THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
Americans continue to purchase firearms for self-defense, the FBI
will need to maintain the National Instant Check System (NICS).
Current wait times are already higher than ever before as
unprecedented numbers of purchases have flooded the system.
With no clear end in sight, Gun Owners of America has sent a letter
to the FBI, urging them to maintain the system so Americans can
exercise their 2nd Amendment right and defend themselves and
their loved ones. From GOA:
Gun Owners of America sent a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) urging the agency to avoid breakdowns in the National Instant Check System (NICS).
“Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing and exacerbating the underlying constitutional infringements with the NICS system. If state or federal governments do not remain open, then Americans will be denied their Second Amendment-protected right to purchase firearms,” GOA’s Senior Vice President Erich Pratt wrote. “The long-term solution is for Congress to repeal this law. But in the short-term, the federal government is faced with a choice: ignore the Brady Transfer Date, thus intimidating gun stores into denying Americans their rights, or reallocate resources so that Americans will not be denied their rightfully purchased firearms.”
The letter also requests that the Justice Department revoke the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) letters that were sent to Alabama, Minnesota and Michigan, which exempted concealed carry permit holders from NICS.
“Gun Owners of America has always believed that the NICS federal background check system is unconstitutional because it infringes the Second Amendment rights of Americans… In times of uncertainty, the right to keep and bear arms is more important than ever. The Second Amendment cannot simply be put on hold because of COVID-19, any more than can the First or Fourth Amendments. Accordingly, we would urge [the FBI] to take the appropriate steps to ensure that Americans can acquire firearms during this time of need,” Pratt concluded.
Erich Pratt, or another GOA spokesperson, is available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over two million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA's Press Center.
About Gun Owners of America
Erich Pratt, or another GOA spokesman, is available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over 1.5 million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA's Newsroom.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
Firearm ownership may be guaranteed under our Constitution by the Second Amendment. But it’s secondary at best to the New Jersey officials who’ve closed down gun stores during our Wuhan flu panic, calling them non-essential. Now two Garden State officials — who some would say are non-essential themselves — are being sued for trampling constitutional rights.
“The case was filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and the New Jersey Second Amendment Society on behalf of Robert Kashinsky and Legend Firearms, a gun shop in the state,” reports WND.com. “Defendants are Gov. Philip D. Murphy and State Police Supt. Patrick J. Callahan.”
“‘Gov. Murphy cannot simply suspend the Second Amendment, and neither can Supt. Callahan,’ said SAF founder Alan M. Gottlieb,” WND continues. “Yet, under this emergency order, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The Constitution, and federal law, don’t allow that. New Jersey may have been the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights, but they’re the last state to recognize it.”
WND further explains:
The case developed when Kashinsky sought to purchase a firearm for personal protection during the current crisis.
However, Murphy issued Executive Order 107 on March 21 that ordered all non-essential retail businesses closed to the public. The order does not include licensed firearms dealers on its list of “essential” businesses that may continue operating during the crisis.
That means the Second Amendment was violated, the case explains.
“In order for New Jersey residents to purchase firearms,” explained Gottlieb, “they must go through a licensed firearms retailer and pass a background check. However, Murphy’s order was subsequently followed by a notice posted on the state police website that the agency is no longer conducting background checks.”
The plaintiffs also explained that while they don’t seek to minimize the Wuhan flu’s seriousness and understand that lifestyle changes are currently necessary, there are constitutional limits to the actions government may take.
For example, could a state suspend the right to free speech if it somehow considered doing so beneficial in combating the virus?
Of course, firearms aren’t technically a “survival need” like water, food, and shelter — but they can be necessary for survival. In fact, when seeing all the liberals hoarding food, one should wonder: If they really think things could get that bad, do they have guns and ammo? For a mountain of food won’t help in a social breakdown situation if bad actors can take it, and maybe your life, from you.
(And what’s with the toilet paper hoarding? So when the apocalypse comes, you can drop dead with a clean backside?)
But New Jersey, where only the mobsters are supposed to have guns, isn’t alone. While demand for firearms and ammo has recently skyrocketed as common people exercise common sense, left-wing governments are again demonstrating how uncommon the quality is. As American Thinkerreports:
In mid-March, Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen, of Champaign Illinois, signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency, despite the absence of any coronavirus cases in Champaign. With the order is in place, Feinen has arrogated to herself the ability to ban gun sales.
Just a few days later, on March 16, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell also issued an emergency order allowing her to ban the sale or transportation of firearms.
In Philadelphia, the police department stopped issuing concealed carry permits, while simultaneously announcing that they would be “delaying arrests for ... narcotics offenses, thefts, burglary, and prostitution.” However, the police will “continue to arrest people carrying a firearm without a permit.” [So when three unaccountable muggers with knives rob you, you’ll be unable to defend yourself.]
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a region notoriously hostile to the Second Amendment, a gun store located in Alameda County (home to the City of Berkeley) tried to keep its two locations open despite the local and state-wide shut-down orders [video below].
The sheriff’s department responded to the gun dealer, as the tweet below relates.
@Solartacticalyou are not an essential business in Castro Valley. Please move to minimum basic operations per the Alameda County Health Order.pic.twitter.com/SWNgerwyQA
So you’re left to protect yourself. Yet the leftists would prevent that, instituting irrational policies that could only be driven by ill intent and/or stupidity born of intellect-clouding emotion. Miscreants bent on evil, who’ll take advantage of social breakdown and commit robbery, murder, or rape, don’t care about anti-firearms prohibitions. Such laws only affect the good people.
The leftist mentality, in its least-malevolent form and often exhibited by useful idiots ignorant of the aforementioned 2005 ruling, says “It’s the government’s job to defend us.” (Heck, Bernie Sanders inveighs even against charity, claiming that it’s the government’s job, too.) History tells a different tale.
During the Los Angeles riots in 1992, a politically correct government’s sins of omission allowed for a period of mayhem, and good citizens were harmed. Innocent truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten almost to death. And the only people able to defend themselves were the armed. Just consider ex-merchant David Joo, who described in the video below what transpired outside his store in ’92 after the police fled the scene.
On a lighter note, there may be a way for gun dealers to get around future non-essential-business-closure orders. Get your establishment classified as a grocery, and sell guns “on the side” (wink, nod). Just carry a few non-perishable food items and offer them gratis with a gun purchase. You could call your store, oh, I don’t know, Guns & Butter.
Gov. Murphy Admits Denying Press Credentials For NJ2AS News - Hates First Amendment as
well!
Governor Murphy, who’s taken our Second Amendment rights away, told NJ2AS News (on 03/27/2020) they shouldn’t have First Amendment rights. He tried to imply Alejandro Roubian is not a real journalist and should not be allowed in his pressers. Then he outright refused to answer his question. This is unreal!
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
Government officials from the president down to mayors aren’t taking what could be counterproductive measures against the Chinese Virus simply because top virologists and epidemiologists are providing sound data that portend a future depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Americans aren’t locked in their homes, washing their hands, and wondering whether they’ll die of pneumonia because all the information they receive from the leftist news sources and social media are accurate.
Rather, hard-left and Democrat activists are pumping out advertisements and faulty “science” to help Democrat president contender Joe Biden and drive public officials to adopt left-wing public policies.
The goals: destroy Trump, elect Biden, and move the country toward totalitarian socialism.
“The Democratic Party’s leading super PAC will begin hitting President Donald Trump over coronavirus in four battleground states, using millions from liberal billionaire George Soros,” the Washington Free Beacon’s Joel Schoffstall reported yesterday:
Priorities USA Action — the Democratic Party’s largest super PAC — will spend $6 million this week on advertisements criticizing Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ads will run in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The PAC received $3 million in contributions from Soros’s Democracy PAC on Feb. 21, new filings show. Soros’s seven-figure donation accounts for 77 percent of the $3.9 million the PAC reported hauling in last month.
The PAC will spend $150 million against Trump in key states, Schoffstall reported, and has raised “$27 million since January 2019. Its largest donor has been billionaire hedge fund manager Donald Sussman, who has given the group $8 million this cycle. Soros is now the group’s second-largest donor at $5 million.”
In its report on the pair of hate-Trump subversives citing the Wall Street Journal, the Media Research Center noted that Sussman gave $21 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, while Soros donated $9.5 million. The former Nazi stooge was Clinton’s second biggest contributor.
Scare Site
Beyond the leftist hit job on Trump, a state representative from Alaska, two “tech bros,” as The Federalist’s Madeline Osburn called them, and a gaggle of other top tech titans are providing faulty data at their COVID Act Now mapping tool that supposedly tracks the pathogen’s progress.
Their information “provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to ‘flatten the curve,’” Osburn reported, and governors and other public officials are acting on it.
“But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister,” Osburn reported:
When Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins announced a shelter-in-place order on Dallas County Sunday, he displayed COVID Act Now graphs with predictive outcomes after three months if certain drastic measures are taken. The NBC Dallas affiliate also embedded the COVID Act Now models in their story on the mandate.
The headline of an NBC Oregon affiliate featured COVID Act Now data, and a headline blaring, “Coronavirus model sees Oregon hospitals overwhelmed by mid-April.” Both The Oregonian and The East Oregonian also published stories featuring the widely shared data predicting a “point of no return.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cited COVID Act Now when telling her state they would exceed 7 million cases in Michigan, with 1 million hospitalized and 460,000 deaths if the state did nothing.
The models predict, ominously, a “point of no return,” a great concern because “COVID Act Now’s predictions have already been proven to be wildly wrong.”
COVID Act Now predicted that by March 19 the state of Tennessee could expect 190 hospitalizations of patients with confirmed Wuhan virus. By March 19, they only had 15 patients hospitalized.
In New York, COVID Act Now claimed nearly 5,400 New Yorkers would’ve been hospitalized by March 19. The actual number of hospitalizations is around 750. The site also claimed nearly 13,000 New York hospitalizations by March 23. The actual number was around 2,500.
In Georgia, COVID Act Now predicted 688 hospitalizations by March 23. By that date, they had around 800 confirmed cases in the whole state, and fewer than 300 hospitalized.
In Florida, COVID Act Now predicted that by March 19, the state would face 400 hospitalizations. On March 19, Gov. Ron DeSantis said 90 people in Florida had been hospitalized.
It’s no surprise that COVID Act Now’s data are shockingly inaccurate. The people who run the data site are not scientists — meaning virologists or epidemiologists, Osburn reported.
The founders are Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a Democrat in Alaska’s legislature, and three Democrat tech executives: “Zachary Rosen, Max Henderson, and Igor Kofman — who are all also donors to various Democratic campaigns and political organizations since 2016. Henderson and Kofman donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, while Rosen donated to the Democratic National Committee, recently resigned Democratic Rep. Katie Hill, and other Democratic candidates.”
Public officials have acted on the faulty progression models.
Last week, a top epidemiologist warned that lockdowns and other measures based on faulty data could be counterproductive.
Pastor Costi Hinn of Redeemer Bible Church in Arizona, discusses the most important preparation of all: salvation and the eternal destiny of our souls. He discusses the importance of repentance and why today is the day of salvation.
Pastor Costi's websites are:
RedeemerAZ.org
ForTheGospel.org
Please subscribe to the Redeemer Bible Church YouTube channel for sermons and live videos.
Recon Marine and Infowars reporter Tim Reames @TimReames joins The Alex Jones Show in studio to expose the government gun confiscation programs pushed through local religious leaders.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The media is full of stories of mask rationing and shortages. Health care professionals are reusing masks, slathering them with sanitizer, or substituting scarves in place of surgical masks. Democrats demand that President Trump make more masks immediately using the Wartime Production Act.
But why aren’t there any masks?
Surgical masks, like anything in the medical field, are tightly regulated. You can’t just make a mask. Some masks have to be certified by the FDA and others by the CDC. Some are certified by both the FDA and the CDC.
Until recently, the public had no problem buying N95 respirators for use in construction. These masks are certified by the CDC. Why is the CDC in the business of certifying industrial masks, you may wonder? Because, as discussed previously, the CDC does every possible thing except what people think it does. The component of the CDC that does this is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
NIOSH is not to be confused with OSHA, even though they were created at the same time, through the same law, and serve a very similar function: making this another skein in the infinitely tangled web of the federal bureaucracy.
The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.
Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.
The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH. Except it may approve some conditionally for use.
The FDA and CDC bureaucracy are not up to speed with the current crisis. There aren’t enough inspectors and the Wuhan Virus won’t wait on inspectors from the FDA or NIOSH to do their job.
Instead of streamlining its approvals and inspection process, the CDC lowered its mask protection recommendation for health care workers on the front lines.
The CDC is willing to tell health care professionals to use scarves, rather than accelerate approvals.
Meanwhile N95 mask manufacturers feared being sued if masks meant for industry were used in surgical settings, which meant that they wouldn’t sell those masks to health care providers. At least not until a law protecting them against lawsuits was passed. All this, of course, took even more time.
Smaller manufacturers have tried to get in the game, only to discover the regulatory challenges of it. Fashion businesses that tried to jump in have settled for trying to make surgical masks that they hope will be FDA certified. Meanwhile the big manufacturers were making masks in the People’s Republic of China. And those masks are not leaving ChiCom territory except by the express will of its government.
Worse still, as the crisis grew, the People’s Republic of China bought up the world’s supply of masks, at one point importing 20 million masks in 24 hours. American companies even eagerly donated masks.
But why was the United States so unprepared for a run on masks before the pandemic arrived?
After Katrina, the Bush administration had set a goal of billions of masks in case of a major disaster. But that goal was never met. When the H1N1 swine flu outbreak arrived, we were badly unprepared.
The last run on masks took place during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak under Obama. Hospitals and health care providers began running low on masks and the Strategic National Stockpile released 85 million N95 masks. The stockpile was never replenished and today there are only 12 million N95s.
There were warnings back then that "maskmaking operations have moved outside the U.S., and 90% of masks sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico or China" and that "Mexico and China would be unlikely to export their supplies before making sure their own populations were fully protected."
While the Obama administration threw billions at assorted solar and wind boondoggles, it failed to invest the money that would have set up reliable mask production in the United States of America. All the experts who claimed that “science” predicted the imminent demise of the planet had been too busy trying to control the weather through higher taxes to spend money on anything as crude as masks.
The secret warehouses where the strategic mask reserve was supposed to be kept are a mess and millions of the masks are expired. New York City asked for millions of masks and got 78,000 expired masks. Oklahoma got 500,000 expired masks. This is the situation, not just at the federal level, but state mask stockpiles, where they exist, also often consisted of storehouses of expired N95 masks.
Had the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza been followed, there would be no mask shortage. And had the Obama administration at replaced the masks that it withdrew from the Strategic National Stockpile, we might have had 100 million or so masks in the stockpile.
And had we brought mask manufacturing back to America, we would have a pipeline for making more.
Instead the Wuhan Virus brought a perfect storm, cutting us off from our manufacturing sources in the People’s Republic of China, after the Obama administration had depleted our mask reserve, while regulatory barriers make it difficult for companies quickly get in the game and produce more masks.
President Trump has done his best to cope with a sudden disaster that was decades in the making.
The mask shortage was not a disaster that could have been remedied in January. We were never going to produce a billion masks in two months. The same nation that could turn out armies and fleets in a year would have, but that nation had its manufacturing at home and fewer regulatory barriers.
Big clothing companies like Hanes have tried to step up. As have smaller manufacturers. But the federal bureaucracy has slowed down the process for both distributing existing masks and making new ones. There are plenty of companies eager to make masks, without any Wartime Production Act pressure. They just need a streamlined process that will clear as many of the barriers and delays out of the way.
Meanwhile making new N95 masks requires melt-blown fabric and there’s a global shortage of the machines that produce it because, once again, China has monopolized the marketplace.
Ordering companies to make them by using the Wartime Production Act won’t bring them into being.
All the posturing by Senate Minority Leader Schumer, House Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and the rest of the circus about the Wartime Production Act is just fantasy socialist wargaming.
Outsourcing our industrial base to the People’s Republic of China came with a price. Reconstructing that base won’t just happen overnight. Not when it often has to be done all the way from the ground up.
President Trump had warned us of the danger of our dependency on China’s Communist regime. The Democrats who denied that reality now act as if waving around a piece of legislative paper can make products spring forth out of thin air as long as the right orders are given and enough money is spent.
Real life doesn’t work that way.
The Democrats had many years in which they could have financed American factories making protective gear or at the very least replenished the mask supplies from the swine flu outbreak in 2009. They did none of those things and now want to blame President Trump because he couldn’t snap his fingers and create a billion masks in two months. Meanwhile they failed to restore 85 million masks in 7 years.
If we’re going to learn anything from this crisis, we have to tell the truth and hold them accountable.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
HARRISBURG, Pa. —A pastor’s wife and lawmaker in Pennsylvania has introduced a resolution calling for “A State Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” in the midst of the novel coronavirus crisis. Two Democratic legislators have expressed opposition, calling her proposal “the stupidest resolution I’ve ever seen” and “forcing her belief system on others.”
“During the pandemic of 2020 and the ensuing uncertainty and anxiety of this time, Pennsylvanians may be comforted by turning to a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer as well as the wise words [signed by] our great President Abraham Lincoln,” she wrote, then proceeded to quote from the historic resolution.
“[I]t is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history: that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”
Borowicz personalized the text at times to fit into current circumstances.
“Insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this world … May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of the pandemic, which now desolates this Commonwealth may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people.”
“We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown … but we have forgotten God and we have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and … we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own,” the 1863 resolution reads.
“Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us,” it laments. “It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
The resolution seeks to make March 30 the “State Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,” just as the proclamation signed by then-President Lincoln made March 30, 1863 a day of prayer and repentance as well.
But some Democratic lawmakers in the Commonwealth object to the proposal, such as Rep. Kevin Boyle of Philadelphia, who remarked on Twitter on Monday, “I do believe this is the stupidest resolution I’ve ever seen a politician introduce.”
Rep. Dan Frankel of Squirrel Hill and Chair for the House Health Committee also opposed the resolution in a statement to PennLive.
“It’s painfully ironic that in her resolution Rep. Borowicz references Lincoln, who sought to unite a nation divided by the moral virus of slavery. It’s ironic because right now the Pennsylvania government is working to unify to combat this epidemic of the coronavirus. Borowicz, using archaic language specific to her personal faith tradition, simply divides us by forcing her belief system on others,” he remarked.
“As a public servant, I believe that is my role, not directing the personal faith practices of my fellow Pennsylvanians,” Frankel said.
Last year, Boyle, a Roman Catholic, introduced a resolution seeking to chastise Borowicz for declaring Jesus as the nation’s “only hope,” and that at His name “every knee will bow” — among other numerous references — during a prayer that was delivered shortly before a Muslim legislator was sworn into office. A Muslim leader also presented a prayer that day, which drew applause, while some conversely had walked out on Borowicz.
“A prayer that cites a particular religious belief as ‘our only hope,’ that ‘we’ve lost sight of you, we’ve forgotten you, God, in our country, and we’re asking you to forgive us,’ and that ‘every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess’ is unnecessarily divisive and polarizing,” Boyle’s resolution asserted.
Gov. Tom Wolf, who identifies as a Methodist, similarly said that he was “horrified” by Borowicz’s prayer.
“I grew up in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn on the basis of freedom of conscience. I have a strong spiritual sense. This is not a reflection of the religion I grew up in,” he stated, according to USA Today.
However, Borowicz said that she prays no differently any other time, including when she is praying with family and friends. She is also the founder of Make a Stand USA, an organization that seeks to “to hold prayer rallies in each state, bringing the country back to God.”
“I had no idea that that would cause controversy. It wasn’t directed at anyone,” she told the American Pastors Network.
Pennsylvania Founder William Penn, Quaker, street preacher and author of books such as “No Cross, No Crown”
The organization defended Borowicz in noting that Penn founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on the Word of God, and that even the preamble to the Pennsylvania Constitution refers to “Almighty God.”
“Isaiah 30:9 says that spiritually rebellious people ‘will not hear the law of the Lord.’ So, we should not be surprised when some people object to the Word of God when it is read, spoken or used in our prayers,” said Executive Director Gary Dull.
“When a person prays a ‘Christian prayer’ to the Christian God of the Bible, it only stands to reason that Christian and biblical terms will be used in that prayer,” he added. “That may and will offend some people, but that does not mean that such a freedom should be taken away.”
Borowicz’s husband, Jason Borowicz, serves as an associate pastor at Crossroads Community Church in Jersey Shore.
