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I did some research and found that by using Google, the following results were returned:

• “common sense gun laws” yields 16,700,000 results
• “common sense gun control bill” yields 28,700,000 results
• “common sense gun control” yields 30,000,000 results
• “common sense gun control measures” yields 37,100,000 results
• “common sense gun” yields 55,700,000 results

Clearly, the broadcast mantra is restrictive gun laws are “common sense”, no?  Millions and millions of already-published works populate the Internet, as evidenced by my searching.  Does anyone find this strange?  Newspeak, anyone?

In the case of Colorado, I’ll debunk some of our “common sense” laws, recently signed into law by governor Hickenlooper.  Here are the bills signed into law (so far):

1. HB 1224: Limits ammunition magazines to 15 rounds
2. HB 1228: Charges gun buyers for the cost of the checks
3. HB 1229: Expands background checks for gun purchases

The first problem I’ll address here is that there is no available mechanism for a private seller to perform a state-sanctioned background check on anyone else.  This effectively shuts down all private sales of guns—at least in the short-term.  Some people argue that’s OK, since perhaps it doesn’t affect them, but it’s a serious blow to the common liberties we’ve enjoyed up to this point.  If the state of Colorado truly wanted to perform background checks for private sales—instead of shutting down sales—they would have provided a web-based site to perform such a thing (or a similar equivalent).  People could pay by credit card, do a check, print a certification of that check, etc.

My argument is that because no service is available, the true intent of this law was to shut down private sales entirely, rather than perform criminal background checks.  Besides, a criminal is willing to use other means get firearms for their crimes by jumping the border to make a legal purchase, stealing them, etc.  This law will hardly affect criminals.

You might argue that background checks are done currently at gun stores, but again, the overhead/infrastructure to set that up is ambiguous, and there are no guarantees that a private citizen/seller can ever have access to such things.  Besides, these checks—at gun shops—were taking almost a week only a couple of months ago.

And then there is the magazine limit law.  “Who really needs more than 15 rounds for a magazine?” they say.  Or sometimes this is likened to how bad a shot one must be to hunt with such a large magazine—and miss.  (Never mind that hunting already has laws that govern magazine capacities, for sportsmanship reasons.)  So the issue is often argued on the basis of proven need.  Out of every possible item a person can own, the issue of demonstrated need is now thrown in and applied only in the realm of firearms.  A genuine oversight, I’m sure.  Wanna start doing that with large-sized sugary beverages, too? (Oh, that’s been tried.  And repealed.)  Seriously, how does anyone even reconcile a need-based purchase, when this is done nowhere else in the market?  Who could have come up with this as a unique qualification for ownership rights?  Sounds like the “common-sense” mantra that was spoon-fed to the media outlets to propagate throughout the nation, but not an original (or merit-based) idea.  But back to the magazine limit law…

This limit on magazines is silly because it won’t actually accomplish what it sets out to do. And supposedly, that is to “curb gun violence”.  It will not and cannot do that, as I’ll demonstrate.

First, criminals don’t abide by laws—definitionally—so this only hits those who do abide by laws and therefore those who wouldn’t have been a gun-violence problem anyway.  Second, larger-capacity magazines are easily (and legally) available outside Colorado.  Third, and most ridiculous, is there’s no way to enforce this law—making it utterly nonviable—because there is no way for law enforcement to determine whether the magazine someone possesses was owned before the ban or after.  This fact alone (which was known by all who voted for it, as well as by the governor who signed it into law) should have stopped the law in its tracks.  No law should ever be enacted that 1) cannot clearly demonstrate its ability to accomplish its stated purpose, and 2) cannot even be enforced.

Worst of all, the arbitrary number of 15 rounds doesn’t fit most standard hardware.  Got a Glock?  Too bad, many Glock magazines are no longer legal to obtain after this law goes into effect.  This is a problem with laws, in general—they don’t conform to the realities of the existing landscape very well.  Manufacturers attempt to apply the best mix of number of rounds to the particular firearm for its purpose—not trying to hit an arbitrarily-reached number by a clueless legislature (clueless being demonstrated above, in passing an unenforceable law).

Perhaps the governor and his Democrat minions “feel good” about committing this form of political suicide with utterly unenforceable (but “common sense”) legislation.  Or maybe they simply don’t remember what happened after a Democrat-led majority passed similar laws back in 1994.  Or perhaps—and this would make the most sense to me—somebody made Hickenlooper an offer he couldn’t refuse and he’ll rise again another day, leaving the ashes of Colorado to smolder for greener pastures with a federal post.

If you guys don’t know what happened in Cyprus over the weekend, I recommend watching zerohedge.com for a while to keep up on the real news.  Pressured by the European central bank, Cyprus enacted a “wealth tax” on all bank deposits held by the citizens, confiscating between 7% and 10% of all holdings of all citizens—overnight!  Further, they closed the banks for a banking “holiday” for a day (Saturday).  But that’s now been postponed until at least Thursday.  That means nobody has access to ANY of their cash held in banks.

This action may unwittingly precipitate a western banking run, or at least, it should.  Why?

1)  The banks stole a portion of all holdings in the bank of those who bank with them.  These banks currently pay 0% interest, offering only risk and no reward to those with accounts.

2)  The people in Cyprus will assault the banks and cause an immediate run on all Cypriot banks.  This is why the bank “holiday” has been extended until Thursday.  In the meantime, those who didn’t hold some cash at home are completely unable to obtain any of their money.

3)  Anyone paying any attention throughout the rest of Europe will realize these same conditions apply to them—that their banks pay them nothing to keep their money with them, and could immediately impose similar theft of their funds against them.

4)  Those paying attention will conclude it’s best if they hang onto their own money, and will begin withdrawing funds from their banks.  The best places to start will be in Italy and Spain, since these two nations are already under pressure by the ECB (Europe’s “Fed”) to move into “austerity” and pay back their loans/bail-outs—exactly the same sort of conditions Cyprus found itself in.

5)  A few people paying attention in other nations in Europe will be enough to cause a European-wide bank run, since European banks hold very little in reserve cash (fractional-reserve lending) on hand.  This will precipitate a banking crisis in Europe.

6)  Some people may even find out about this little issue as far away as the USA—or at least those who get their news from sources other than cable TV.  Though US banks have slightly higher reserve requirements for their banks than in Europe, it’s still only about 10% of stated capital.  Again, a few people paying attention can cause a nation-wide bank run.  And despite all the talk of “recovery” and healthy banks and all that nonsense, US banks are perilously close to collapse without an additional banking crisis.  If Europe descends into a banking crisis, the US is sure to follow.  This following-delay allows the wise in the US to arrange things properly with their own banks such that they can have the most time to prepare for such a crisis.  But do any “wise” yet remain in the US?

These are the things that I would think would follow the seemingly innocuous actions of a distant and small nation’s banks—and it seems some smarter folks than I agree with me on this potential crisis.

The wise would do well to pay attention, prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.  The rest of the lemmings will run off the cliff to their own demise.

Yes, what difference, indeed.  After all, we have an obvious cover-up, an obvious push to punt the investigations/hearings until after the election, and an obvious desire that this whole situation would just go away.  Oh—and we also have a handful of dead Americans and no answers on what really happened—even today.

You know, when the attacks were immediately blamed on the sudden interest of “militants” to a poorly-done anti-Islam video six months after the video was published—all of this coming from the upper-echelons of the federal government—maybe it makes a difference.  False flag events should be investigated.  Casting such events in the light of being provocation from a video maker is silly.  The attackers where heavily armed, and certainly not out for a casual evening stroll.

Clinton seems exasperated that anyone would really like to know why this happened, and how it happened while the DC big-wigs watched live coverage on video—and did nothing!  In fact, there are allegations that they not only did nothing, they permitted no defense or retaliation while it happened.  If that’s true, we certainly wouldn’t want that to be made public, would we.  Gross negligence?  Incompetence?  Or perhaps outright malice?

“It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again…”

Yeah.  But wasn’t it also your job to prevent it from ever happening in the first place?  As with the Fast and Furious debacle, something wrong was done, and done knowingly, by our servants in Washington.  And in each case, Americans (and others) were murdered as a direct result.  Why wouldn’t American citizens want these things investigated?  Perhaps then—and only then—can we be sure to prevent it “from ever happening again”.

Did you find yourself pressured to choose between a “lesser of two evils”, since your choice of an ideal candidate was nowhere to be found on the ballot, or perhaps couldn’t possibly win?

Have you ever considered the whole charade might be a massive manipulation of tyranny over good?  Have you ever envisioned a society other than what we’ve got now?

What if you were king?  (As fans of Monty Python know, “You don’t vote for king!”)

What if?  Here’s something to consider:

Then what’s the alternative?

Consider, if we know one outcome as absolute (the eventual arrival at full tyranny), why would we not change course?  Why not at least take the risk of a small chance of success now, in the face of an absolutely certain fate (tyranny) down the road?

Alan Keyes addresses this issue in the video below.  I recommend we consider what he has to say.  Is America now a mere cult of personality?

The video below certainly belabors this point.  It’s about the missing-from-media, favorite candidate of the grass-roots non-establishment people of America.  Whether or not you’re a fan of Ron Paul, you can definitely see there’s a scripted agenda here—an one that remains utterly unexplained.  (Or does it?  See the last couple minutes of the video.)

So after the abominable behavior of the “rule-makers” at the RNC, we’re left with Romney and Obama.  Welcome to America.  Land of the free.  Home of the brave.  Where you can vote for anyone as long as it’s not Ron Paul.

Did you catch the latter part of that video?  Harry Reid—a long-time proponent of auditing the Federal Reserve—now suddenly won’t let the recent bill that passed the House to even come to a vote in the Senate.  Why not?  Does he have a suddenly-expanded bank account in the Cayman Islands—something as a little incentive for his recent change of heart?  After all, when you dole out $16 trillion dollars in bailing out old friends and fraternity brothers, what’s a little more to keep that sort of thing hidden?

I think a good, sturdy audit of the folks controlling our (government-mandated) money supply would be enlightening.  I’d like to know, for instance, the Fed’s role in the Libor scandal—a scandal in the range of many times the total in bail-out money recently doled out.  Hey—maybe a little hush-money my way for an off-shore bank account so I can enjoy some rum and cigars with Mr. Reid?

But then again, maybe I’d sooner find myself swimming with the fishes.

The first thing I thought when I heard of the Aurora shooting was, “Why didn’t anyone shoot back?”  Really.  A single person could have ended the massacre, and two people certainly could have ended it immediately.  In fact, that would have been the best possible outcome, considering the guy who started the killing was psychotic.  Do we really believe we can protect society from sick people before they do harm?  (I don’t.)  Will psychotic people—willing to commit murder of innocent people—obey laws of any kind?  (No—that’s why we call them psychotic.)  If these sick people don’t have access to guns, will they get access to other means of murder?  (Of course.)  So in my view, it’s not the guns, but the psychos that are the problem—these people are willing to murder innocent people.

Given this, I think we have only two options.  1)  Make guns completely inaccessible to everyone, since sick people would eventually be able to access or create a gun for evil purposes.  2)  Keep guns accessible to everyone who doesn’t show clear signs of being sick, and encourage these people to be willing and able to use them in any situation where a sick person initiates dangerous force against another.

But the first solution has some problems.  The first is that we have places where law forbids gun ownership and tightly controls access to civilian ownership.  And yet gun massacres happen in these places.  Remember last year in Norway where a man killed many, many people?  Norway has strict regulation of ALL firearms, and yet this guy killed 77 people with police arriving on-scene only after 90 minutes.  In the recent massacre in Aurora, it was reported that police weren’t called until nine minutes after the attack began!  In that instance, police did absolutely nothing to protect people, because the killer had already stopped killing by the time the police arrived (ran out of ammo, gun jammed, etc.).  Would you rather rely on police that show up only after the violence, or rely on your own fellow citizens who are armed themselves and able to put an immediate stop to this sort of thing?

Consider, too, Chicago, where only the police and criminals have guns.  Chicago has a terrible problem with violent crime, being recently named as the most deadly “global” city.  Though the author argues this is because of segregated pockets of poverty (something found in many other large urban environments—without the gun violence problems), I argue that the reason is because the law-abiding citizens aren’t allowed to defend themselves with the same weapons used by the criminals in this article.  And again, criminals don’t let the law get in their way because they’re criminals—so they terrorize the people who cannot defend themselves.

What about the second solution (above)?  Will an armed population curb violence?  On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive, but as Robert Heinlein once said, “An armed society is a polite society”.  Think about that.  If everyone has the capacity to kill or defend, then nobody will be a very easy victim of crime.  And since the law-abiding citizens always far outnumber the criminals, this is more of a deterrent on crime than it is an encouragement of violence.  After all, the law-abiding majority of people will not initiate violence against their neighbor.

But that’s not the sort of thing we hear from governments, who always thirst continually for more and more power.  Despite the failures of governments to protect people in the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and now the Aurora theater massacres, the government seems to think it can prevent massacre by disarming the victims.  The government seems to think it can instead disarm all the criminals, despite the fact that all the massacres listed above occurred in places that already had no-firearms policies.  How, then, does the government really believe they can protect citizens?  And supposing they really do eliminate gun access to all criminals (and all law-abiding citizens), won’t we still have a problem with criminals getting things like machetes, baseball bats, swords, or explosives?  Will we have to then ban steak knives from kitchen drawers?  Regulate baseball?  Where would it end?  It’s simply not a feasible idea.

To conclude, massacres can occur only in places where the victims are disarmed.  Ever.  Because if a single victim is armed, he’s got an equal footing with the psycho killer and a 50% chance of ending the conflict instantly.  If only two victims are armed, they have an almost certain chance of ending the conflict instantly.  So counter to what we’re told by news media and other government outlets, the thinking person can see clearly that armed societies make massacres impossible.

As a case in point, several years ago a shooter went rampaging at a Denver missions group and a large church in Colorado Springs.  This shooter was stopped by a fellow citizen who happened to be armed.  (The police did not, even 12 hours after the first victim was shot.)  And earlier this year there was another would-be massacre in Aurora, also at a church.  That shooter was stopped after killing a single person, also by an armed citizen.  But we didn’t hear about these events in the news, most likely because the massacre was stopped instead of allowed.  And it was stopped by ordinary citizens—not police or other government officials.

While government servants debate restrictions of online ammo purchases (a red herring that had nothing to do with the Aurora shooting), an act that would apply to many more potential victims than criminals, have you considered how such a policy would possibly benefit you?  While government servants say we need to “step-up” criminal background checks of those that would purchase firearms, I wonder how that would be done.  Should the required background check be done two times?  Three?  James Holmes had no criminal background, so he was able to obtain guns and ammo legally.  Are these servants really acting in your interest, or merely attempting to show that they’re “doing something” about gun violence?

The solution is quite clear.  Encourage the law-abiding to carry the same firearms used by criminals.  “Level the playing field,” as these servants like to say so frequently.  Why encourage criminals to shoot at unarmed victims?  After all, it’s much more difficult for crime to thrive when the would-be victims shoot back.  All the criminals of Chicago know that.