A couple weeks ago I wrote about evidence that niece Lisa shared genes with me.
Today she applied for a concealed weapons permit.
Which reminds me. I never mentioned that at the last Boomershoot daughter Kim was stopped by the police while driving to Orofino. I think it was a headlight that was out…
Anyway, the police officer said nice things to Kim about having a concealed weapons permit.
I’m so proud of both of them.
[The County should not] provide a place for people to display guns for worship as deities for the collectors who treat them as icons of patriotism.
Mary King
July 20, 1999
Attributed to an Alameda County Press Release in plaintiff’s brief.
[Reading the brief was enlighting to me. The case isn’t really about a misguided attempt in “preventing crime” or accidental shootings. The county even admits that isn’t the reason. It’s about bigotry and deliberate repression of free expression. This gives me hope that the 9th circuit giving the case another look might not be about throwing out the 2nd Amendment incorporation finding.–Joe]
You’ve heard the 200 million guns in this country before, right? The anti-gun people fainted and after they woke up they told anyone that would listen there was approaching almost one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. We of course were concerned as well because that meant some of us weren’t doing our part and buying enough guns to arm all the neighbors in case of a Zombie attack.
Alan points out that maybe the numbers were actually understated:
The lamestream media has been claiming for years and years there are about 200 million guns in America. With about 100 million sold in just the past decade, even the brain dead can tell the media is just parroting a number without doing any research. At the very least, they should up the numbers from time to time, no?
If I recall correctly the 200 million number is an estimate at least partially based on survey results. If so then people are going to under report the number of guns in their homes.
That would explain 100 million sold in the past decade when the destruction, loss, confiscation rate is certainly going to be far, far below that.
I’m feeling better now. When the Zombies attack I want a gun and a back up gun with lots of ammo available for everyone. It appears we have almost enough guns now and we can start stocking up on the ammo now.
Alan Korwin has a really good post about the guy with the AR-15 in Arizona. As Alan lives in the area he knows a little more about the guy than the rest of us.
I just love the media interactions Alan had after the event:
Chicago’s WGN couldn’t believe we have the right to keep and bear arms out here. I had to tell them most places have RKBA, a surprise to them in their little cloister. “Do people shoot each other on the streets a lot?” They actually asked that. These folks aren’t in a bubble, they’re in a vacuum, they get nothing. “With your new guns-in-bars law, which has created quite a commotion here in Chicago, are there shootouts in bars?” I’m not making this up.
…
A Chicago caller to the show asks, “Well do you carry your golf clubs or exercise equipment into a restaurant?” This imbecile actually thinks he’s making sense. Gun ignorance has so blinded him, this is how he uses his 30 seconds of fame. I tell him of course I don’t. So he concludes, “See, you’re full of baloney,” and hangs up. He’s not even thinking rationally, and is convinced he’s right. Does he even know what the shooting sports are? I don’t think so.
WGN mentions that in Chicago, NYC, and DC, where the major news orgs are based, this black-man-with-a-black-gun thing strikes them as stunning. Coincidentally these three cities are among the most repressive civil rights deniers in the nation — and they have the gun-crime records to show for it. Guns are virtually banned for the innocent, yet armed criminals run around at will. But they cannot connect the dots.
So let me ask them. “Why aren’t the people who stole your rights arrested?”
Seattle Mayor Nickels is not only one of Bloomberg’s mayors against guns but is very active on his own. He believes he is above the state preemption law on firearms. He even hinted he believe his city should be considered as a state it in the meeting with him at work that I attended. After he answered my question he went on to say the population of Seattle was just as large as entire states were at the time the colonies became a nation and as such justification to be able to make laws just as freely as a state made sense. And beyond that he said he would ban guns from city property, including parks and other public areas, by executive order. When gun rights groups referred to him as wanting to be a king they were right.
His Majesty got a taste of reality in the primary election last week with some help from Seattle gun owners:
Seattle gun owners can take much credit for the ouster of anti-gun Mayor Greg Nickels in this week’s primary election, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said this morning following what amounted to a concession speech at his press conference.
Nickels came in third in the city’s “Top Two” primary, signaling that voters in Seattle were fed up with his bully pulpit style, and perhaps more than anything, his arrogance, said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. No single episode has better underscored that haughtiness than the mayor’s open defiance of Washington State law that denied him the authority to set up the city’s own restrictive gun laws.
“When the mayor announced last year that he would ban legally-carried firearms from city property when he knew it would be contrary to the state’s preemption statute,” Gottlieb recalled, “it made tens of thousands of Seattle gun owners furious. Nickels insulted their intelligence by promising to ban guns by executive order, which is the height of municipal contempt for the rights of citizens under the state Constitution. He literally threw away their votes.”
CCRKBA Projects Director Thomas McKiddie, a West Seattle resident, said he and his gun-owning fellow Seattleites had simply had enough of the mayor’s condescension toward their rights to be safe on city streets, in parks and on other public property.
“I don’t know a single gun owner in Seattle who voted for Nickels,” McKiddie said. “After he threatened an executive order, he lost the nerve to actually issue one because he knew he would lose that fight in court. Instead, he included gun prohibitions in use contracts for the Seattle Center and other venues. He knew a citywide ban would be unenforceable, and his ouster demonstrates that Seattle gun owners were having none of it.”
“We hope this sends a signal to Nickels’ successor,” Gottlieb observed, “that stirring the wrath of gun owners is a mistake. This week’s primary result in Seattle should stand as a warning to other mayors who signed on with New York’s Michael Bloomberg to trample the firearms rights of their constituents.
“Mayors are not monarchs,” Gottlieb concluded. “They are not above the law. Greg Nickels is going to have a long time to think about that, as he watches this election season from the sidelines.”
As near as I can tell from the other candidates websites here and here guns weren’t an issue in the campaign. My guess is they don’t want them to be an issue either. If they say nothing more about them that would be fine with me.
The Second Amendment Foundation announced today they have joined the Montana Shooting Sports Association in suing the Federal government to stop enforcing gun laws against guns and ammo that stays entirely within the state of Montana.
The article in the Missoulian elaborates:
That the guns and ammo not be used outside Montana is important, Gottlieb said. So far, the federal government has justified federal control over guns by citing the “interstate commerce clause,” which states that the federal government can regulate commerce between the states.
But if a gun will not be leaving Montana, there is no “interstate commerce” and the federal government has no standing to enforce its laws, Gottlieb said.
Marbut said he’ll planning to file suit in Montana federal court the day the law goes into effect. He said he’s received letters from Montanans interested in making their own guns, but who aren’t sure the new law will protect them from federal prison time.
This makes perfect sense to anyone that hasn’t read the Federal case law that came out of the 1930s (and since). But after hearing about the case law in which a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own use was found to be engaging in Interstate commerce you realize we have a much higher hurdle to clear with this sort of lawsuit. That one case was just the beginning. There have been thousands of cases and laws built upon that one finding. How can a gun rights case find a niche in that “wall”?
Everyone I have talked to about this thinks the Firearms Freedom Acts (Montana and Tennessee so far) are only good for entertainment value. But SAF throwing it’s weight behind this causes me some doubt. Sure, it makes great copy for fundraising. But so would a lot of other gun lawsuits that are lost causes. I’ve had a lot of “behind the scenes” conversations with the SAF people over the years and while I acknowledge fundraising is one of their objectives I know they are smart enough to not back a completely lost cause. Winning lawsuits is far better for fundraising than losing a case no matter how noble a cause.
Perhaps my email to Gottlieb’s and my Senator, Patty Murray, convinced her to pull a few strings on her end in Washington as well.
A couple months ago I suggested people buy their “assault knife” now because of proposed regulations that might make many folding pocket knives illegal.
I posted that I had just made my bulk purchase from The Blade Shop. In the comments people reported there were many people who had delivery and customer service problems with that particular outlet. I received my knives within a few days and thought that they had gotten their act together and that there was no need to be concerned.
That was two months ago.
Today I received this email from reader Ben:
I have read your blog for a long time now and very much appreciate your knowledgeable writing on firearms and explosives.
Several months ago you posted a snippet about how you picked up several knives from a place called The Blade Shop. Since I was in the market, I took your suggestion for the place to buy the knifes. I ended up ordering $165 in knives from them. It is now two months later and I have not receive anything except excuses.
After several weeks of not having received anything, including a status update on merchandise being back ordered I emailed them asking what was going on. They responded that one of the items was on back order and it would be a couple of weeks. After that deadline had come and gone I asked again. They said that item was still on back order. I asked to be refunded the money for that particular knife and send the rest on their merry way. The person at the other end said that they were going to refund the money and ship the others, but that it would take 10-14 days for the refund to go through. Now three weeks later I don’t have a refund or any knifes.
I will be calling my credit card company today and asking for them to reverse the charges. They have a 2 month policy, thankfully I am a few days inside of that.
Please spread the word that at least some people are having difficult with this particular shop.
Thank you,
Ben
Rats.
Sorry about that.
They used to say that the difference between conservatives and liberals were that conservatives thought liberals were stupid, and liberals thought conservatives were evil. Now it would seem they think conservatives are terrorists.
Sebastian
August 24, 2009
The Media’s Shallow Understanding
[I suspect it isn’t really “shallow understanding”. It’s about attempting to demonize in any way possible those who oppose their agenda. People believe what they want to believe and anything that supports their belief system will be latched onto with far less fact checking than if it contradicted their belief system. I’ve been guilty of this too. But there have also been times when I thought (borrowing a literary tool from Say Uncle), “Self, this is too good to be true. You better check this out.” And nearly every time it was too good to be true.
In the case of the present day “militia movement” I can’t help but remember in the mid-90s I knew the names of several different militias both in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the country. I read about them, by name, in the paper and heard about them in the social circles I communicated with. I saw their displays at gun shows. I occasionally even talked to member of militias. This time? The only “militia movement” I have heard about all traces back to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I think it’s too good to be true for the left and they latched onto it without checking into it. Someone should check it out and, if my hunch is correct, slap them down. With appropriate timing and proper location it could be a good political tool.–Joe]
On Friday my officemate told me Kris had just stopped by and left something for me. I found a damaged Pocket PC with a note on it asking that I do an Idaho Stress Test on it. I contacted Kris via IM for more details. The screen had been damaged and was completely non-functional. There was company sensitive data on the device which needed to be destroyed and Kris wanted me to do this for him.
On Saturday daughter Kimberly and I went to the Boomershoot site and, among other things, destroyed the data for Kris. I also had a hard disk that was in similar need of “data reduction” and we deleted the data on both items at the same time.
Tomorrow I’ll deliver the pieces Kim and I found to Kris but for the rest of you here are a few pictures assembled into a video:
Looks like Jackson Pollack threw up in here.
Tamara K.
August 24, 2008
Referring to all the previous use of Simunitions in the Blackwater 360 degree shoothouse.
[I want to do the “Blackwater thing” with all the gun bloggers again. That was really fun.–Joe]
Ry says, “facepalm“. There are other phrases that could be used to describe the act of giving your attacker the ammunition to shoot at you with:
As a strong supporter of the country’s National Parks System, I just don’t see a logical reason why anyone would want to carry a concealed weapon into such naturally beautiful places like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Redwoods, Crater Lake, Grand Teton or any of the national parks.
Is someone seriously afraid of being accosted or robbed by Old Faithful or El Capitan? Are there criminals hiding out in the Petrified Forest?
These places should be off limits to such practices because of the presence of children. Just because you have the right to pack heat on a vacation doesn’t mean you should.
Chuck Bloom
Plano, Texas
… but what about the children?
August 21, 2009
[A extraordinary clear example of scrambled thinking on the gun issue. Perhaps the reason he doesn’t see a logical reason for carrying a gun in the national parks is because he is severely logic impaired.
What does being “a strong supporter of the country’s National Parks System” or their natural beauty have to do with concluding there is no “logical reason” to carry a concealed weapon?
Even his straw-men of “being accosted or robbed by Old Faithful or El Capitan” is extraordinarily weak.
Criminal do their thing where they have the opportunity, means, and high probability of accomplishing their goal. If their thing involves robbing or hurting people the remote location and disarmed status of their victims in the remote parks can be good hunting grounds. One does not have life insurance for only when their risk is high, such as when traveling by car. They have life insurance for all occasions. And so it is with carrying defensive tools. If you knew you were going to be attacked you wouldn’t go there. But you don’t know so you carry defensive tools wherever and whenever you can. And not all of the threats are human:
Sign in Glacier National Park
Bear in Glacier National Park.
And finally, “because of the presence of children”? Come on, can any anti-gun person offer a plausible defense for that statement? Do children not need to be defended against violent attacks? Is it better to let them be injured or killed than for them to see a bear get shot? Is it better for them to see their mother raped and/or killed than to see the attacker stopped in his tracks by a gun in the hands of his or her parents?
I actually did use my gun while hiking through a state park with my kids several years ago. There was a rattlesnake near the edge of the trail. It was a threat both to us and other hikers that perhaps would not have seen and avoided it. From a safe distance I put a 9mm FMJ bullet through it’s head. The kids did not seem to have suffered any short or long term adverse effects from the use of the gun in their presence. They even seemed relieved after the threat was neutralized.–Joe]
As pointed out by others MSNBC cropped the video of the black guy with a rifle at the Obama protest down enough to not show his skin color. Then they talked about gun owners being white racists against Obama.
I have to wonder what the basis for that belief was and why they would put effort into falsifying the evidence to fit their, obviously, false beliefs. Do they think they have some sort of telepathy such they can read the minds of others? Or is it as Say Uncle pointed out:
So, you were assigning stereotypes to a broad group of people? Supposedly trying to address bigotry in this country while being bigoted yourself seems to lessen your point. It’s OK, they’re only gun owners.
Although there are a people who believe they have telepathic powers I believe projection is far more common and all the evidence appears to fit that diagnosis.
Projection is very common in the anti-gun camp and it’s one of the first thing you should look for when you encounter an anti-gun person. Do they say they are afraid of what someone might do if they carried a gun while at a school/church/restaurant/wherever? The evidence is overwhelming that people with guns in those places do nearly exactly the same things that other people without guns do in those places. It’s actually their fear of what they might do if they had a gun in those places. Never mind that a police officer with a gun in the same location is just fine for nearly all of these people–disregarding the fact that police officers accidently shoot innocent people at a much higher rate than private citizens do.
So in this case the media representatives feel, without a factual basis, badly toward gun owners. They then search for something that could justify their bad feelings. Racism is an easy “hook to hang their hat on” since there once was a great deal of racism against people of color in this country and President Obama has the necessary pigmentation to be a target of white racists. But it’s the feelings of the media that drove the conclusion that someone else must be racists rather than the evidence of racism that drove their feelings.
This can be generalized to freedom in general. People are afraid of making their own decisions and they attempt restrict others decisions via some “wiser” authority with the justification being that someone else might make a bad decision–regardless of the fact that government “one size fits all” decisions for nearly everything cost more and are less effective than private solutions. Hence because of their feelings of fear of their own decision making ability drove the demands that others not make decisions for themselves rather than actual fear of others making their own decisions.
I suppose another psychological model that could be applied is one of stress reduction. It’s more stressful to believe that you are bigoted than to falsify the evidence to indicate someone else is bigoted.
In the case of the generalized freedom issue the stress reduction model works there too. It’s impossible to predict the future in any detail so having someone else to blame for making the wrong decision relieves the stress of making the, possibly wrong, decision yourself–even if the situation of nearly everyone is worse than if they made their own decisions. It appears to be more stressful for many people to see a disparity of outcomes than for everyone to have the same bad outcome. As a friend, Susan K., told me many years ago there are people who would rather everyone earns $1.00/hour than for the minimum wage in a truly free market (no government imposed minimum wage) to be $100/hour if there were other people earning $10,000/hour. I found this hard to believe but I’m now convinced it is true as long as there is some method by which the person desiring this sort of outcome can put some sort of whitewash, such as using phrases such as “social justice”, over the ugly truth.
As a side note I’ve heard it said that Bill Gates earned, on the average, about $100/second or $360K/hour while at Microsoft. This may have contributed to the great pressure put on Microsoft by the U.S. Justice Department during the 1990s and the European Union legal action that continues to this day.
Human psychology is a strange thing. What we call rational thought and socialization is only a very thin veneer over something far, far different which it pokes its ugly head through the veneer far more frequently than we realize.
There are those who don’t like Americans owning guns at all, let alone carrying them about. They can be counted on to run about squawking like Chicken Little that the sky is falling – a calamity brought about by the presence of an armed citizen in public. We are warned that: “Somebody might grab the gun and do something bad! The armed citizen will intimidate others! Tempers will flare and blood will run in the streets!”
These are the same alarms that are sounded when any measure designed to facilitate citizens keeping and bearing arms is advanced. And the alarms are always false. One would think that consistently being wrong would be embarrassing, but one would be wrong about those who assume that common citizens are untrustworthy and dangerous.
Larry Pratt
August 20, 2009
He Had a Gun and Nothing Happened
[Embarrassing? They have no shame, how could they be embarrassed? Their minds are locked into the reality of an alternate universe, sort of a Mirror, Mirror like place. And even though their concepts and assumptions are demonstrably false here they try to take over our universe. If we could just get Spock to transport them swap them back with their counterparts in the other universe things would be so much better.–Joe]
Late last night I got a link from Instapundit to my Did we just win? post. Early this morning I got a link to the same post from Say Uncle. A little bit later the same post was linked by Michael Bane.
Reynolds and Uncle were characteristically brief but Bane said something that was almost embarrassing to me:
Joe Huffman of The View From North Central Idaho and the majordomo of the Boomershoots has emerged as an important voice in the gun blogosphere, and I think today’s column shows why…
I didn’t think the post was all that strong. I was pushing the envelope with it. I really was overstating things some. I knew it, but figured I could put up a plausible defense of it if I really had to.
But regardless of how shaky the ground I was on something on the order of 7000 (adding a “fudge factor” for the RSS readers which don’t show up on Sitemeter) people read it in a single day. The day isn’t quite over yet and here are the numbers compared to a typical day of about 600 visits:
I’ve spoke about gun rights before crowds of 500 to 700 before. That was a little intimidating but I was very well prepared and confidant of my material. But a crowd of 7000?
It kinda cool that 7000 people in one day read at least a sentence or two of something I wrote. But it’s also kinda…well different. I grew up on a farm and went to two room grade school nearby that had eight grades for a total of about 30 kids. I didn’t have a lot of social contact until I went to a high school where I was in the biggest class ever (the record still holds) which was 125 graduating seniors. The entire town of Orofino, at it’s peak, was only about 3500 people. Yet, twice that many people in a single day read what I wrote and a well known (in some circles) T.V. personality says I’m “an important voice in the gun blogosphere”. Wow. As Sebastian said while I was writing this, I’m just another guy with an opinion.
I think maybe I should be more careful of what I write.
If you ever heard me say I was working on an iPhone killer this wasn’t what I meant:
I wouldn’t do that.
I would perform an Idaho Stress Test instead.
Carrying a gun to a political meeting is an obscenity. Anyone who does it, even if they are within their legal rights, should be ashamed. Our founders fought a revolution (and, yes, took up arms) to build a society where political disputes are not settled through force or intimidation–and that’s the only purpose of bringing a weapon to a political discussion: to intimidate.
It is utterly unacceptable, and every politician should have the guts to say so.
Rick Perlstein
August 18, 2009
Outlook: In America, Crazy Is a Pre-existing Condition
‘ … the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy …’
[Just so you know what they think of you.
I wonder what he thinks of the White House response–that open carry at political events is no big deal. Does he think President Obama has no guts?
I think he may have just had the wind sucked out of his sails.–Joe]
We’ve known for several years (see posts here, here, here, and here) that we were winning on the gun control battlefield. The expiration of the “assault weapon” ban and the Heller decision were just the two best known battles. There were thousands, perhaps millions if you count the wins of the hearts and minds of neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers.
I recognize open carry is on the path to victory but I figured it would be in the form of open carry at picnics, highway litter cleanup, and maybe as an organization at parades. People need to be desensitized to gun ownership. And concealed carry just doesn’t help that much. When and how we do that desensitization can matter a great deal.
I’ve been open carrying in a few circumstances for a couple months now (here and here). There has been no obvious notice taken and certainly no adverse effects have occurred. Yet, had anyone asked my advice about open carry at a political protest about the nationalization of health care I would have told them I didn’t see any good could come out of it. Obviously these people didn’t ask for my advice or take similar advice from someone else.
In my opinion these people took a huge risk. They were throwing the dice in a game that affected tens of millions of people in this country. I’m not exactly risk adverse, after all I play with explosives for the fun of it and even have my children help make the explosives. But I wouldn’t have taken the risk they did.
And what happened? It’s as if we had been slowly advancing against the enemy. We were a little surprised to win the battle on carry in National Parks and we almost won a battle for nationwide reciprocity we couldn’t have imagined even coming up for a vote had we thought about it after the election last November. But the enemy was still putting up resistance and we thought they were still formidable opponents. Then they collapsed. The White House (or Red Shed as a commenter recently called it) said it was no big deal to open carry. Public opinion is affected by statements from the White House. Having the most anti-gun administration in U.S. history say it’s no big deal to open carry is huge.
We knew recent poll results showed us winning. But I thought that would take time to translate into our enemies fleeing before us. But it appears now that the brave actions of a few open carry advocates broke through the empty shell of the anti-gun organizations and there are going to be a lot of Sad Pandas tonight and people looking at their bottles of cheap rum.
Now, more than ever, we have a chance to push these bigots into political extinction. When they are on the run they have their backs to us and cannot organize and put up effective resistance. We need to acquire the proper state of mind and pound them as hard as we can as fast as we can. There are still pockets of resistance in New Jersey, Chicago, California, etc. but we may have just won the war.
Update: This post just got linked to by Glenn Reynolds. I would like to suggest my new visitors also look at some of my other posts:
Thanks visiting.
The Fulton case demonstrates an important consequence of Heller’s individual right holding: the normalization of firearms possession. In the past sometimes treated as a deviant act, something not to be permitted without the indulgence of the sovereign, firearms possession is now something contemplated by the Constitution–something not deviant, but normal, with the burden shifting from those who would possess firearms to those who would deny their possession. This burden-shift may turn out to be the most consequential result of Heller, at least in the day-to-day work of state and federal courts.
Brannon P. Denning
Glenn H. Reynolds
August 1, 2009
Heller, High Water(mark)? Lower Courts and the New Right to Keep and Bear Arms
[I wouldn’t normally quote the same person (or people) two or more days in a row. But this is a special day and this quote is very applicable because of this and other indicators that open carry of firearms is being accepted. If open carry of firearms is accepted then that means firearms ownership in general is more acceptable.
See also my post from last night and this followup post.–Joe]
I read the headline and article before seeing Dave Hardy’s blog post and I’ve been wandering around my underground bunker doing a few household chores and I tried to get my mind around what this means.
I’m not sure I would necessarily agree with Dave, but I can’t say that I disagree when he says, “Time for Brady Campaign employees to circulate resumes” in response to the Washington Post running a headline that says, “White House Backs Right to Arms Outside Obama Events“.
Maybe after I sleep on it overnight I’ll have something of my own to say.