Wednesday • November 19 • 2025
Vol.XVII • No.XLVII
Manchester, N.H.
This is not the first time Rep. Jim White has proposed this legislation, but it is back after the Lewiston, Maine, shooting. The bill would make property owners of gun-free zones liable if disarmed individuals were harmed as a result of that restriction.
Do you agree?
Gun-free zones appear statistically to be the more significant threat to public safety. Shooters, regardless of their grasp of reality, always seem capable of choosing locations where people are known to be disarmed. Making these areas less common can only limit victim-rich environments and, by extension, (perhaps) the incidents themselves.
A simple public safety measure opposed by public safety advocates, which Rep White is trying to get around.
White’s bill is similar to one that came before the Legislature in 2017 and was opposed by the Maine Gun Safety Coalition and the Retail Association of Maine. It was voted down in committee and didn’t get a vote by the full Legislature.
The idea has virtually no chance of winning the support of the Democratic controlled Legislature, which this year easily rejected efforts to allow guns in schools based on some of the same arguments.
But the bill highlights an ongoing national debate about the impact of gun-free zones, especially in communities that have been hit hard by gun violence.
“I think the situation in Lewiston might bring to light the necessity of this,” said White, who owns J. White Gunsmithing, a firearms shop in Guilford. “The most vulnerable among us are put in a more vulnerable situation because of these gun-free zones.”
We might feel inclined to say something like, how can you embrace the idea of the government adding another layer of enforcement upon property owners? The answer, I think, is that we’re not. We’re removing it. The Constitution is clear about the right to keep and bear arms. Principally, this is a defense against tyranny, specifically from your government. But there is no way to know precisely where, when, or how tyranny may present itself or through what machination. We uphold that right by prohibiting you from being disarmed anywhere you have a right to be (or have been invited).
As for tyrannous plots and intrigues (aside from the ones where we might think the government set up and triggered a shooter), many of the gunmen, after the fact, are revealed to be people known to the government (police, mental or public health, locals) who needed attention the State increasingly claims it is best suited to provide then does not—individuals who should trigger so-called safeguards that disarm others but never them.
The courts (also the government) have made it clear they (the government) have no obligation to protect you, so we presume this would include failing to prevent crimes whose scope rises as the result of laws that disarm us when it is clearly up to us to defend ourselves.
Rep, White’s law increasingly makes sense when confronted with all of that nonsense, but again, not in a state like Maine where Democrats increasingly control the government. Places where mass shootings will likely increase as a result of these facts. They will disarm you. They will allow others to disarm you. No one is or will be held responsible for what happens to you. Perhaps not even the shooter, who will likely end up dead, which is what many of them wanted or expected. Something an armed citizen could have provided much sooner with less injury and loss of life if permitted to exercise their natural right to defend themselves.
The post Should Owners of Gun-Free Zones Be Liable if Disarmed Citizens Are Shot or Killed? appeared first on Granite Grok.
Two new reports on Vermont’s Renewable Energy Standard, one by the Department of Public Service and Sustainable Energy Advantage and the other by an organization called Brattle, confirm what we’ve been pointing out for a long time – Vermont’s so-called green energy mandates are all cost and no benefit for the Vermonters who get stuck paying the bills.
And those costs are huge.
The DPS report focuses primarily on what the impact of the Renewable Energy Standard does to electric costs and ratepayers’ bills, and that will be the focus of this article. Brattle touches on this as well but also delves into the overall economic impact of the policy, which I will save for another time. (Spoiler alert: it’s all bad.)
The most important aspect of these two analyses is that they put the lie to the advocates’ talking point that the benefits of decarbonizing our economy and electrifying everything outweigh the costs. Nope.
The “big benefits” claim is based on a fiction wrapped in a fib called the “Social Cost of Carbon.” The Social Cost of Carbon is a mostly made-up calculation that attempts to affix a price to the negative economic impacts of releasing a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. It is highly subjective. Under the last three administrations, it has been officially pegged at $43 a ton (Obama), $3 to $5 a ton (Trump), and $51 a ton (Biden).
If you’re a fan of The Office, think of the Social Cost of Carbon as like Kevin’s magical accounting number, keleven, defined wonderfully by the Urban Dictionary as “a fictitious number used by an incompetent or corrupt individual to balance accounting books.” So, when the costs of your ideological “green” boondoggle are going to cost voters $2 billion, likely upsetting them, just add your $2.2 billion social cost of carbon keleven to the ledger, and presto, you’re back in the black!
A year ago, I wrote an in-depth article on the Social Cost of Carbon; the Climate plan’s costs are real. Savings, not so much, if you want more on this topic. But the short version of the gimmick is that while the costs of green energy policies are born entirely by Vermonters, any benefits are spread thinly across the globe. This means that only an infinitesimally minuscule, undetectable amount of any benefit from Vermonters’ “investment” actually accrues to Vermonters.
As explained by Dean Murphy of Brattle, “The increment of global carbon emissions or the decrement to global carbon emissions from Vermont going from its current RES (Renewable Energy Standard) to 100 percent will be very, very small. And the impact that will be felt globally will be very, very small because Vermont is a very small part of the world. And those increments to those costs in Vermont of flooding, climate change, changes in temperature, etcetera, because Vermont’s own contribution to the global climate is very small, the effects that you feel in Vermont are very small. You’ll feel much more impact from what happens in China and India than you will from what you did in Vermont.”
What’s happening in China and India is not carbon reduction—quite the opposite. The same goes for Russia and most if not all of the developing world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In other words, Vermont will see no benefits – cost-wise or trauma-wise — from reduced flooding or other impacts from severe weather in the future as a result of our renewable energy policy. The money we waste on these policies, however, is money we won’t have to prepare for any future natural disasters caused by the two new Chinese coal-fired power plants that come online every week. Or just Mother Nature doing her thing?
So, when advocates for these policies say, yes, we may be throwing hundreds of millions of your dollars at this, but we have to balance the cost of paying for these policies with the cost of floods, etc, you are free and encouraged to go ahead and point and shout “liar, liar, pants on fire.” There is no balance. In fact, we get stuck paying for both the cost of “going green” and any natural disaster that might have been prevented if we used that money to adapt to cope with evolving weather patterns.
Now, exactly how much money are we pouring into this hole of no return? According to TJ Poor of the Department of Public Service, if we continue with our current “business as usual” Renewable Energy Standard policy it will cost Vermont ratepayers about $130 million a year extra on our electric bills. If we adjust the Renewable Energy Standard along the lines of what is currently being proposed by the Renewable Energy Standard Working Group, that increases by another $50 million per year to $190 million per year.
Think of this a “Green Virtue Signaling Tax.” We get almost no material benefit for this otherwise unnecessary expense at a tremendous opportunity cost.
As Poor concludes, Vermont’s Renewable Energy policy “is not cost-effective for Vermont ratepayers…. And so those are the tradeoffs that we need to evaluate… how much Vermont ratepayers should pay for societal benefits.” I can tell you that our elected so-called representatives have a very different idea about what that number should be than do the people who are sticking with the bill.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.
The post Two New Studies Show Renewable Energy Policy Is All Cost/No Benefit for Ratepayers appeared first on Granite Grok.
Gender clinics welcome parent involvement as long as they do what they’re told.
Dartmouth Health recently testified that giving children puberty blockers and hormones is “rendered following consultation with medical and mental health professionals and parents and guardians.” But parents are given one option: social and medical transition.
Parents who push back against puberty blockers and hormones for their children can expect to face emotional blackmail and end runs around their authority.
Dartmouth Health coerces moms and dads with the suicide myth. They tell parents that their children are at immediate risk of suicide unless parents affirm their delusions and agree to let the clinic provide what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” (GAC). (Related: Trans or Die: The Ideological Blindness of a Dartmouth Health Endocrinologist.)
Detransitioner Prisha Mosley described this emotional blackmail when she testified to Maine legislators about the 15-minute appointment where she was diagnosed as being transgender:
She asked questions like ‘Do you like your period? Do you get along better with boys?’ And when I answered those questions honestly, she looked me in my eyes and told me ‘You are a boy.’ I remember my dad looking like he was in shock, and my mother was crying, and they just asked them, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
We get a sense of the pressure Dartmouth Health puts on parents from pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Frances Lim-Liberty’s Concord Monitor Op-Ed. “I had seen Nick a couple of months ago, and the family was ready to start gender-affirming hormone therapy at that visit. Today, they were no longer on the same page.”
When the parents expressed concern that their daughter might change her mind, Lim-Liberty responded, “But what if he doesn’t change his mind? What have we done then?”
Lim-Liberty conjures the suicide myth in another anecdote, this one about a boy whose parents had refused to sign the hormone consent form for three years. “My biggest fear manifested, would she make it to her 18th birthday, just three months away?” She describes her plans to wait out the parents. “I promise her we will start medical affirmation as soon as she turns 18.”
In her March testimony against HB619 which would ban sex-trait modifications for minors, Dartmouth Health internist Dr. Simrun Bal said that decisions about the medical transition of minors should be in the hands of the “patient, family, and physicians.” But she made it clear that she has no qualms about undermining parents who aren’t on board with social and medical transitions.
We often encounter parents who may not be supportive, and in that case the child turns to other trusted role models in their life, like teachers, peers, and others in the community who are leaders. I worry that not accessing those supportive social supports will mean difficulties in accessing care and going through a potential transition.
Even if parents find therapists and physicians who are concerned about the harms of GAC, our conversion therapy ban, signed by Gov. Chris Sununu, makes it a crime for them to help a confused girl learn to be comfortable with her own female body.
Parents and guardians can even lose custody if they don’t affirm their children’s new identity.
Until lawmakers regulate the medical industry or lawsuits end these practices, it’s important for parents to protect their children from white-coated activists who put profit and ideology above medical science and their patients’ welfare.
The post Night Cap: Sit Down and Shut Up: The Myth of Parent Involvement in Child Transing appeared first on Granite Grok.
What would be the difference between a Nikki Haley or Chris Christie presidency and a Biden presidency? Nothing positive IF you are an actual Republican. Haley/Christie would pour even more money (that we don’t have) into that military-industrial feed trough known as the War in Ukraine.
But that’s not a positive change IF you are an actual Republican.
Neither Haley nor Christie would actually close the border. Both are donor-class Republicans, and donor-class Republicans are essentially Democrats who want to cut taxes. Neither would actually reduce out-of-control spending. Instead, we would hear how cutting taxes will unleash economic growth, which will bring in more tax revenue (which is often true, but which the UniParty then immediately spends). Neither would actually “get tough” with China because the donor class believes in America-last … they call it free trade … trade policies.
Yet, if the polls are to be believed, one-third of New Hampshire “Republicans” are going to vote for these neocon imposters.
The post One -Third Of “Republicans” In New Hampshire Aren’t Even Republicans appeared first on Granite Grok.