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The Federal Bureau of Investigation released its Uniform Crime Report for 2018 on Monday, and the numbers indicate that more people were killed by knives than rifles.

The annual report touts an overall drop in violent crime for the second consecutive year, according to the Bureau’s news release on the numbers. However, the numbers specifically on homicides in the United States offer some insight into America’s ongoing gun control debate.

Due to multiple shooting massacres that took place in August, gun control proponents have once again turned their animus toward semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15. Perhaps the most salient example of this is 2020 Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke’s pledge, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

However, as has been the case in previous years, the numbers show that rifles in general — including semi-automatics as well as others — only account for a fraction of a percent of the total homicide rate in the United States.

Here’s what the FBI’s 2018 homicide numbers show us:

• Overall, the number of homicides dropped from 15,195 in 2017 to 14,123 in 2018. The overall number of people murdered with guns dropped as well.
• 10,265 were committed with firearms, out of which handguns accounted for 6,603.
• Rifles were used in 297 homicides, shotguns in 235, and “other guns” in 167.
• 2,963 homicides were listed as “firearms, type not stated.”

What does this show us? According to the available information, rifles accounted for just 2.1 percent of total homicides last year — and 2.9 percent of gun homicides.

Once again, deaths from knives and “personal weapons” like hands, fists, and feet were higher than the number of homicides committed with rifles. More than five times as many murders were committed with knives (1,515) as with rifles, and more than twice as many people were killed with “personal weapons” (672). Other years included in the FBI report’s table — which spans 2014-2018 — show similar disparities between the same weapon types.

Again, these numbers are just for rifles as a whole. There’s no further breakdown for what kind of action or cosmetic features the rifles had.

But despite the facts, the question of what to do about the AR-15 and other widely used semi-automatic rifles — sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” — will likely remain as one of the main focus points in America’s ongoing debate about guns and the Second Amendment.

The post The FBIs annual crime report is out, and the anti-gun crowd won’t like it appeared first on Conservative Review.

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Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren endorsed a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) policy proposal that includes taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, dubbed "A Just Society," calls for nationwide rent control and bans the federal government from denying welfare benefits based on an individual’s immigration status and previous criminal convictions. Warren became the first Democratic presidential candidate to endorse the plan, calling it "just the type of bold, comprehensive thinking we’ll need" to make "big, structural change."

Ocasio-Cortez is considered to be "one of the most important endorsements in America," and Warren’s immediate support of her latest policy marks another attempt to win the freshman congressman’s nod of approval. Warren’s quick embrace of Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is the latest sign of the social media superstar’s policy impact on the Democratic presidential field.

Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Warren returned requests for comment.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, consisting of six separate bills, calls for the expansion of welfare. Bills three and four make it illegal for the federal government to deny welfare benefits to ex-convicts and illegal immigrants. The legislation does not address how to pay for the rising cost of welfare, nor does it explain how it would accomplish its goals.

"It’s been really hard for me to find housing. I have the money to move places and stuff, but they deny me for my felony history. It’s not right," a man with a face tattoo said in the legislative package’s announcement video.

Ocasio-Cortez’s second bill, titled "The Place to Prosper Act," calls for federal rent control by imposing a 3 percent national cap on annual rent increases. Similar legislation has failed at the local level amid concerns that such policies increased housing prices while limiting supply. A recent study by the American Economic Association found that San Francisco rent control policy "drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law." The Council of Economic Advisers found that in 11 metropolitan areas with housing regulations, deregulation would reduce homelessness by an average of 31 percent. More than 80 percent of economists surveyed by the University of Chicago in 2012 found rent control to be bad policy.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal also includes an official poverty guideline that accounts for "new necessities," such as internet access, while the fifth bill creates a "worker-friendly score" based on union membership and other factors that would be used to evaluate or award government contracts.

The last bill in Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal establishes health care, housing, and healthy food as government-provided rights.

A Just Society is Ocasio-Cortez’s latest major policy initiative since introducing the Green New Deal, a $94.4 trillion environmental policy proposal that would have no effect on the environment.

All major Democratic presidential candidates quickly supported the Green New Deal, including Warren, Sanders, former vice president Joe Biden, and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.

To date, only Warren has endorsed "A Just Society."

The post Warren Backs AOC’s Illegal Immigrant Welfare Plan appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee raised $125 million in the third quarter of the year, a presidential fundraising record.

The pro-Trump effort said Tuesday that it has raised more than $308 million in 2019 and has more than $156 million in the bank. Republicans aim to use the fundraising haul to fight off Democrats’ impeachment effort.

Former President Barack Obama and the DNC raised just over $70 million in the third quarter of 2011.

“President Trump has built a juggernaut of a campaign, raising record amounts of money at a record pace,” said Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel credited Democratic attacks on Trump for motivating supporters to donate in record numbers.

“We are investing millions on the airwaves and on the ground to hold House Democrats accountable, highlight their obstruction, and take back the House and reelect President Trump in 2020,” she said.

The fundraising announcement comes as the pro-Trump efforts launched their first major advertising campaign of the cycle. Trump’s team aims to devote $1 billion to his reelection.

Last week, as House Democrats launched their impeachment effort, the Trump campaign announced it would spend $8 million to air an ad attacking Democrats for trying to “steal” the 2020 campaign. The RNC said it would spend $2 million attacking Democrats for their support of impeachment.

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A newly-unearthed photo shows former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter sharing a round of golf with Devon Archer, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings alongside Hunter.

The photo, first obtained by the Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, is believed to have been taken at the Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, New York. Both Hunter Biden and Archer both joined Burisma Holdings as board members in April 2014.

BUSTED: Photo shows Joe Biden and son Hunter golfing with Ukraine gas company exec back in 2014https://t.co/0pCHXuZ3oY

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 1, 2019

The photo raises serious questions regarding the extent to which Joe Biden is aware of his beleaguered son’s business deals overseas — something the top-tier 2020 White House hopeful claimed earlier this month he has never discussed with his son.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden told reporters during a campaign stop in Iowa. “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be looking at Trump.”

In a wide-ranging interview with New Yorker magazine, Hunter Biden claimed that he and his father discussed his business activities in Ukraine “just once.”

The photo’s emergences come as House Democrats are moving swiftly with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump over his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he raised the issue of Hunter’s business dealings in the eastern European country. A partisan CIA officer, with second-hand knowledge of the call, filed a so-called “whistleblower” complaint with the intelligence community about the call, alleging Trump sought to exchange U.S. military aid for a probe into Hunter.  However, both Trump and Zelensky have denied any pressure to look into the Biden family was applied and the White House, in a nod to transparency, released the transcript of leaders’ July 25th conversation.

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California Democrat Adam Schiff hit the Sunday news shows this weekend to gripe publicly again about President Donald Trump allegedly seeking foreign help against a political opponent.

But a Florida Republican used the same day to remind the country that Schiff was caught not too long ago trying to do exactly the same thing himself.

And Schiff’s target was, naturally, the president he keeps accusing.

In a Twitter post, as Fox News reported, Rep. Dan Gaetz dug up a recording of Schiff being taken in back in 2017 by Russian radio hosts posing as Ukrainian elected officials claiming to have compromising information about the president.

And Schiff was all ears.

TRENDING: Whistleblower’s Attorneys Blow Whistle on ’60 Minutes’ for ‘Literally Making Stuff Up’

“@RepAdamSchiff is a hypocrite,” Gaetz wrote succinctly.

.@RepAdamSchiff is a hypocrite. pic.twitter.com/LFbGFBUG6r

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) September 29, 2019

The recording Gaetz posted was made in 2017, when Schiff took a call from radio personalities Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetzov and Alexey “Lexus” Stolyarov. Kuznetzov was posting as Andriy Parubiy, a right-wing politician who was chairman of the Ukraine Parliament at the time.

As first reported by The Atlantic  in January 2018, the fake “Parubiy” told Schiff that the Ukraine government had obtained recordings of conversations showing that Russian agents had compromising information about Trump.

That material included nude photographs of Trump with a female Russian reality television star, which Russian President Vladimir Putin was supposedly using to blackmail Trump, according to a Daily Mail report from February 2018.

“Well obviously we would welcome a chance to get copies of those recordings,” Schiff told his caller.

Schiff’s office later told reporters that the congressman suspected the call was bogus from the beginning. And Schiff did make several references to contacting the FBI about the call and providing the agency with whatever information arose.

Check out the whole recording here:

RELATED: Schiff Accuses Trump of Risking US Security by Delaying Ukraine Aid, but Obama Denied Lethal Weapons Altogether

However, if Schiff’s office did think the call was a fake, it was tough to tell. The Daily Mail reported that Schiff’s office went to considerable lengths to try to get hold of the material that was discussed.

According to the newspaper, Kuznetzov and Stolyarov had emails to show Schiff’s staff trying to make follow-up arrangements after the call.

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“I understand Mr. Schiff had a productive call with Mr. Parubiy, and that Mr. Parubiy would like to make some material available to Mr. Schiff through your embassy,” a Schiff aide wrote in an email to what she thought was Parubiy, according to the Daily Mail.

“Please let me know how best to arrange pick-up of those materials from your Embassy in Washington, D.C.”

According to the Daily Mail, the FBI would neither confirm nor deny whether it had received any notice from Schiff’s office about Ukraine officials peddling compromising information about the president.

Now, there’s no way of knowing for sure whether Schiff and his office knew the phone call was fake, but it’s tough to believe that an American congressman would choose to spend eight minutes on the phone with a caller he knew to be bogus.

It’s tougher to believe that his staff would try to follow up to get information discussed in the call if everyone knew it was faked.

But what’s absolutely no problem to believe is that Schiff is on an audio recording doing exactly what he’s accusing Trump of doing – with nowhere near the same evidence.

For all the Sunday talk show blather, the shifty California Democrat is still the same man as the one who assured the media repeatedly that there was ample evidence of Trump “collusion” with Russia – right up until the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller ended up finding nothing of the kind.

And yet he keeps peddling the same wares, hoping the American public, at some point, is going to buy.

Gaetz, now in his second term in Congress, but first in the minority party, has been building a reputation recently for needling the Democratic majority.

This time, his tweet had it right on the money:

Schiff is a hypocrite.

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Imagine being a member of Antifa blocking and harassing an elderly woman using a walker & actually thinking YOU are the one fighting "fascism."pic.twitter.com/jpbiV34RuI — Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) September 30, 2019 The woman was trying to get to a free speech event at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Canada with Maxime Bernier and Dave Rubin. There […]

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Guest post by Ted Malloch

The 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (庆祝中华人民共和国成立70周年大会) will be a ceremonial event praising communism and will include a grand military parade as its spotlight to celebrate National Day of the People’s Republic of China which takes place on 1 October 2019 in Beijing.

When the throngs of Red Chinese parade in front of the President for Life- Xi Jinping, on October 1, replete with thousands of military troops and enough military hardware to destroy the world many times over, what should the Free World witness and recall?

Should we really celebrate or instead decry the occasion?

Here are TEN proven things with abundant and irrefutable evidence that Red China has accomplished in these seventy tumultuous and horrendous bloody years of communism that should NOT be ignored or forgotten.

They won’t be part of the big celebration in Red China and our mainstream media will not mention them, under any circumstance.

1 The most infamous experiment in social engineering, the so-called,

‘Great Leap Forward’ organized by Mao Zedong saw the loss of 45 million lives in the deadliest politically created famine in all of human history.

2 The Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1976 to 1976 killed 3 million citizens in order to stop the “bourgeois elements” in the violent move to total Marxist-Leninist communism.

3 In 1966 the Red Guard killed 1,722 people in just a few days in Beijing, alone.

4 The Concentration / Re-Education Camps in Red China, present from the start of the Communist regime until the present, have incarcerated millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uyghurs, today.

5 The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre saw 10,000, mostly students, killed who were designated “primitives” by the Chinese Communist Party.

6 Religious freedom is nonexistent in Communist China with official atheism the state preference. Underground churches operate at their own peril. An estimated 100 million Christians worship in constant fear and persecution.

7 The surveillance state in Red China has 200 million CCCTV cameras (1 for every 7 people) focused on its population in order to control and “score” them.

8 Humans rights do not exist in China, where routinely freedom of speech, movement, the press, and religion are ignored and abrogated, according to the US State Department, the UN and numerous NGO monitors.

9 There have been an estimated 12 million abortions a year in Red China for many decades, where a one child policy was strictly enforced until recently.

10 In sum, a rich 5000-year-old civilization was utterly destroyed in just a decade starting in 1949 under brutal communist rule that has continued unabated for seven decades now.

Over 100 million human lives in total have been sacrificed on the altar of RED Chinese Communism.

And this doesn’t even count the more modern crimes ,like buying off entire political classes in whole countries , including the US (“sharp power”), stealing territories in maritime areas, keeping North Korea in business and with weaponry, covetous looks at resource rich Siberia, stealing intellectual property, and totally mishandling Hong Kong — probably the one most worth mentioning of current vintage.

This is the greatest travesty of our times and nobody seems to want or need to do anything to challenge it and the dictatorial, one party, totalitarian, criminal, communist, mercantilist remine of the Communist Party of China —until Donald Trump.

The post Ted Malloch: DECRYING SEVENTY YEARS OF RED CHINESE COMMUNISM appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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Federal immigration officers seized “almost 13 pounds of fentanyl” at a port of entry in Arizona last week, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

A CBP news release published Thursday explains that officers at the Nogales Port of Entry stopped a vehicle being driven by a 30-year-old Tuscon woman and referred it for secondary inspection as she tried to take the sedan across the border into the U.S. interior. A drug dog pointed officers to check under the seats of the car, where they found “nearly 50 packages of drugs.”

Five of those packages, CBP said, contained almost 13 pounds of fentanyl with an estimated street value of $137,000.

Relatively cheap and incredibly potent, fentanyl is used as an additive in all kinds of illicit drugs on the black market such as heroin and cocaine, which has made it a key driver of overdose deaths in the ongoing drug crisis. Just a tiny amount of it can be deadly. According to the DEA, “as little as two milligrams is a lethal dosage in most people.” Assuming a lethal dose of two milligrams, 13 pounds of fentanyl would be enough to kill 2,948,350 people.

The release says that officers seized over five pounds of heroin worth more than $61,000 and almost 41 pounds of methamphetamine at the same stop. It adds that officers at Nogales seized an estimated overall total of $1.9 million in illicit drugs that week, including 123 pounds of meth in a different car.

Elsewhere in Arizona earlier this month, CBP says it seized almost four lbs of fentanyl from a car stopped at the San Luis Port of Entry and that officers seized “nearly three-quarters of a pound of fentanyl” from a 19-year-old Phoenix man attempting to cross at the Lukeville port of entry. Last month at a different Arizona port of entry, CBP announced the seizure of almost two pounds of fentanyl in a Mexican woman’s underwear after being alerted by a drug dog.

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To anyone who isn’t dead set on using President Trump’s phone call as an excuse to remove him from office, Hunter Biden’s past ties to a Ukrainian energy company may look suspicious. They start looking more suspicious when examined in light of the history of the company itself.

On Sunday night’s episode of Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News Channel, LevinTV host Mark Levin and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer took a hard look at Hunter Biden’s business in the Ukraine and dad Joe Biden’s proximity to it.

Schweizer explained that, prior to his father’s election to the second-highest office in the land, Hunter Biden worked as a lobbyist and had no prior experience in foreign investment. Afterward, however, with some financial backing from then-Senator John Kerry’s stepson, Hunter started an investment firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners.

Schweizer’s 2018 book “Secret Empires” outlines the details of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in both the Ukraine and China and how they happened and operated in such close proximity to his vice president father.

The Ukrainian portion of Hunter Biden’s story begins in 2014, Schweizer explained. Shortly after Ukraine’s troubles with Russia began that year, Joe Biden was made point person on the matter for the U.S. government. Two months after the country’s former prime minister was driven from power and after Russian forces started to invade, the author explained, “a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma decides it’s a great idea to hire the vice president’s son as a consultant, adviser, and board member” despite his lack of background in the energy industry or in Ukraine.

“Keep in mind that Burisma is a corrupt company — it’s probably the most corrupt company in Ukraine,” Schweizer added. “There were lots of western firms that would not even deal with them, partly because it was headed by this Ukrainian oligarch named [Mykola] Zlochevsky, who was the former energy minister … and he basically created Burisma by stealing assets — state assets — and putting them into his own company.”

In fact, by the time Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, the author elaborated, a U.K. government fraud office “had actually frozen Zlochevsky’s assets and bank accounts because of money-laundering, all sort of other serious allegations.”

Schweizer summed up the concerns about Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma:

The point is Hunter Biden joined forces with a very corrupt oligarch, got a big payday. And he got a payday that he didn’t deserve, Mark, because he wasn’t selling his expertise; he had none. And a key question here that nobody seems to want to ask in the media is: What was he being paid for? He wasn’t being paid for his expertise; what was he being paid for? And what were the Ukrainians expecting to get in return?

And I think when you overlay the financial payments with the fact that Joe Biden, as point person on Obama administration policy to Ukraine, was steering billions of dollars of western money to Ukraine, it becomes crystal clear exactly why they were paying him money: They wanted access, and they wanted to influence Joe Biden. And Joe Biden’s been around a long time, and he had to know exactly why his son was being paid this money.

The two also discussed Hunter Biden’s big Chinese business deal following an official United States delegation to the Asian country in 2013, the details of which were also outlined in “Secret Empires.”

Schweizer is also the author of the 2015 book “Clinton Cash,” which describes Bill and Hillary Clinton’s suspicious financial actions, especially those while Hillary was U.S. secretary of state.

Watch:

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Who Is The Whistle-blower?

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— LevinTV (@LevinTV) September 26, 2019

The post Author of ‘Clinton Cash’ tells Levin all about the shady history of the Ukrainian company that hired Hunter Biden appeared first on Conservative Review.

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