John Lott asks Just One Question

Nice:

I would ask gun control advocates one question: name a single place in the entire world where murder rates fell after gun control laws were passed.

It’s essentially the same as what I have been asking since 2004.

Also from this review of his new book:

Another reason that a third edition is essential is that critics have had twelve years to critique Lott’s proposition.  As Lott states, however, “not a single refereed study finds the opposite result, that right-to-carry laws have a bad effect on crime.”  Lott’s latest edition also addresses the impact of “Castle Doctrine” laws, which refer to the adage that “a man’s home is his castle” and make it unnecessary for potential crime victims to retreat as far as possible before using a firearm in self-defense.

Also addressed by the new third edition is the federal “assault weapons” legislation, which took effect in 1994 but terminated in 2004.  Gun control advocates predicted an explosion in murder and violent crime when the ban expired, but rates actually declined substantively.  As Lott notes, “rarely do we get a chance to look at the impact of gun laws when they are first passed and then when they are eliminated.”

Gun cartoon of the day

[sarcasm] Nice characterization of an NRA member [/sarcasm] –complete with the safety violation of the finger on the trigger.

But the artist may have accurately depicted the effect of the loophole for the NRA. It severely wounded the proposed law and while the law is still is on life support there is a good chance it will die.

Sex Party

Sex Party? Did someone say “Sex Party”? Where?

It sounds like the type of party Bill Clinton and Al Gore should belong to instead of the Democrat Party.

Oh, it’s in Australia.

Can we export them?

I wish they would give us a list

A caller to some radio talk show recently said we should ask the Federal government for a list of the laws they have no intention to enforce. He was talking about illegal immigration but he just as well could have been talking about any number of things.

Charles Nichols did ask about something similar:

The City of Redondo Beach
California has taken the position that persons who exercise their new
constitutional right to openly carry firearms do so at their own “risk.” Putting
aside the fact that openly carrying a firearm was already legal under California
law before the US Supreme Court decisions in Heller and McDonald, I was curious
to see if the Federal Government is going to be as enthusiastic in upholding the
High Court decisions today.

It is their position that,
having been threatened by a police officer, one should file a complaint with the
police department that employs the officer.

I asked, even if the person who
made the threat is the Chief of Police? The DOJ spokesperson answered “Yes.” I
said, “That’s what you call a Catch-22” {no response}. I asked isn’t it the case
that when a police officer acts under the color of authority to deny someones
civil rights that the police officer has committed a federal crime?

The DOJ spokesperson said “We
do not involve ourselves in such cases.”

Since neither self-defense nor
the accompanying right to carry a weapon for that purpose is recognized by the
DOJ, I wonder what their current position is on requiring non-whites to sit at
the back of a bus, or to use separate drinking fountains, or to be denied
lodging in hotels or prohibited from eating in restaurants?

I wish they would give us a list of “such cases”. Having received such a list the first thing I would look up would be crimes involving the use of tar and feathers.

I think I see the problem here

Sometimes when you are trying to teach someone something and they just aren’t getting it your student will say something and all of a sudden you realize what the problem is. Typically it is some fundamental assumption either the student and/or the teacher had made but had not articulated.

I remember one time I was trying to explain the difference between current and voltage to someone. They weren’t getting it. I finally made the analogy to water in a hose. With a very small hose, say the diameter of pin, it really doesn’t matter if you have 1000 pounds per square inch of pressure (voltage). The rate of flow (current) coming out of the hose is going to be slower than a very large hose, say the diameter of your leg, with a pressure of one pound per square inch. If you want to quickly fill a bucket with water which do you want? High pressure or high current? His answer was, “I don’t know.”

It was like time froze for me. I wouldn’t be surprised if I went pale, my jaw dropped, and I started drooling. I realized what the problem was. He was just too stupid to understand. My assumption was that since he was able to walk upright and speak in complete sentences that he was capable of understanding simple everyday concepts involving the physical world. I was wrong. That was 30+ years ago. He now teaches art at a high school.

I had another epiphany recently. In the comments to one of my posts moderately anti-gun commenter ubu52 said:

Every death is a loss to society, every single one of them. There is no such thing as a “throwaway person.”

Oh! I understand now.

This is the type of thing taught in kindergarten and early grade-school. It’s a simple concept that works for most interactions at that level. It’s sort of like a child who learns that if they drop a glass on a hard floor it will break. That simplistic view of gravity will serve them well for years. Later on Newton’s three laws will be important if they want to understand why things are different when riding in a vehicle undergoing acceleration or orbiting a celestial body. Still later Einstein’s thoughts on gravity, space, and time may be of importance.

I am not, yet, of the opinion that ubu52 is incapable of understanding the applicable concepts. I suspect it is a systemic lack of exposure to the evidence and concepts involved. There appears to have been school of thought that “no one is better than anyone else” which has taken in a large portion of our culture and is largely unchallenged. I suspect it is the logical extension of the Marxist view of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” which progressed to “everyone deserves just as much as everyone else” and then to the final warped conclusion that “no one is better than anyone else”. But that is just a guess. There are similar extraordinary errors in thinking (or more likely application) that go back much further such as, “Judge not, least ye be judged yourself.”

No wonder the concept of “use of deadly force in the defense of innocent life” is a non-starter for her. We are talking Newtonian physics to someone that hadn’t gotten past the stage of looking out for falling apples when they walk under a tree.

Many other anti-gun people have similar naïve or immature belief systems. Still others arrogantly believe they are intellectually superior to the red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthals who wish to exercise their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. They believe the Second Amendment is obsolete and no longer, if it was ever, useful in today’s society. If not evil, then typically their thought process is incomplete and proceed something like this, “Gun are used to commit crimes. Even if it is a right restrictions should be put in place and crime will be reduced.” They frequently are aghast that people disagree with such a simple and obviously correct conclusion. They conclude that anyone that does not agree with them must be their intellectual inferiors. It is this sort of thinking that results in things like this, this, this, and this. It is the “reasoning” of bigots.

The CliffsNotes version of schooling necessary for ubu52 (and others like her) to get up to speed with the rest of us is the following:

  • The deaths of Ted Bundy, Richard Kuklinski, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and millions of other lesser known threats to society were not a loss to society. Their deaths were a net benefit to society.
  • Philosophers, lawmakers, and religious leaders from all over the world and nearly all cultures are almost unanimously in agreement that the use of deadly force to protect innocent life is at least acceptable if not an obligation.
  • While there is an unacceptably large percentage of the human population that are a threat to society they are vastly outnumbered people who respect the rights of others to live their lives free of threats to life, limb, and property.
  • In order to defend against the villains of society the aged, infirm, outnumbered, and smaller need tools to put them on equal terms with the monsters who would prey upon them.
  • The firearm is the best tool ever invented for equalizing those who would be prey with the predators in our society.
  • Accidents and misuse of any type of tool can result in a tragedy.
  • Training and the proper design of tools reduce the risk of accidents.
  • Punishment is the appropriate response to those who misuse tools.
  • Firearms design and training is more mature than for almost any other tool in common human inventory.
  • The number of tools more frequently used for criminal purposes than benign or beneficial uses is vanishingly small and firearms are not in that set. It does not matter if the tool was a screwdriver used to pry open a cash box, a box cutter used to hijack a plane, or a firearm used to rob a store. Any proposed restriction on a tool must take into account their benefits as well as their misuse.
  • Restrictions on the use of tools work no better than the restrictions on the use of recreational drugs or sex.
  • The rules for the use of deadly force are well established in U.S. law and are among the first things taught in self-defense classes involving firearms.
  • The nearly universal rules are that if the attacker has means, intent, and opportunity to cause death or permanent injury to innocent human life then the use of deadly force can be justified.
  • All restrictions on firearms yet conceived reduce the number and/or ability of those who are likely to be prey to protect themselves more than it reduces the number and/or ability of predators. Even the simplest (and in implementation it is far from simple), most innocuous restriction of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) deters as much or more potential prey from defending themselves than it prevents predators from hunting their victims.

As Sean Flynn once said (paraphrasing), “I’ve spent years studying the issue, my opponents only minutes”.

Quote of the day–Ralph Fascitelli

It matters not that some of the victims may have been affiliated with gangs. These were two groups that were with family and friends out celebrating a sunny Seattle weekend.

Let’s make our parks gun-free zones where families can gather with
peace of mind without the worry of sudden death to innocent loved ones (and
let’s have our park rangers make spot checks to ensure that no one does indeed
have a gun in their possession).

Ralph Fascitelli
President of the board for Washington Ceasefire.
Sammamish park shooting underlines need for gun control
[It doesn’t matter that the people doing the shooting were affiliated with gangs? And if they were engaged in illegal activities, such as assault and battery they aren’t “victims”.

Make our parks gun-free zones? Yeah. Right.

“Gun-free zones” like Virginia Tech, Columbine, Fort Hood, Chicago, and Washington D.C.?

And since we are violating the Washington State Constitution and the Second Amendment we might as well violate the Fourth Amendment while we are at it. Or how about this–since they don’t have a problem violating specific enumerated rights how about we make it illegal for their anti-rights organization to exist? Or for illegal for people to advocate the violation of specific enumerated rights?–Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

The artist thinks the votes of 4 million members and millions more that own (and vote) guns have nothing to do with the support of politicians for the NRA agenda? And no politician supports the Bill of Rights without fear of being shot or encouraged by campaign donations?

Automated blacklist checker

As you probably already know some bloggers have been sued (for details see here, here, here, here, and here).


I don’t have problem with people enforcing their copyrights. But there is the concept of “fair use” which also needs to be taken into account. It is the general impression that the lawsuits do not recognize “fair use”.


The best plan of protection proffered so far (I have something else in mind that will take some more legal research) is to not link to any content from the offending news organizations (“blacklist” them).


Searching your blog for existing content that should be removed or edited is going to be dependent on the type of blogging software you use. Sebastian has something for WordPress.


Here is something to use with dasBlog software.


In private email Robb Allen reports if you have direct access to your data store you should be able to do something like:



SELECT * FROM posts WHERE postContent like ‘%{website}% OR postContent like ‘%{website2}%’ etc.


For future links I have created a web based utility that will check a link for you to see if it is on the blacklist. Some people got a preview of it last week. This morning I updated it so that it can handle heavier traffic and it looks a little prettier. Feel free to share it with whoever might have need of it.

Hard times for Gun Guys

I had noticed there wasn’t much activity on the Gun Guys web site but I hadn’t really put things together. Stephen did:

For some time blogging at gunguys.com has rarely been more than a repost of
something someone at another group wrote up with little commentary, and recently
the blogging frequency has dropped to once a week or so. Now … their last post
(at least as of Thursday night) was about SCOTUS nominee Kagan, and is two weeks
old.

And he notes this from the Gun Guys web site:

About Us

Mission: GunGuys seeks to inform, engage and persuade fellow
Americans to change the way we look at guns, and gun culture.

GunGuys.com is a completely independent and unaffiliated news website and
blog that focuses on all aspects of the gun issue, including politics and
analysis, policies and culture, shootings and violence, the gun lobby and gun
industry, extremism and terrorism, advocacy and campaigns, rhetoric and
messaging, as well as humor and satire.

History: From 2006 to Feb. 2010, GunGuys.com was managed by
the Freedom States Alliance (FSA), a non-profit organization working to reduce
gun violence in America. FSA dissolved on Feb. 23, 2010, and merged with States United to Prevent Gun Violence.

Since that time GunGuys.com is now an independent and unaffiliated blog. All
opinions, analysis, comments, posts, editorials, videos, images and articles
reflect only the views of GunGuys.com and do not represent the positions
of any organization, group, cause or campaign
.

GunGuys.com is no longer a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

Emphasis in the original.

Nice.

I still think he should be charged with violation of 18 USC 241. But until that becomes politically feasible having him scurry back under the rock he came from is an acceptable alternative.

Quote of the day–T

You are all a bunch of bumbling morons. This is the information age, get a clue. You can’t keep people from doing things by innocuously passing laws as a band-aid or stop gap. In this day and age people are going to find ways to do things. You want to teach them something? Teach them to be responsible with firearms. THAT’S the key that’s missing in today’s youth. You want to know why kids blow up high schools? Because no one in this ‘nobody fails’ government will allow the two kids to duke it out behind the library in the third grade.

Unfortunately, by doing this, you folks have basically ‘screwed the pooch’ on an entire generation. I can only see one way to actually repair the damage, and this is it.

Step 1) Force everyone in the country to carry a handgun.

Step 2) Watch society get really polite, really quick.

In a couple of months all the psychos and gang-bangers will kill each other off and everyone will be happy.

Let’s just call that a win / win / win scenario.

– T
Referring to the Brady Campaign and “the Mayors coalition against private handgun sales”.
July 28, 2010
Complete and Utter Fools are trying to run our Government
[While there is more than a hint of truth in what he says I’m opposed to forcing everyone in the country to carry a handgun. I’m a middle ground sort of guy.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Dave Hardy

It was only a few years ago that Brady and others were suing gun manufacturers right and left, as part of a campaign to bankrupt the industry, a campaign that had a good chance of succeeding. Today, they’re on the defensive (to the extent they act at all) and the progun side is on the offense. Since almost all of it has occurred over the last month or so, it’s more than an offense, it’s a legal blitzkrieg.

Dave Hardy
July 29, 2010

SAF, Alan Gura, sue over Maryland carry permit denial

[I have written of this sort of thing before. Keep the initiative and drive them into political extinction. We must choose the time and place of the battle. Letting them choose the time and the place is a recipe for losing.

It appears the people in the driver seat understand this and have the mean to follow through on it.–Joe]

Obfuscation and Delusion as a Way of Life

Someone gave us some “tofu milk” and some “vegan rice milk” they didn’t want.  It comes as a powder.  If we run out of real milk, I’ve been mixing up a batch of one or the other for my morning coffee.  It’s not too bad.  If you’re desperate.


Reading the ingredients on the rice milk, I find one of them is “evaporated cane juice”.  Seriously; who are we kidding, hippies?  “Cane juice”?  I’m pretty sure it’s not bamboo we’re talking about.  It must be sugar cane.  That’s right; we don’t like added sugar, but we like the taste, so we’ll use sugar and call it something else.  It’s not sugar.  It’s “evaporated effing cane juice”.  How dare you say otherwise.  What are you, a racist teabagger?


I’ve seen “evaporated cane juice” listed on some hippie kids’ cereal boxes, along with warnings about how corporations hurt animals and kids!


Call it “raw cane sugar” if you want to be accurate.  But no– you don’t want to be accurate.  You want to be deluded.  You want to fool yourself and hope no one else notices.  It feels better.  And instead of “statist” or “totalitarian” you call yourself “progressive”.  That makes it all better, doesn’t it?  Just use the language differently.  Now it all sounds perfectly wonderful, and anyone who calls you on it is a bad person.


Don’t anyone come on here and say I’m being unfair by conflating the use of “evaporated cane juice” with statism.  Note the aforementioned cereal box– it does that all by itself.  The same people who can’t be honest about adding sugar are warning us against corporations (while profiting in selling sugar-laced cereal to kids).  It’s all part of the same culture, people.

Are you into reloading?

If you are into reloading in a big (and I mean BIG) way I have just the deal for you.

I received a phone call and follow up email from Marc Coury:

From: Marc J Coury
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 5:22 PM
To: JoeH@boomershoot.org
Subject: RockTek/Marc Coury-Ballistic Solutions-50 Cal Powder

Joe,

Just left you a voice message after hanging up with Ron Gilbert. He said to give you a call immediately regarding this powder.

As I mentioned, Ballistic Solutions, Inc., has been manufacturing small arms ammo and sniper rifles for 15 years. Our CEO, Jeff Semko, is a sniper instructor and has consulted for Homeland Security and many law enforcement agencies. We’re currently in process of re-locating our production facility onto the Tooele Army Depot in Utah. We also have a contract with Tooele, marketing their demil and other military surplus: powder, brass, projectiles, heck, you name it.

I’ve attached a detailed overview of what we currently have for sale – we’re down to 45,048 lbs. from 190,000 lbs. of Winchester 50 cal pulldown: 872 & 867.

The powder is stored at Tooele and is packaged in DOT approved, mil spec containers, so we can have it shipped out as soon as a wire transfer clears. We had it priced at the low-end wholesale of [call for details–it is awesome price–Joe]/lb.

However, as we need to make room in the bunker, if someone wants the entire remaining lot it’s theirs for [even more awesome price–Joe]/lb.

That’s a substantial loss for us, but a gain to the buyer. As you know, retailers are selling it between $8.50 – $11.75/lb., with smaller reloaders paying up to $25.00/lb.

If you or anyone else can use it, you know where to find me!

Best,
Marc

Marc J. Coury
Ballistic Solutions, Inc.
Satellite Office:
2715 W. Coast Highway, Suite: A
Newport Beach, CA. 92663
TEL: 949.645.3815 FAX: 949.646.8746

You don’t have to buy it all. You can buy it in quantities as small as three pallets (6,480 pounds). Call Marc for the details.

Who Knew…

…that there would be warm water on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, that there would be sunlight on the Gulf, or microbes in the water?


Experts Surprized…Again.


It seems the major catastrophe that was supposed to happen, that the anti capitalists desperately wanted to happen, isn’t happening.  Damn it!


FYI; Diesel fuel, for example, needs to have preservatives added to it, or it will rot in the tank.  Yes, it’s food for little bugs otherwise.  I know that, ’cause I used to run a diesel car.

Quote of the day–Josh Sugarmann

The same industry that has given us armor-piercing ‘cop-killer’ bullets, plastic
handguns, and assault weapons has now added caseless ‘phantom’ ammo to its
litany of assaults on public safety. This is just the latest example of the
failure of a system that allows a virtually unregulated industry to develop and
market hazardous products without the pre-market scrutiny afforded almost all
other products in America.

Josh Sugarmann
July 6, 1993
New Technology–Caseless “PHANTOM” Ammo–Could Devastate Police Investigations
[I
remember when this came out. It was the heyday of gun control in this
country. It’s almost hard to believe I’ve been fighting this guy for
over 17 years.

Just like “cop-killer bullets”, “plastic handguns”, and “assault weapons” Sugarmann had to, and still does, deliberately mislead and lie to the public in an attempt achieve his unconstitutional attack on a specific enumerated right.

At
times I still wonder if it was the enabling of better communication by
the Internet, the success of the “assault weapon” ban which awoke the
voters, the emergence of great leaders, or something else that turned
the tide. A “little bird” told me there is a movie being made the
chronicles the gun rights movement of the last 50 years or so. Although I’m more interested in making history
than documenting it does help to review the diplomatic rhetoric and
saber rattling, as well as the skirmishes and battles from time to time.
We can learn about the ways of our enemies and how our heroes both
stumbled and won battles.–Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

Ignoring the fact that guns don’t victimize anyone or anything the artist goes further and ignores the benefits of gun ownership. All the millions of instances each year where the use of a firearm prevented the loss or injury of innocent lives. All the food that has been put on the table using firearms. All the recreational use of firearms.

Nope. None of that is interesting to the artist. And if he is typical of the anti-gun people only the total number of deaths is interesting and furthermore it is implied that all deaths by firearms are to be considered a loss to society.

What a bigot.

Quote of the day–Neal Knox

But Mayor Daley went back to Chicago and pushed through an ordinance individually registering every gun in Cook Country. That ordinance was delayed one day because the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down U.S. vs. Haynes, which held that it was a “justifiable defense” for a criminal, prohibited from possessing a gun, to refuse to register it due to fear of self-incrimination. The Chicago city council found an innovative way to enact their registration ordinance while evading that law: Persons with criminal or mental records which prevented them from legally owning a gun were exempt from registration.

Never mind that criminals were the alleged target of that law, and that they were exempted, the city’s new registration law applied only to the law-abiding citizen with a spotless record. And it’s still the same way.

One thing the late-Sixties gun laws and attempted gun laws accomplished was to make the state’s gun owners nervous. So when the state’s Constitution was rewritten in 1970, they helped put in a clause guaranteeing that “subject only to the police power, the right of the people to keep and bear arms would not be infringed.” That mean, according to the official documents describing the Constitution, that while guns might be subjected to certain regulations, private ownership of handguns could never be banned.

In 1982, the village of Morton Grove banned handguns. A few months ago the state’s Supreme Court, on a split decision, ruled that the ban didn’t violate the new Constitution. They explained that since Morton Grove residents could still own long guns, the prohibition against banning arms hadn’t been violated.

Neal Knox
December 12, 1983
The Drift Toward Prohibition
From The Gun Rights War, page 80 and 81.
[It’s a great book. But if you are like me you probably shouldn’t read it just before you go to bed because you will end up angry and have difficulty going to sleep.

But it’s interesting to know that the methods and attitudes of the bigots haven’t changed over the last 50 years. They lied, they ignored original constitutional intent, and they wanted to infringe the rights of ordinary citizens even though they claimed they only wanted to make it difficult for criminals to possess firearms.

The difference is that we now have a “won game” (is that phrase used outside of the chess culture?) on our hands now. We just need to keep up the pressure and drive these bigots into political and social oblivion.–Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day



The artist apparently has no connection with relevant facts. The 30K deaths by gun fire (ignoring his badly phrased “gun deaths per year” which to me means that many guns die each year) includes suicides, justified homicide, and praiseworthy homicide. Furthermore there is no evidence that fewer restrictions results in more criminal homicide or suicide.


He also fails to acknowledge the human rights issues involved.


But then, bigots don’t care about facts anyway.