“All 16 parts of the controversial gun, called the Liberator, are made from a tough, heat-resistant plastic used in products such as musical instruments, kitchen appliances and vehicle bumper bars,” explains Fox News. “Fifteen of the components are made with a 3D printer while one is a non-functional metal part which can be picked up by metal detectors, making it legal under U.S. law. The firing pin is also not made of plastic, though it is easily crafted from a metal nail. The weapon is designed to fire standard handgun rounds and even features an interchangeable barrel so that it can handle different caliber rounds.”

If you haven’t yet heard of 3D printing technology, you will. Arguably one of the most important advancements in manufacturing, 3D printers use digital models to “print” layers of plastic to create three-dimensional shapes. This is an “additive” process, as opposed to traditional machining (in which “subtractive” processes are used to remove material, such as cutting a blade from a metal blank). The popularity of 3D printing has exploded recently because the price of the printers has dropped, making them accessible to average citizens.

Companies like Makerbot market both 3D printers and certain 3D printed consumer products and files to their customer base. For example, you can purchase wind-up feet from the site, then attach these to plastic robot bodies that you print at home. You can also purchase the Makerbot Mixtape, which is printed and assembled in the company’s New York City facility. It is essentially an extremely cheap MP3 player that can be filled with the music you choose and handed off to anyone with a pair of headphones. The Makerbot website offers the colored plastic filaments that “feed” its 3D printers, too.

“MakerBot had 16 percent market share of all 3D printers (industrial and personal) made from 2009 to the end of 2011 (based on Wohlers Report 2012),” reads the company’s website. “In 2011, MakerBot had 21.6 percent market share. There are over 13,000 MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers in use by engineers, designers, researchers, and people who just like to make things.”

Prices for the printers will continue to drop, and as they do, more of us will acquire them. “Despite the growing popularity of 3D printers, being limited to purchase through specialist stores and online shops means they still occupy a niche market of hobbyists and professional designers,” reports Gizmag. “You can’t just waltz into your local office supply store and pick one up along with a pack of manila folders and paperclips. But soon, you’ll be able to do just that. Office supply chain Staples will become the first major U.S. retailer to offer 3D printers on its shelves, starting with the Cube from 3D Systems.”

Gizmag’s Jonathan Fincher goes on to speculate that this move “could be part of a concerted push from Staples to bring 3D printing to more consumers. The company also has plans to launch a 3D printing service that uses paper as material. It’s hard to say at this point if the general public will take notice or not, but this news does at least indicate just how much 3D printers as a whole have begun creeping into the mainstream.”

The applications of 3D printing are as diverse as human imagination. The technology has been used to print everything from the lower receiver of an AR15 to a “bionic ear” to a skull implant to a prosthetic hand. As every consumer home becomes a “mini factory,” the ability of individuals to create the products they need and will use holds breathtaking potential to improve their lives.

Obviously, your government can’t have that.

The immediate response by governmental entities in the United States has been to remove from public access the files used by 3D printers to create firearms parts. These are not receivers. They are not firearms, and they are not firearms parts; they are electrons, collections of ones and zeros. They are information. Defense Distributed, the firm that has created this furor, went about printing its 3D firearms parts legally. It obtained a Type 7 Federal Firearms License in order to manufacture its Liberator pistol. This did not stop your government from seizing the company’s website files and removing the digital plans for the Liberator from the Web.

Building guns is easy. It’s manufacturing ammunition that is relatively difficult. Inmates in prison build “zip guns” all the time. You can make an improvised firearm from pipe fittings. To produce a repeating firearm, however, required access to a machine shop, meaning the average citizen could not easily do it … until now. That’s what an increasingly invasive government – helmed by Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden and bent on stamping out the Second Amendment – cannot abide. Your masters will not tolerate a society in which every free man and woman can conceivably print up a gun at home, for such a world renders all state and federal “gun control” completely toothless.

Defense Distributed’s owner complied with the government’s demands. That was smart. Had he refused, men with traditionally manufactured guns would eventually have come to his door. It remains to be seen whether Cody Wilson will have a convenient “accident,” as so many do who prove troublesome to Democrats in power. The bell may yet toll for him – but with the 3D gun’s plans already circulating on international file-sharing sites, that bell cannot be unrung.

Christie told Brian Williams that he “did not want to take the risk of becoming unhealthy and the ramifications that would have for Mary Pat and for my four kids. And as you know, I still have children that are in elementary school, so I got a long road here as a father, and I don’t want to miss any of it.” The report describes Christie’s weight loss since the February surgery as “noticeable.”

Less than six months ago, however, Christie was still deeply in denial, insisting that he was not too fat to be president. The Raw Story quotes ABC News and Barbara Walters’ interview with Christie, who said, “That’s ridiculous [that I'm too fat to be president]. I mean, that’s ridiculous. People watched me for the last number of weeks in Hurricane Sandy doing 18-hour days, so I don’t really think that would be a problem.” But anyone who saw Christie try and fail to sit in the guest seat on Letterman while eating a donut could see that Christie is morbidly obese. That’s incompatible with serving in what is arguably the most stressful political post in the world, which is Christie’s ambition: The man wants to be president, and his stomach surgery is an attempt to make that possible.

The site Lapband.com explains that gastric banding “is a minimally invasive weight loss procedure. Unlike sleeve gastrectomy and gastric bypass, the LAP-BAND® Adjustable Gastric Banding System involves no use of metal surgical staples, no amputation of any part of the stomach, nor any cutting of the intestines. … The surgeon places the band around your stomach using long, thin instruments. A small camera allows the surgeon to see inside your body as he or she performs the procedure.”

The idea is to restrict the stomach’s capacity, making it more difficult to eat as much while also helping patients to feel full and stay full longer. Side effects range from problems with the band to reflux, dilation of the esophagus and other horrifying prospects. Should Christie lose an extraordinary amount of weight very quickly, he may require additional surgery, such as for excessive loose skin.

The problem with all stomach surgery options for weight loss is that few of them are the magic bullet they are touted to be. Nearly half of all patients who undergo laparoscopic gastric banding have to get the bands taken out after complications such as “erosion,” in which the band migrates through the stomach wall and into the stomach. According to Thinner Times, when this happens, “bacteria from the stomach enter into the capsule that mutually forms around the band. The infection then travels along the tubing into the pocket around the subcutaneous port. Thus many patients who develop erosion first notice pain, redness, and swelling in the vicinity of the access port. … When the band erodes well into the stomach, food can bypass around the band. The patient can eat much more than before.” While not an emergency – the band is simply removed in many cases and re-banding performed – erosion represents the failure of the banding technology.

More significant, however, is the percentage of patients who get gastric surgery for weight loss … and then power through the band, regaining all of the weight that they lost (and more). The Daily Mail cites both Brazilian and German studies supporting this assertion: “In fact, 63 percent of patients put weight back on within two years of their operation, according to one Brazilian study of 782 patients. Meanwhile, a German review of studies on weight-loss surgery found 30 percent of patients regained their lost weight between 18 and 36 months. As a result, growing numbers of patients are requesting a second operation. In a Dutch study of patients who’d had gastric banding, a third needed the operation redone after five years and half after 10 years.” Among the high profile celebrities who have lost, then appeared to regain weight after gastric surgery are Star Jones, “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson and singer Carnie Wilson.

While style will almost always supersede substance in politics, Christie’s weight isn’t his biggest problem. While he has (or had) significant support in New Jersey and among “moderates,” Christie is a Republican in Name Only. He is not a conservative; he is not even loyal to the party. His reaction to Hurricane Sandy and his embrace of Obama just prior to last year’s election arguably stalled Romney’s momentum and helped bolster Barack Obama’s campaign. Christie attacked the NRA after Sandy Hook and refused to fight Obamacare in New Jersey. The Daily Intellgencer proclaims him “basically a Communist.” When he’s not bullying homeowners (with profanity) to make them accept eminent domain encroachment on their property, he’s attacking the Republican majority in the House. He is a Republican in the same way John McCain is a Republican. That is to say, Christie gets media attention by paying lip-service to his “disagreements” with liberal policies, all the while attacking his party and governing to the left.

Fat or skinny, Chris Christie is an unctuous, vulgar slob whose politics are “progressive” and whose attitude is classless. As president, Christie would be no better than Obama. He is not the man any right-thinking voter should want in the Oval Office – regardless of whether he can fit in the chair.


Oh, you’ve never heard of either one of them? Well, you will, now that both are becoming household names in the campaign to stitch to the social media pages of cultural heretics and in the collective consciousness of our nation the scarlet letter H. That’s right: Mike Wallace is a HOMOPHOBE. He is such a HOMOPHOBE that he should probably be fired by the Dolphins – an organization that has already condemned Wallace’s short-lived act of microblogging heresy.

“Mike Wallace has apologized for his comments, and we have addressed the matter with him,” quotes the gossip site TMZ. “Mike’s comments do not reflect the views of the Miami Dolphins. We believe in a culture of inclusiveness and respect, and any statements to the contrary are in no way acceptable to our organization. We will address the entire team about our policy of inclusion and make sure they all understand the importance of respecting individual choices.”

So the dolphins are all about respect and inclusion … unless the opinion expressed is one they don’t happen to respect or include. And what was Wallace’s terrible crime – a crime for which his own team has reprimanded him, apparently, and a crime for which he has himself apologized on Twitter after deleting the offending post?

“All these beautiful women in the world,” he tweeted shortly after Jason Collins announced publicly that he is “gay,” “and guys wanna mess with other guys SMH (shakin’ my head) …”

That’s it. That’s all he wrote. He didn’t mention Collins by name. He didn’t say anything overtly cruel or unkind about homosexuals. He wrote from the perspective of a straight man who appreciates beautiful women and doesn’t have a frame of reference for feeling otherwise. At worst, his comment reflects a lack of perspective, one that no straight man need or must acquire because it simply doesn’t apply to him. Taken charitably, his comment was a wry observation on the media circus surrounding Collins’ disclosure.

The TMZ site called Wallace “ignorant” (and worse) while mocking his attempt to apologize. Mr. Wallace is now the poster child for “homophobia” – a word that has no meaning now except, “To say something less than completely affirming of homosexuality.” It is no longer culturally possible to believe that being “gay” is something less than worthy of praise in and of itself.

For perspective, until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness in the standard reference Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It was not removed from the World Health Organization’s Classification of Diseases until 1999. Just last year, the province of Alberta removed from its medical services billing codes language that classifies gays, lesbians and bisexuals as mentally ill.

Whether one believes homosexuality is a mental illness is irrelevant. Neither your belief that it is (or isn’t) nor a homosexual American’s belief that you are (or aren’t) a “homophobe” is germane to a free society.

Both parties are free to believe as they do. “Tolerance,” in this context, is defined as neither party violating the other party’s natural rights. Simply put, neither the bigot nor the special-interest group need approve of one another as long as neither party is throwing bricks through the others’ windows.

Excoriating someone, not for saying that which is hateful, but simply for expressing a lack of sympathy for your position, is exactly like throwing a metaphorical brick at them. If you make someone an online outcast because he dared to say something less than completely affirming of your position, it is YOU who are engaging in some “-phobia.” You are so afraid of differing viewpoints that you must mischaracterize all dissent as irrational fear.

Jason Collins’ public announcement that he enjoys sexual intercourse with men instead of women is not news. It is his personal business, something for which he should be neither criticized nor lauded in the context of doing his job (playing in the NBA) or living his public life (going to the store, keeping company with his boyfriend, or what have you). His announcement has been called “courageous,” but one would think telling his fiancée of multiple years that he was homosexual before she spent years with him, or when he called off their marriage, would actually have been brave. His announcement now seems comparatively easy, especially with homosexuality a vaunted cause célèbre.

In today’s rootless, amoral society, the only boundaries to human behavior come in the form of an ever-encroaching government presence (as facilitated by totalitarian Democrats, who will not be satisfied until they have a say in every facet of your waking life) and in the form of peer reaction to your words and deeds. Because our society’s members now live their lives in the public square of the Internet, one’s peers form a much larger body than once they might have, and their reactions come immediately and in greater quantity than ever before. If you say something that flies in the face of prevailing sentiment, if you offend the wrong people, you will be pilloried online without delay.

Anyone who does not bow down before the idols of political correctness, anyone who expresses an opinion the libs have chosen to marginalize, will face social sanction. Right now, it is Mike Wallace’s turn in the stocks. Tomorrow, it may be yours.

Where is the outrage that the Powers That Are in Boston essentially made prisoners of an entire city? On what grounds and by what authority does any municipal government presume to place every citizen of a major United States city on house arrest? In the afterglow of the successful capture of the remaining Boston Marathon bombing suspect, alleged Islamist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the people celebrating in the streets that Tsarnaev was taken alive (ironically, only because the “lockdown” was lifted and the property owner in whose boat Tsarnaev was hiding could finally go outside and check his yard) ought to be asking themselves what they have to be happy about. They are beta testers of the New Freedom, which looks a lot like the Old Oppression. At whim, your government may order you to remain in your home, and if you dare disobey, they will point guns at you, essentially threatening to murder you.

You may think this sounds extreme, but if so, that is only because you have not seen yet another viral photo passed around the Internet after the Boston manhunt. This one depicts a man with an assault rifle pointing it up at the window of a civilian who is taking the gunman’s picture. The gunman is not a civilian. He is not a tea partier. He is not a libertarian. He is not one of the dastardly “right-wingers” the left was so quick to blame for the actions of accused jihadists.

This man sits atop a Hummer and is wearing the paramilitary dress that is all the rage among scions of authority these days. It is impossible to tell the difference between police and combat soldiers now. The heavily equipped men riding armored vehicles in the streets of Boston, the heavily armed men walking through the streets and peering into yards, the men who ignored the Bill of Rights in executing warrantless searches of citizens’ homes in the name of finding the Boston bomber(s), carry and ride the very “weapons of war” President Barack Hussein Obama says do not “belong on our streets.”

Even as Obama and the Democrats struggle so hard, whine so petulantly and act so unconstitutionally to severely limit American citizens’ right to own firearms, they and their fellow travelers flood our streets with armed goons and trample on our individual liberties in the names of whatever authoritarian exigencies they find convenient. Far too few people are asking why this happened. Even fewer are daring to say that, despite the quick capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, what was done in Boston was completely unjustifiable from a civil rights standpoint. Instead, multiple voices in the media and in government are rushing to rationalize the imprisonment of thousands of innocent Americans, playing it for humor or spotlighting individual acts of kindness.

Bent permanently leftward, NPR quoted Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. “In terms of both scale and scope,” Cilluffo said of the lockdown, “the shelter-in-place that was enforced was extraordinary, perhaps even unprecedented, but so too were the circumstances.” NPR interpreted that as meaning local officials in Boston and in Massachusetts state government were elected to make just this kind of call. Missing from this bland dismissal of the legal issues involved is the idea that we elect our officials to protect and defend the Constitution, not to walk all over it in the face of “unprecedented” circumstances.

While we’re writing humorous puff pieces about the one-night stand that turned into an awkward all-day visit during the lockdown, or sentimental twaddle about a bride whose dress was heroically delivered during the lockdown (an act that required “pleading” with the police for permission), the fact that our rights are being destroyed is all but ignored. We are rationalizing tyranny. We are spinning despotism.

“We’ve been surrendering liberty in the hope of keeping ourselves safe for the past decade,” warns The Atlantic‘s Wendy Kaminer. “The marathon bombings will hasten our surrender of freedom from the watchful eye of law enforcement. … For those of us miles from Watertown and the vicinity of the hunt for Dzhokhor Tsarnaev, the ‘sheltering’ was voluntary. Out of fear or faith in law enforcement and a desire to cooperate – or lack of anything better to do with the city shut down – people stayed indoors.”

But how “voluntary” is a house arrest that is enforced behind the barrels of assault rifles? The “heartwarming” picture of the police officer delivering milk is actually a terrifying photograph. That milk was being delivered to a mother who could not leave her home to get milk for her children. She could not leave her home because she had been ordered not to do so. Had she defied the order to stay indoors she would have found no stores open from which to buy that milk. (Where did the officer get the milk, come to think of it?) And she was caught in this situation for one and only one reason: HER GOVERNMENT DECLARED HER A PRISONER IN HER HOME.

That statement deserves to be in all-caps. It ought to be shouted from the rooftops. It’s the real problem we face: a government out of control, a government that uses “weapons of war” to treat its citizens like inmates in a nationwide gulag of the Democrats’ making.

This is not new. For years now, Barack Hussein Obama and entities answering to him have been desperate to reclassify all dissent as domestic terrorism. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security tried to categorize conservatives as “right-wing extremists” (in a report from which the administration tried to distance itself). In 2012, it again hit the news that DHS’ Science and Technology’s Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences division was classifying those “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. Then, just this month, it came out that DHS considers Christians to be “citizen terrorists.”

Obama and his acolytes have a long history of trying to marginalize and mischaracterize dissent. If you oppose Glorious Leader Obama’s policies, you are to be accused of spreading lies and misinformation. Mister Obama himself advised his mind-numbed, welfare-check-cashing minions to “get in your face” and shout you down. The Democrats, the liberals, the “progressives” have tried several times to create informers from among the ranks of your neighbors online, using social media to create an army of spies and bullies to scream at all who disobey.

First it was the flag@whitehouse.gov email, through which good little Obama drones could report their neighbors for thoughtcrime. Then it was “Attack Watch,” a Twitter account so swamped with ridicule by conservative participants in the microblogging site that Obama’s minions were forced to “protect” the account. More recently the Obamabots have tried to make a go of their “Truth Team,” which has met with similar heaps of scorn on the Internet. But their failures never stop the libs from trying. Every effort they make, particularly online, is an effort to reclassify, recategorize, recast and redefine Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and third-party voters as alien, as “extreme” and even as criminal – if not explicitly, then by default.

Domestic terrorists certainly do exist. The single best example of domestic terrorism is probably still the Oklahoma City bombing. But the threat from “right-wing” or “militia” and “patriot” groups has always been infinitesimal compared to the threat posed by Islam and by Muslim terror groups. According to the National Counterterrorism Center’s 2011 report, fully 70 percent of worldwide terrorism is committed by Muslim terror groups. This contrasts widely with repeated attempts to misidentify or mischaracterize Muslim terrorists as only a small percentage of terror operatives.

For example, last year a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Charles Kurzman, asserted that the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism was minuscule and often exaggerated. (This year he claimed it was even less real than last.) Kurtzman analyzed what he claims was Muslim-American terrorism in the 10 years following Sept. 11, 2001. He went on to claim that compared to the 14,000 murders in the U.S. in 2011, the 20 Muslims who were indicted for violent terrorist plots was a “tiny” number.

The problem with this type of specious analysis is that it compares indictments for terror plots – which one would hope would be a relatively small number, given that American has not experienced a major, successful terror attack after 2001 until the Boston Marathon – to murders. This is not comparing apples to oranges; this is comparing apples to giraffes. There is a world of difference between a murder and a terror plot.

The fact that, according to Kurtzman’s own numbers, 26 Muslims were indicted for terror plots in 2010 and 20 more were indicted in 2011 is a significant and troubling number. Given that these terrorists work in groups, that figure represents perhaps three to four Boston Marathon bombings per year at the very least. Does the fact that these plots were not successful mean the threats themselves did not exist? Clearly not. But the sound bite, the action line, the mythology, was established the moment Kurtzman issued his report. It is now taken on faith on the Web, and repeated ad nauseam, that Muslim terrorists represent only a small fraction of terrorists.

So what is the dutiful “low-information voter,” the good little Democrat marching in lockstep with the masses of useful idiots who return despots like Barack Obama to power, to do? Why, he can only conclude that those nefarious right-wing extremists must be to blame. When pressed for evidence of right-wing terror on American soil, he can cite Oklahoma City … and there his specific recollections end. But he is confident that The Big Evil Right must be to blame, because that slurring imbecile Chris Matthews and that lopsided grinning lesbian on MSNBC and that pompous hypocrite on Comedy Central told him so. The fact that “left-wing terrorists” like unrepentant bomber Bill Ayers are never floated as possible culprits by network news reporters simply shortens the leap necessary in jumping to conclusions.

The resulting trial by social media invariably lays the blame for any crime, from mass shootings to any act of terror, at the feet of a nebulous “right wing” presumed to be monolithic and criminal. This is as Obama and the libs want it to be. In the eyes of liberals, of Democrats, of progressives, you are guilty of a crime simply for disagreeing with the leftists. They will do whatever is required to blame you for all crime, whether committed by goggle-eyed, drug-addled lefties, hippie bomb-throwers, rare militia nut-jobs, or – yes – Muslim murderers.

Fantastically, the report of the mass stabbing has actually elicited some calls for more gun control in Texas. The libs have their sights on Texas and have been making rumblings for some time now about moving there in droves in order to bend free Texans to their totalitarian wills. A state that openly advertises itself as a free haven from “progressive” tyranny cannot be allowed to exist, in the minds of liberals. They brook no dissent and abide no deviation from their schemes. Thus, they cannot simply sit back and let Texas be Texas. Instead, they must actively work to make Texas like New York and California – states that rank dead last in personal freedoms in the United States. Oh, and did we mention New York also has the highest taxes in the country?

But these are all distractions from the main issue. Stupid as it is for liberals to demand more gun control in response to a mass stabbing, this is entirely consistent with their “justice” ethic, which reads as follows: When a crime is committed, immediately punish everyone who did not do it. Liberals, therefore, gleefully introduce laws that affect law-abiding gun owners’ constitutional rights, but which the libs freely admit would not stop the very crimes the left exploits to gin up support for their attacks on the Bill of Rights.

Never forget that to a liberal, the Constitution is an impediment – an obstacle to the progressive gulag liberals wish to construct. Obama has said as much on multiple occasions, whining that our Constitution prevents him from ruling autocratically.

The real issue in the Texas stabbings, however, is that of knives. Obama has been busily tap-dancing on the corpses of the Sandy Hook victims since that shooting took place, using children as props in his war on the Bill of Rights. (Liberals adore dead bodies. They are ghouls who race to the nearest television camera or microphone whenever someone is killed.) Barely reported in American news outlets and all but ignored by Chinese state media, however, was that on the same day as the Sandy Hook shootings, more than 20 children in China were stabbed in a very similar mass attack. The only real difference was the weapon used … and therein lies the problem.

Knives are simple to construct. Ban all knives and any person who wishes to produce a stabbing implement will still be able to do so, from a variety of available materials. While it takes tools, talent and time to produce a high-quality cutting instrument, it takes almost nothing to produce a stabbing tool. Slashing someone will kill them eventually, particularly if you cut a major artery. Blood loss alone will end someone’s life if that loss is not stopped. But if you truly wish to kill a human being, and you wish to do it quickly, stabbing them is the way to do it.

The technology of stabbing is almost laughable. You can stab someone to death with nearly anything long enough and sufficiently tapered, with enough rigidity, to reach an organ. A sharpened piece of wood (like a fictional vampire stake) will do it. A sharpened rod of plastic will do it. A pen can do it. A shard of glass or Plexiglas will do it. Even a toothbrush whose end has been melted and honed can do it. These examples are not arbitrary. They are all weapons manufactured in American prisons.

If prison inmates in strictly controlled environments cannot be prevented from manufacturing stabbing implements, “free” Americans cannot be. Passing laws prohibiting knives will have no effect whatsoever on crime because the knives prohibited are not required to do the deed. Any flat-head screwdriver can be used to stab a man to death. Will we ban screwdrivers? In recent years we have seen a rise in attacks with claw hammers. Will we require hammer registration and background checks for nails?

Yet demands for “knife control” are upon us – and we are seeing attempts by the left to vilify knife manufacturers as a demonic, all-powerful corporate concern with “paid lobbyists” seeking to influence, unduly, the outcome of knife laws. This is exactly the method used to demonize the National Rifle Association and to marginalize the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights. The most prominent example is found on the website of the Association of Flight Attendants.

When the TSA proposed changing its screening laws to permit small, non-locking pocketknives in carry-on luggage, this left-leaning union and lobbying organization – representing nearly 60,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines – had a fit. “The knife lobby,” sneers the AFA’s Web copy, “representing a group of knife manufacturers, gloated that their efforts to lobby the TSA for years finally ‘paid off’ and they were ‘instrumental’ in getting the TSA to change the policy. … Now they are on Capitol Hill fighting us. … We have to make sure knives are not allowed back on our planes. At great cost, we know the danger of lifting the ban on knives.”

Get ready for more of this tripe. No doubt slavering would-be dictators like Obama and Biden are saddened by the fact that Dylan Quick used a utility razor and not an “assault knife” such as a “tactical folder.” The Democrats won’t let that stop them, however. Emboldened by their successful infringements on your firearms rights, they will seek to further disarm you by banning knives. There is no “if” and there is no “when.”

It’s already happening.

Given that New York as a state is ruled by “Kim Jong Andy” Cuomo, a wretched progressive who rammed through, in the dead of night, the country’s most unconstitutional gun ban without discussion or public comment, it is saying something that New York City fares more poorly by comparison. New York ranks dead last among “tax friendly” states. It has the highest taxes in the country “by a large margin,” according to the New York Post. But New York is not alone at the bottom of the pile where liberty is concerned; it is joined by California, its counterpart on the West Coast.

New York and California are, to citizens in relatively free states, merely academic tragedies. To the citizen not living with the boot of a “progressive” governor or mayor on his neck, if he thinks anything at all of these states on the coasts, he is simply grateful not to dwell there. But New York and California matter because, traditionally, liberal infringements on the Constitution start at the coasts and creep into the heartland from without. Just as “creeping Shariah” threatens to impose feudal Muslim barbarity on Americans from without, creeping liberalism imposes lib tyranny from the coasts to middle America. This is purely a product of the liberal political mind, no better example of which can be found than in Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, are birds of an ideological feather. These are “men” – no liberal male can truly be considered a man, for cowardice and the impulse to control are hardly a man’s virtues – who hate the thought of you making decisions for yourself. You are too stupid to decide what you will eat or drink. You are too dangerous to be trusted with weapons of self-defense. You are too greedy to be allowed to keep the money you earn as a result of your labor. You are too helpless to be expected even to have a job when you can instead go on the government dole.

Thus, a dictator like Michael Bloomberg, smugly grinning his way through interviews in which he claims he is justified in telling New Yorkers what size soda they may drink or how much salt can be in their food, won’t even pretend to hide his desire to control every waking moment of your life. Nanny Bloomberg recently complained, in a speech in repressive Singapore, that freedom of speech and social media actually make it harder for him to govern as autocratically as he might like.

“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” quotes the New York Times. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”

Stop and consider the significance of that statement. Bloomberg has become accustomed to micromanaging the lives of his city’s denizens through governmental fiat. He delights in telling New Yorkers how to live – without a vote, without a public referendum. He actually bristles at the notion that people might criticize him when he attempts to bend them to his will.

In other words, Nanny Bloomberg resents whenever someone dares to tell him no. He wants to make you live as he believes you should. You are not a free citizen of the United States; you are a serf, a subject of New York City, and you will do as you are told, you stupid prole, without daring to question him on Twitter or Facebook.

In that he is no different from Gov. Kim Jong Andy, who famously and histrionically moaned into news cameras, “Nobody neeeeds ten booolllets to killlll a deeeeer!” He is no different from Nancy Pelosi, who wants to stifle the economy of Canada in accordance with her liberal hatred of business and energy production. He is no different from Barack Hussein Obama, who has successfully nationalized the United States’ health-care system and who has consistently lied about every facet of that plan – a plan that will cost Americans more for health care while drastically reducing their access to that care.

Rampant voter fraud, the work of complicit mainstream news propagandists, and the purchase of votes through redistributive “welfare” programs and recruitment of illegal aliens (who, once granted amnesty, will overwhelmingly vote for Democrats) have rendered it difficult, if not impossible, to vote out dictators like Nanny Bloomberg and Kim Jong Andy. The individual American who does not wish to cede control of his life and his family to the all-powerful state is left with little recourse. He cannot take up arms against his country without making everything worse. He cannot refuse because he will be imprisoned or killed.

Your only option is to do what these dictators hate most: speak out. Take your criticism to social media. Use the platform of the Internet. Speak out and drown these thugs, these bullies, these autocrats, in humiliation and scorn. Confront them with their crimes. Ridicule their families. Rewrite their identities with derisive nicknames. Shout them down at every conceivable turn.

Arrogant rulers like Bloomberg, Cuomo and Obama despise criticism above all. Give them more. Give them all you can.

Give them hell.

They take screen captures of things you write in the often irrational belief that they are amassing “evidence” against you. You don’t know what that evidence is supposed to show; you can’t say what crime it is you’ve committed. You know only that there are people who hate you, and they’re going to go on hating you. Whatever you do online, they’ll be there, wishing you ill and hoping you fail.

To call this “cyberstalking” begins to capture it, but most of the behaviors described herein are legal. It’s legal to hate someone (for now). It’s legal to call someone names. It’s legal to wish someone harm as long as you don’t imply that you’ll be doing the harming. The world of social media allows us to interact with any number of people – and to offend that same number in countless ways – to the extent that we can anger human beings all over the world. We anger them with our dissenting opinions. We anger them with our criticism. We anger them with our humor. We anger them with our sarcasm.

All you have to do to create a scenario wherein a virtual gang of cyberstalkers hunts you online is – express an opinion. That’s right: State your opinion online, and in social media and you will immediately make enemies. Look at the Twitter accounts of popular conservative pundits. You’ll find an army of people questioning their parentage, their sexuality, their motives, their intelligence. The more effective they are, the more hate they incite. Conservatives like Kurt Schlichter have been writing entire books that drive the libs crazy. Other prominent social media movers like Todd Kincannon have created online networks of conservatives, prompting the libs to create copycat networks and to condemn Kincannon’s every breath. If those pundits are beautiful women, you can add constant references to rape and murder, with every sexually charged perversion in between, to those attacks. Just ask Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, or other prominent female conservatives online.

The outrage isn’t limited to conservatives, of course. Every so often, some liberal idiot will open his mouth and prove himself stupid, only to be met by a hail of criticism, threats and encouragements to die of ailments or misadventures that are obscenely biological. Take, for example, Jenny McCarthy, who became famous first for taking her clothes off for men’s magazines and then for the obnoxious, shrill manner in which she hectored the nation’s parents not to get their children vaccinated. The number of threats and insults Ms. McCarthy has received have only recently been rivaled by those thrown at her one-time boyfriend, comedian Jim Carrey.

Carrey took his turn in the barrel recently by insulting gun owners. His opinion seems to be that anyone who owns guns hates children and enjoys seeing mass murders perpetrated. Understandably, many gun owners were outraged by his comments. While Carrey’s career isn’t what it once was, he is still famous enough that response to his opinions has been vehement. One imagines that sprinkled among those responses have been various encouragements that he go off and die of ebola – or date Jenny McCarthy again – whatever will most quickly rob him of the will to live.

So what is the common denominator here?

You don’t have to be famous to end up hated by multiple people you do not know. All you need is an opinion and access to the Internet. If you are especially good at offering your opinion, and particularly if what you say is also true, you will amass legions of enemies who know only that they dislike you. Given the passage of time, their hatred of you will evolve. They will hate you not for what you say and what you believe, but for what they think you have said and what they believe you believe.

Where all this online hatred crosses a line is difficult to specify. At some point, an argument can be made for harassment, but that is difficult and, where voluntary participation in social media is concerned, courts have ruled that you have very little recourse to complain. You are a willing actor in that environment. Certainly a case can be made for libel or defamation in some cases, especially if your online critics make maliciously false statements about you without regard for the facts. It is difficult to prove damages in many of those cases, but not impossible. People get sued all the time for things they say online.

Choosing to engage in communication online is tacit acknowledgment of the responses you may receive. If you are going to express your opinion, expect it to make people angry. If you are going to participate in social media, expect to make enemies as well as friends. You have only three options. The most obvious two are that you can either accept the consequences and post online, or you can avoid social media and live as a disconnected virtual hermit, an Internet Luddite. The third option is less obvious, but no less real: You can participate in social media but try very, very hard never to offend anyone. That means never expressing an opinion of any kind.

Bertrand Russell said, “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” There is no better metaphor for social media. You must accept this and cope with it if you hope to share your beliefs in the virtual public square.

The Internet is a mass of stupid people who translate your opinions. The Internet is criticism embodied. The Internet is hate, and that’s just how it’s going to be.

At least, she was born a man named Boyd Burton, complete with male genitalia and a Y-chromosome. She says she underwent sex-reassignment surgery and hormone therapy six years ago, and that she was reluctant to “come out” with regard to her sex because she feared the reaction she would face. Those fears were justified; she or he is now the center of a heated debate about whether sexually reassigned men should be permitted to compete with women in organized and professional sports.

Fox spoke with Cyd Zeigler earlier this month about the years she spent hiding her sexual identity from those she worked with and competed against as an MMA fighter. “For years I’ve known at some point it’s very likely the shoe would drop,” she told Zeigler. “Maybe someone would guess that I’m trans. Maybe they would know me from my life before I transitioned. I’ve been waiting for that phone call to happen.” Happen, that phone call did.

What has been lost in the subsequent debate over whether Fox should be allowed to compete with women is that she never intended to tell anyone. She only started addressing the issue after she was found out. The opponents she has been “tearing through,” in Zeigler’s words, were never meant to know. Not surprisingly, Fox doesn’t think she should have had to tell them.

“I don’t believe that a transgendered fighter should have to disclose her personal medical history to other female fighters before they fight,” she says in a video interview at MMA Junkie. She claims that the “medical community and the scientific community has come to the consensus that post-operative transsexual fighters who have been on hormone replacement therapy and testosterone suppression, when they’re going from male to female, don’t have, or haven’t been found to have, any physiological advantages over other women, so why should we have to disclose our personal medical history?”

The problem with Fox’s justification is that this simply isn’t true. In an attempt to advocate for the inclusion of transsexuals in sports, Salon asks, “Why don’t transsexuals dominate women’s sports?” The implication of the headline is that they don’t, and therefore any claims that transsexuals like Fox should not be allowed to compete against women are claims based in ignorance. Salon cites, as “evidence” that there is “no proof” of a physiological advantage among transsexual “female” athletes, a report produced by the former director of the “It Takes a Team! Education Campaign for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Sport, Women’s Sports Foundation” and the Sports Project Director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The report, in turn, asserts that no available research supports or refutes the assertion that a “transgendered” man competing as a woman has a physical advantage.

In other words, no, the medical and scientific communities have not come to a “consensus” on the physiological advantages, or lack thereof, of having been born a man, then performing as a sexually reassigned woman. There simply is not enough data to go on to make such judgments. In the absence of such research, what are we to do? We might be forced to rely on something as antiquated as common sense.

Miesha Tate, formerly a belt holder in the now defunct Strikeforce Mixed Martial Arts organization, told ESPN that she would not fight an athlete like Fox unless there was “solid research” that Fox is “100 percent like a female.”

“I have nothing against transgender people,” she went on. “You should live your life however you want. It’s about fighter safety. I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting in with someone who is a woman but developed as a man. I just don’t think it would be safe.”

The fact that Tate has to insert that caveat – that she has “nothing against transgender people” – is the larger problem. Rampant political correctness and the intellectual dishonesty of some activists within the “LGBT” (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community has made it impossible to oppose any facet of the LGBT sociopolitical agenda without facing accusations of “hate.” Weight classes and gender divisions exist in sports for a reason: to decrease the likelihood of a gross mismatch in physiological attributes, which better promotes both competition and, yes, safety. Tate and those who agree with her rightly express reservations about the physiological advantages a genetic man has when competing against women, regardless of the effects of hormone therapy or – excuse the terminology – the fact that “she” has had her penis exploded and sewn to her pelvis.

In her interview at MMA Junkie, Fallon Fox was quick to play the “hate” card. “Yes, I do believe [my transgender status] may deter some fighters from fighting me in the future. … I think that’s because they’re scared, number one because I’m pretty good … or they might just have a bias or they just might be a hateful person who doesn’t want to touch me, or whatever. I don’t want to fight those people anyways, because they’re scared, and what kind of fight would that be?”

Fallon Fox believes she is a woman. She has undergone extensive medical treatment in order to live as one. To the degree that she is happy with her life as a woman, this harms no one and is entirely her business. When she began competing against biological women in professional sports, however, she inflicted her opinion of her sexual identity on others without their agreement or their consent. She made her business their business, all while deceiving her opponents and the sporting organizations with which she worked. She would still be carrying on this deceit if she had not been found out – and given that medical science cannot come to consensus on how to test for sex in athletics, her claim that she is “proven” to have no advantage is a lie.

At best, this lie is wishful thinking by Fallon Fox – and this wishful thinking lies at the core of her entire sexual identity.

Police finally used flash-bang grenades and tear gas to remove Ryan Whidden and his wife, Nina, from their home, where Whidden barricaded the pair after discharging a firearm into his own cars in his driveway.

During the ordeal, during which nearby residents were evacuated from the neighborhood, Whidden appeared to mock police, who were speaking to him through a bullhorn.

“I love the robo voice,” he wrote on Facebook shortly before 10:00 am on Monday, roughly 40 minutes after barricading himself in his home with his wife.

He then “liked” his own status, before commenting, at 9:57 a.m., “You all can handle my lightwork [sic].”

Other status updates apparently removed from the account, but which were screen-captured and uploaded by morning-show listeners to local radio station 98.9 The Buzz, were much more ominous.

“You have no clue how long I waited for this day,” Whidden, whose Facebook account says he is a veteran of the United States Army, posted on Facebook. “[M]an the contrast in flavor is sweeter than I imagined.”

He went on to write, “[Expletive] me sideways I have missed killing things.”

Bizarrely, he appears to have gone on to comment on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, sometime after that before sharing the status update again. And a post to his Twitter account, dated Sunday evening but shared on Monday, defends Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh.

“I am curious how many people calling you stupid, immature or anything never go above the speed limit,” Whidden wrote to Suh’s Twitter account. “[I'm] not holding my breath.”

Whidden was charged with criminal possession of a weapon. He has been arraigned and remanded to the Ontario County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bond. Even as he awaits trial, however, the incident that has put him behind bars is actively being discussed on Facebook, blurring the line between news and popular culture.

“Maybe he heard a noise outside and he was just [following] Joe Biden’s instructions,” wrote one listener to the Buzz morning show on the show’s Facebook fan page. Biden has famously said for those who feel they need to protect themselves to go “Buy a shotgun.”

“He likes his own status… lol,” wrote another.

“People, he does NOT look like a psycho,” wrote yet another. “That is what is scary. This shows that even the most innocuous neighbor can be crazy when pushed to the edge.”

Further commentary on the page turned to speculation over the cause of the incident, including unconfirmed allegations that Whidden thought his wife was having, or planning, an extramarital affair. Nina Whidden’s photograph, reposted from her Facebook account, drew often vulgar responses from the Internet audience.

“She looks stoned,” wrote the first respondent, before the comments quickly turned sexual. “She is what you call good from a far,” read a follow-up comment, “but far from good.”

Rochelle Peachey, a relationship and couples counselor who founded the dating site I Love Your Accent, calls this phenomenon “keyboard bravery,” which could be applied both to Whidden’s online bravado and to the vicious commentary of bystanders that followed.

“Keyboard gangsters are [are] people who become extremely vocal when hiding in the computer,” Peachey told WND. “Typing things you would not dream of saying in person, suddenly you are a militant, tell it like is, don’t mess with me warrior. No one can touch you in the computer but then you see them and it’s on.”

As social media becomes ever more entwined in citizens’ daily lives, both the real-time updating of crimes and Internet-driven analysis after the fact is becoming more common.

Already, police are using Facebook to solicit crime tips and gather supporting data on criminal behavior. At least one federal court has ruled that the expectation of privacy ends when you share your data with friends through social media.

“One of the biggest liabilities of social media is the inherent lack of privacy,” agrees Dr. Carole Lieberman, M.D., a media psychologist and author of the book “Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets”. “Conversations that should be held privately and face-to-face wind up on social media for the world to see.”

As in Ryan and Nina Whidden’s case, “for all the world to see” extends to crimes as they happen.

Occasionally, however, it ends on a more positive note, as in the case of famed Mixed Martial Artist Renzo Gracie. Gracie beat down a would-be mugger in New York City and then tweeted the hapless man’s image.

“This one asks me why did I do that,” Renzo typed on the micro-blogging site, “pretending to be stupid, one little kick to the ribs makes him whine and apologize, as I’m writing this.”