“Guns silence thousands of lives every year. ‘The Shotline’ was created to bring these voices back using AI technology in order to call our representatives,” Manuel Oliver posted on X Wednesday. “I just placed a call to @marcorubio using one of these voices, and you can join me.” (See the graphic introductory FB post, found here.)
Oliver is the Venezuelan immigrant who became obsessed with blaming his adoptive country’s gun laws and using an international tribunal to bankrupt gunmakers and eviscerate the Second Amendment after his son was killed in the Parkland shootings. That was as the armed school resource officer made sure only those inside the mandated “gun-free zone” were at risk.
Those of us with children who have not suffered such a loss can only imagine the agony surviving parents will live with for the rest of their lives.
With that acknowledged, our natural sympathy does not entitle sufferers to lay claim to our rights. Especially when the one demanding them is someone who opted to leave the corrupt, Marx-inspired tyranny of Venezuela and mandate the same “gun control” edicts on the people who took him in as are imposed in the land he fled.
A vehicle Oliver uses to try and impose such tyranny here is Change the Ref, a tax-deductible nonprofit now partnering with Marx… uh March for Our Lives, the wagon David Hogg hitched his star to, to unveil The Shotline. (www.theshotline.org)
“Guns silence thousands of innocent lives every year,” the website claims. “Using AI technology, we re-created the voices of those shot and killed by guns so they can call our representatives in hopes of changing our country’s gun laws.”
Guns are inanimate objects, and blaming them for acts of volition is primitive, superstitious nonsense, meaning it’s sure to appeal to emotion-driven, low-information Democrats and a fawning media.
As for AI, we’ve already seen how ChatGPT is essentially bias-parroting Garbage In/Garbage Out on guns – that is, when it’s not “hallucinating” and wholly inventing lying criminal charges against prominent right to keep and bear arms voices like Mark Walters of Armed American Radio.
“Gun violence stole their voices and ended their dreams, but now they have a chance to speak again,” The Shotline elaborates. “Clicking the button below will trigger these AI voices to be sent to the phones of members of congress as calls they can’t ignore.”
The “voice from the grave” featured first is from Jaycee Webster, who, according to The Shotline, “was shot and killed by a firearm. More effective gun laws could have prevented his death.”
The oxymoronically named Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence gives us a chance to test that supposition:
“That was all shattered when a group of men, unknown to the family, barged into the home. The men were there to buy marijuana. Jaycee had felt isolated in a college far away from home so he left school and found selling marijuana was an easy way to make money. He wouldn’t sell to just anyone. A younger neighborhood boy wanted to get high and Jaycee convinced him it wasn’t the right path to take. For Jaycee, selling the drug was the easiest path. He liked the money and the respect he received from neighborhood kids, but he was only going to sell the drug until he could get his feet back under him and find a school nearby to attend.”
To recap the story above, he was engaged in the criminal drug trade in Baltimore, and violent sociopaths ripped him off and executed him.
But with great claims come great responsibility, so it’s on The Shotline to flesh out for us just what “effective gun laws could have prevented” Oliver Waltz Farley, 19, Re’Quan Kasim Hopson, 21, and Brian Anthony Mackall, 20 (and who wants to bet it wasn’t their first brush with lawlessness), from doing what predators do to prey. As opposed to just infringing on the rights of the “law-abiding”…
If this stupid, ghoulish project is the best the lying gun-grabbers can do, let them waste their donated Astroturf resources, which, from the look of the Change the Ref website (changetheref.org/our-initiatives/) and projects appear substantial (“Shame Cards”? “Wall of Demands”?). I’m sure Oliver’s call to Rubio made zero difference beyond creeping out some low-level staffer.
As for those of us who refuse to be victims, the gun-grabbers do offer one idea we can repurpose: It doesn’t hurt, now and then, for we the living to call our representatives (or write or hit them up on advocacy media where others can see our messages) and let them know that we’re done with compromises and scapegoating, that we will not disarm, and instead of “enforcing existing gun laws,” we expect them to repeal existing Intolerable Acts.
David Codrea
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
