly partisan. These activists will be used to rally support against every Republican candidate in Tennessee for years.

The first two initiatives involve perennial issues — an effort to implement so-called “red flag” laws to confiscate firearms under the umbrella of “temporary transfer” language, and the implementation of more stringent “background checks.”

But the third and most perilous of those initiatives is an effort to criminalize victims of crime in the name of “responsible firearms ownership.” They want legislation to make you a criminal if your property, in this case, a firearm, is stolen from your vehicle — and this will be expanded to include firearms stolen from your home. Not only do they want a law-abiding citizen to be held criminally liable for the unlawful acts of criminals, but by extension, this would open a wide door to civil liability against anyone who has a firearm stolen.

Consistent with Safer TN’s efforts to promote its agenda as “benign,” it has also pushed out “polling” that it claims indicates wide support for its initiatives. However, that outcome-based polling uses questions crafted to get the answers it wants. Of course, mindless Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes have been dutifully pushing pollaganda — using polls as propaganda for a political agenda.

Here is the bottom line: The murder of a family member or friend is a burden that remains with us for life. That grief has been experienced by hundreds of thousands of Americans.

But the politically inconvenient truth is that a grossly disproportionate number of those victims are black men, women, and children. That is a reality check that Democrats never mention — but if they actually really believed that black lives matter, it would be their highest priority.

That gross racial discrepancy is not about “gun violence” but about a culture of violence Democrats continue to perpetuate with policies that have, generationally, resulted in broken families — the number one indicator for violence — and that, in effect, keep their constituents enslaved on Demo urban poverty plantations.

If the Democrat objective in Tennessee, and any other state, is really to reduce violence, then that legislative conversation should start with serious consideration of the culture from which murderous thugs arise. But Democrats will vigorously avoid any such discussion because responsibility for that violence will fall at their feet. Likewise, the so-called Safer TN groups also avoid that conversation because their agenda is gun confiscation. Moreover, using the Demo model, they disgracefully use the families of victims as human shields against criticism of their political agenda.

Consequently, Republicans should change the subject from emotive solutions of rare but tragic mass murders to the causal factors associated with the vast majority of murders.

No person is more despicable than one who would take the life of a child.

And no group is more contemptible than those that predate on the grief and agony of the families of murdered children, using them as political props.

Again, I recommend you read “The Left’s Red State Gun Control Trojan Horse” because your state is next.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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NOTES:

The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

What follows are a few key notes that all defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate, in order to refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

While some of this data is based on annual findings, most of that data does not vary significantly year over year.

FOOTNOTE 1: Regarding so-called “gun violence,” there were approximately 19,600 homicides involving firearms in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state. Fortunately, there are indications that homicides may be declining after the significant surge of violence unleashed by Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020. The 2022 homicide rate was 30% higher than in 2019.

The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded as “gun violence,” and they focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile so-called “mass shootings” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed in Democrat-controlled urban centers.

In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers — mostly thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence and indoctrinated with mass-media glorification of violence — it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not 10 times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their decaying urban poverty plantations, because they want to avoid the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. In fact, black people (13% of the population), are 12 times more likely to be murdered, per capita, than white people (62% of the population).

That gross racial disparity in murder rates isn’t useful for the gun control narrative Democrats invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, who form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.

FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding so-called “mass shootings,” for the record, murders of multiple people by one assailant are very rare in our nation of 335 million people. Less than 1% of all murders nationwide are classified as “mass shootings” and high-profile attacks, such as the 2017 mass murder in Las Vegas, are extremely rare.

The FBI defines “active shooter incidents” as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2022, the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020 when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded).

A broader record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and they range between 20 and 40 incidents. But notably, over the last 30 years, the number of black mass assailants is almost as high as the number of white assailants.

Democrats focus on these rare instances of multiple murders because these high-profile tragedies are political fodder to foment fear — most notably when they can toss out their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug-associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.

The fear and angst Demos intentionally propagate are taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers, in particular, is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fabricated fear Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.

(Notably, the deadliest school assault in American history did not involve a firearm. A sociopathic school board member in Bath, Michigan detonated a bomb outside an elementary school, murdering 38 children and six adults.)

FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding what Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists ubiquitously and falsely label “assault weapons,” an actual assault weapon, commonly known as a “machine gun,” is select-fire and can rapidly cycle rounds in fully automatic sequence. Very few select-fire weapons are in civilian hands, and only then subject to stringent licensing requirements.

In fact, civilian firearms in common use, like the AR-15 and other semiautomatic sporting and hunting rifles, are not “assault rifles.”

For much the same reason the Demo/Media talkingheads focus only on rare high-profile “mass shootings” to generate fear and angst, they also call semi-automatic rifles sometimes used in those attacks, “assault weapons.” Predictably, Demos then call for what Hillary Clinton framed decades ago as “common sense gun laws,” inevitably followed by calls for an “assault weapons ban.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton banned the sale of “military-style assault weapons,” but that ban was not renewed 10 years later because it was determined the ban had no effect on crime reduction. According to Rand Research, “We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.”

The fact is, rifles and shotguns combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their “assault weapon ban” political agenda.

Both the Clintons were prolific prevaricators, masterful obfuscators of the truth. And Joe Biden has followed their template, establishing himself as the standard bearer of the “lying dog-faced pony soldier” cavalry.

FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, almost 60% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drug or alcohol abuse. But the big numbers promoted in “gun violence” reports do not distinguish between murder and suicide, thus implying that homicide rates are much higher. And does this mean that Demo support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control?

FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol versus firearm deaths, if Democrats are serious about protecting Americans, they should outlaw alcohol. Alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 178,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year — that’s NINE times the number of homicides associated with firearms. Drunk drivers are responsible for 37 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is a key factor in at least 30% of homicides where the assailant uses a firearm. (Include drug dealing or use as a factor and that number jumps to about 60%.)

Of course, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws.

BOTTOM LINE: Let me restate this point — only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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