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NRA: Jovan Belcher’s Girlfriend Would Be Alive If She Had A Gun. Well, They Had 8.

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National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre claims that Jovan Belcher‘s girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive today if she only had had her own gun. LaPierre is dead wrong: there were eight guns in the Belcher-Perkins house. So much for NRA bull.

“The one thing missing in that equation is that woman owning a gun so she could have saved her life from that murderer,” LaPierre told USA TODAY Sports, talking about Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher.

Belcher, of course, is the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker who shot to death Kasandra Perkins, who was just 22-years old, Saturday, December 1, then shot himself to death minutes later.

The couple had a three-month old infant.

“Owning guns is a mainstream part of American culture and it’s growing every day. My God, there’s nothing more mainstream in this country than 100 million Americans who own firearms,” LaPierre says.

Which is utterly pathetic.

Guns shouldn’t be considered part of “culture.” Guns are designed to do one thing, one thing only, and to do it very well: kill. If LaPierre wants to promote guns as “culture,” he’s promoting a gun culture, which is equivalent to a culture of death. So much for the “pro-life” radical right, which isn’t truly pro-life, but pro-birth. And the moment a child is out of the womb, they’re on their own. Like three-month old Zoey Michelle, Kasandra Perkins’ daughter who will now be raised by her grandmother.

“According to Kansas City police, Belcher owned multiple guns, and they were in the house,” USA TODAY reports. “In addition, Sports Illustrated has reported that Perkins went to shooting ranges with Belcher.”

Jack Dickey at Deadspin writes, “Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins kept ‘about eight guns’ in their house and liked to go shooting together, according to a new report from Sports Illustrated.”

So, Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are full of it.

“The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence reminds us that since 1968, when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, over one million people have been killed with guns in the United States,” Daniel Kaufmann at the Brookings Institution, one of the most-respected think tanks in the world, reports. “On average, almost 100,000 people in the United States are shot or killed with a gun annually.”

Noting that “there appears to be substantial evidence that removing guns saves lives,” Kaufmann writes that the Brady Campaign “indicates that 94 percent of gun-related suicides would not occur had no guns been present. Since keeping a firearm at home increases the risk of homicide by a factor of three, it is not surprising that guns are more likely to raise the risk of injury than to confer protection. In fact, they claim that every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens.”

Kaufmann’s article, written just after the Aurora, Colorado, massacre in July at the midnight premiere of “The Dark Night,” addresses all those arguments gun advocates like to try to use to derail the only sane argument: guns kill.

Making Wayne LaPierre even more full of it.

And he’s using the murder-suicide of a popular sports figure to advance a falsehood.

Disgusting.

“So here are some statistics,” Amy Davidson at the New Yorker writes. “According to the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, ‘The data are clear: More incidents of murder-suicide occur with guns than with any other weapon. … In 591 murder-suicides, 92 percent were committed with a gun. States with less restrictive gun control laws have as much as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws.’ Another study found that the mere presence of a gun in the house increased the chance that domestic violence would escalate to murder six fold’.”

But at least some NFL players have learned from this tragic event.

“At least seven NFL players have turned their guns into their respective team’s security following the murder-suicide involving Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher earlier this month, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King reported on ‘Football Night in America’ on Sunday,” ESPN reports.

According to the report, at least one player handed over multiple firearms, telling his team’s personnel that he didn’t trust himself with the guns.

Yeah.

Pretty sure football is far more mainstream than guns.

Let’s see LaPierre, and the NRA, fight that.

 

Via: Doktor Zoom at Wonkette

Image composed from Wikimedia Commons

 

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News

Trump Could Face 20 Years Behind Bars for ‘Serious Felonies’ at Mar-a-Lago: Legal Analyst

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August 14, 2022

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A legal analyst for ABC News pointed out that former President Donald Trump is potentially facing 20 years in prison for “serious felonies” after the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.

Dan Abrams told ABC host Jonathan Karl that the Department of Justice could indict Trump for multiple crimes after finding classified documents during the search.

“They’re very serious,” Abrams said of the charges. “And the one that’s being talked about most is this espionage act because it has the word espionage in it. But the truth is that when it comes to potential criminal sentences, the obstruction of justice statute is the one with the most potential prison time.”

“There you’re talking about up to 20 years behind bars,” he added. “So these are not sort of minor crimes we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the potential for serious felonies with regard to all three of the crimes being investigated.”

But Abrams threw cold water on the idea that a Trump prosecution would be easy.

“The fundamental question is going to be intentionality,” he opined. “How much do they believe that they did this on purpose? Were they intentionally ignoring subpoenas? Were they literally destroying documents?”

Watch the video below from ABC.

 

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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

New Analysis Breaks Down GOP’s Flawed Response to the Mar-a-Lago Search

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2 days ago

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August 13, 2022

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Republican lawmakers are reportedly at an impasse on whether or not they should be defending former President Donald Trump amid his latest flurry of legal woes. The party is also facing challenges with navigating some lawmakers’ critical assessments of law enforcement over the Trump investigation.

A new analysis is breaking down Republicans’ seemingly flawed response and how it underscores the cracks in the political party’s foundation.

According to Axios, the analysis comes shortly after documents released on Friday, August 12, offered details about the search which reportedly involved “highly classified materials believed stored in violation of the law at the ex-president’s private residence.”

Prior to the release of those documents, Republicans serving on the House Intelligence Committee participated in a press conference where they continued to criticize the investigation, describing it as being politically motivated.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) scrutinized the investigation deeming it a “complete abuse” of authority as she suggested it was being conducted because the former president is considered to be “Joe Biden’s most likeliest political opponent in 2024.”

However, some Republicans on the committee have offered a more leveled approach to the situation. Per The New York Times, “Trump allies have told top Republicans to tone down their criticism of the Justice Department ‘because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public.'”

“It’s incumbent upon everybody to act in a way that’s becoming of the office they hold,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), a former FBI agent, “And that’s not casting judgment on anything until you know all the facts.”

Others have attempted to defend the former president. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said, “You can say nuclear weapons, but there are things that are highly, highly classified, there are things that are not extremely classified.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is now selling merchandise on her website in support of a call to “defund the FBI” while Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) tweeted, “I will support a complete dismantling and elimination of the democrat brown shirts known as the FBI.”

 

Image: Elise Stefanik with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago via Facebook

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News

Trump Makes False Claims About Classified Documents – And Obama

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2 days ago

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August 12, 2022

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Donald Trump is responding to news reports he is under FBI investigation for actions covered by the Espionage Act by making apparently false claims about his mishandling of classified documents and about former President Barack Obama.

“Number one, it was all declassified,” Trump says in a post on his Truth Social site, a claim legal experts say is incorrect. For any president to declassify documents, experts say, there is a process that involves actions being taken on each individual document. They also say the president does not have legal authority to declassify documents related to nuclear weapons.

“Number two,” Trump continues, “they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request.”

READ MORE: FBI Agents Searched Mar-a-Lago for ‘Classified Documents Relating to Nuclear Weapons’: Report

Again, according to reports, that too is false. DOJ issued a subpoena after the National Archives tried to get all the documents back and Trump still did not comply.

“They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago,” he continues in a separate post on Truth Social. “ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK.”

Again, multiple reports say they did, numerous times.

READ MORE: DOJ Served Trump With Grand Jury Subpoena for Classified Documents Months Before FBI Raid: Report

None of his responses explain why he had at Mar-a-Lago what we now know were at least 35 cartons – 20 retrieved on Monday and 15 earlier this year – of items including confidential, classified, and top secret documents that were required by law to have been handed over to the National Archives.

“The bigger problem is,” Trump says, “what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”

That is also false.

The National Archives on Friday issued a statement after Trump repeatedly spread the false claim that former President Barack Obama had 33 million documents in his possession.

“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!” was one of Trump’s false attacks on his Truth Social site.

“The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama Presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” the Archives said in a statement posted to its website Friday.

“NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA,” the Archives added. “Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”

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