In the wake of two mass murders, leftists and corporate media have been joined by international media to try to paint the United States as being too soft on firearms. This is the standard response following any controversial attack of the magnitude we’ve seen recently, but the rhetoric and gaslighting are ramped up to 11 this time. The push for gun control has never been more fierce than it is right now.
It’s an emotional response, which is why it always begins within minutes after a reported mass murder. The left needs to latch onto emotional responses because the facts simply do not support their conclusions. It is their hope that people will step on the surface logic of “fewer guns means fewer crimes” without digging deeper into the true takeaway. The most logical conclusion is invariably that fewer gun restrictions and removing gun-free zones will decrease murders. But it’s more than just logical. It’s statistically demonstrable.
On the latest episode of The Midnight Sentinel, I covered a Twitter thread posted by Andrew Follett from Club For Growth that lays out how statistically speaking, stricter gun laws are tied to increased violence and Democrats are clearly to blame:
A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control 1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings. 2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence
A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control
1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings.
2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence#2A
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Although events in the U.S. tend to get the lion’s share of media exposure, mass shootings are clearly a worldwide issue. The US makes up about 1.15% of the world’s mass shootings while having almost 5% of the world’s population.
Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate. And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster
Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.
And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster pic.twitter.com/SRrC1YYFod
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
4 times as many per capita died in mass shootings in FRANCE as in the US. 21 times in Norway. In addition to those fairly nice nations, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland have higher mass shooting death rates.
All of those are pretty nice countries which MUCH stricter gun control laws than the US…and all have higher per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US.
All of those are pretty nice countries which MUCH stricter gun control laws than the US…and all have higher per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
According to this 2018 study (surveying data over an 18 year period), the US is 64th in the world in terms of mass shooting rates per capita (which sounds far worse than it is…because all the countries in gray below didn’t report data.)
If anything our policy structure is actually pretty good at preventing this by global standards…especially relative to fairly nice countries of the type we want to compare America to.
If anything our policy structure is actually pretty good at preventing this by global standards…especially relative to fairly nice countries of the type we want to compare America to.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
2: The highest gun-ownership state with the loosest gun laws in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!) Wyoming gun laws are arguably the LEAST restrictive in the United States.
Wyoming does NOT HAVE a gun homicide problem, with a rate of only 1.4 per 100,000–actually lower than right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada– and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole.
Wyoming does NOT HAVE a gun homicide problem, with a rate of only 1.4 per 100,000–actually lower than right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada– and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
The highest murder rate of any jurisdiction in the US is Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8 per 100,000… more than twenty times that of most European countries!
But DC also has the most restrictive gun laws in the country… and the lowest rates of legal gun ownership, with numbers less than in many European states!
But DC also has the most restrictive gun laws in the country… and the lowest rates of legal gun ownership, with numbers less than in many European states!https://t.co/sVyAIuGzlq
[Gulp]
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
I’d say that data suggests that the factors making DC have such high gun violence rates are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership or a lack of gun regulation…by definition.
If stricter gun laws reduced gun violence rates, you’d expect jurisdictions with those laws to have lower rates of gun violence. Instead, we find quite the opposite.
If stricter gun laws reduced gun violence rates, you'd expect jurisdictions with those laws to have lower rates of gun violence.
Instead, we find quite the opposite.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Now, maybe you think “of course those jurisdictions have higher gun violence rates, that’s why they enacted the laws.” I doubt that…but the data is CLEAR that those laws haven’t reduced the rates.
The factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
The factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
And blaming this on Republicans’ (which Libs made trend ALL of yesterday is…stupid. Washington DC hasn’t had a Republican mayor since literally 1933…and hasn’t had a single Republican on its city council since 2008.
The same thing is true of ALL the cities with REALLY BAD gun homicide rates. In 2019: St Louis, 64.54 murders per 100k, last GOP Mayor left in 1949 Its the 9th most violent city in the world.
The same thing is true of ALL the cities with REALLY BAD gun homicide rates.
In 2019:
St Louis, 64.54 murders per 100k, last GOP Mayor left in 1949
Its the 9th most violent city in the world. pic.twitter.com/LIJhKVsyI7
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
The murder rate in Baltimore is 58.27 per 100,000. Its the 11th most violent city in the world…and has VERY strict gun laws.
This goes and and on down the list…check it for yourself. I stopped looking for a Republican mayor after a while because it was all Dems forever.
This goes and and on down the list…check it for yourself.
I stopped looking for a Republican mayor after a while because it was all Dems forever. https://t.co/JvoEiSouti
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Yet…as I noted yesterday… Libs PRIMARY RESPONSE is to blame the GOP for this…when they are LITERALLY THE ONES IN CHARGE of the cities choking under gun violence.
You want to know how to convince me the Libs are serious about gun control? When they actually bring down gun homicide rates in the cities they’ve politically dominated for decades. Instead, they ALWAYS cast blame on everyone but themselves.
You want to know how to convince me the Libs are serious about gun control?
When they actually bring down gun homicide rates in the cities they've politically dominated for decades.
Instead, they ALWAYS cast blame on everyone but themselves.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Talk to any Lib about Chicago gun violence…which is so bad there’s literal websites dedicated to statistically tracking it…and they’ll blame Indiana’s gun laws.
This is because the ONLY move Libs have to distract from the fact that places they’ve subjected to VERY STRICT gun control laws is to…blame neighboring Republicans.
This is because the ONLY move Libs have to distract from the fact that places they've subjected to VERY STRICT gun control laws is to…blame neighboring Republicans.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Laws that we know work (like cracking down on straw buyers) get entirely ignored in favor of oblivious attempts to gin up political support for policies we know DO NOT work bc we saw them fail in Dem controlled cities.
Statistically speaking, the most effective laws for reducing gun violence and gun homicides is cracking down on straw purchasing…that is someone buying a gun for a person not legally able to have one. And it isn’t even close.
Statistically speaking, the most effective laws for reducing gun violence and gun homicides is cracking down on straw purchasing…that is someone buying a gun for a person not legally able to have one. And it isn't even close.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Basically every state (including ones with very intense gun laws) doesn’t take straw purchases of firearms very seriously. It’s MOSTLY a misdemeanor. Nobody bothers to enforce it.
As Kevin W of NR says…this is because of bureaucratic laziness more than anything else. Its easier to pressure a federally licensed retailers with fixed addresses and regular business hours than it is to go chasing Joe Gangster’s rap-sheet-free girlfriend all over St. Louis
As Kevin W of NR says…this is because of bureaucratic laziness more than anything else.
Its easier to pressure a federally licensed retailers with fixed addresses and regular business hours than it is to go chasing Joe Gangster’s rap-sheet-free girlfriend all over St. Louis
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
If you can’t read it, its the saga of one specific straw purchased gun being used in a dozen criminal acts. The person who bought the gun committed a felony in the state (Virginia) where he bought it. He pled guilty to this and got a slap on the wrist.
If you can't read it, its the saga of one specific straw purchased gun being used in a dozen criminal acts. The person who bought the gun committed a felony in the state (Virginia) where he bought it.
He pled guilty to this and got a slap on the wrist.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
This is what annoys me so much about the “gun control” debate…its entirely media driven to gin up outrage, not solve problems. Media shift the responsibility for criminal violence away from the criminals who did it and onto 3rd parties that are easier to police.
And who just so happen to have deeper pockets. You can’t sue Baker (the guy who bought the gun in the WaPo story) or Stunna (rapper who acquired the gun). There’s no $ in that. But u can shake down Bob’ Shotgun Emporium or Remington & that’s what Libs ACTUALLY want
And who just so happen to have deeper pockets.
You can't sue Baker (the guy who bought the gun in the WaPo story) or Stunna (rapper who acquired the gun). There's no $ in that.
But u can shake down Bob' Shotgun Emporium or Remington & that's what Libs ACTUALLY want
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Meanwhile, a few U.S. ZIP codes, practically all of them represented exclusively by political party which always promotes gun control, are plagued by gun homicides and nobody in power is willing to lift a pinky finger to do anything meaningful about it.
Nobody cares on the left cares about saving lives in this debate, they care about the prospect of letting their lawyer friends make money and getting a bit of desperately needed extra political energy. That’s all folks, going to dinner.
Nobody cares on the left cares about saving lives in this debate, they care about the prospect of letting their lawyer friends make money and getting a bit of desperately needed extra political energy.
That's all folks, going to dinner.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 25, 2022
Just wanted to address this point and others like it on the main thread as I can't do it in my messages due to volume.
Depending on your distribution, sometimes “outliers” are the only thing that matters. pic.twitter.com/b5VTPG94yJ
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 26, 2022
I could make a graph showing that since January 13, 2010, fewer Haitians have died per year from earthquake-related causes than whatever, and say "why worry about outliers.
Well, the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010 killed about 100,000 people. Outlier is all that matters.
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) May 26, 2022
Follett’s thread is definitely worth sharing, but he didn’t go into the “why” behind all the gun control talk. This has nothing to do with public safety, as I noted on my podcast. This is all about disarming the people ahead of tyranny. Remember that when you read or hear about how the Uvalde massacre was handled.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
