Dominating a transaction simply means getting what one wants without being hurt. Where people differ is in how likely it is that they will be involved in a situation in which a gun will be valuable. Someone who intends to engage in a transaction involving a gun—a criminal, for example—is obviously in the best possible position to predict that likelihood. Criminals should therefore be willing to pay more for a weapon than most other people would. Professors, politicians, and newspaper editors are, as a group, at very low risk of being involved in such transactions, and they thus systematically underrate the value of defensive handguns. (Correlative, perhaps, is their uncritical readiness to accept studies that debunk the utility of firearms for self-defense.) The class of people we wish to deprive of guns, then, is the very class with the most inelastic demand for them—criminals—whereas the people most likely to comply with gun control laws don’t value guns in the first place.
Daniel D. Polsby
March 1994
The False Promise of Gun Control
[It’s somewhat remarkable that this extremely well done article, critical of gun control, appeared in The Atlantic in 1994.
This was a time when gun control advocates were on a roll. The evening news would give crime reports with an icon of a gun on the screen even when the crimes being reported did not involve a firearm. The message being screamed by the media and politicians was that gun control was the ultimate crime control. Yet a voice of reason made it through.—Joe]
We see that term, “stunning” too often. This interview with Dinesh D’Souza however was actually stunning. Please watch the whole thing. Wow! In any other circumstance this stuff would dominate the headlines for months and then linger for generations.
Actually, this is dominating the headlines, but not in the Old Media. You have to look elsewhere. Forget about the Old Liars (ABC NBC CBS MSNBC NYT et al). They are done. How did they get away with it for so long? That, I hope, will be one of the big topical questions in history classes for the next hundred years.
It’s been done, but I second the notion that we stop worrying about about the Old Media. Some people still bitch about them, wringing their hands over the latest dumb thing they did, always reacting and rarely acting. No, Young Grasshopper; move past them, like the wind. They are nothing.
We have our own media and our own culture.
On Tuesday (Illinois) McLean County State’s Attorney Ronald C. Dozier announced he would not prosecute many victimless crimes associated with firearms. The U.S. Department of Justice could learn something from Dozier instead of pursuing prosecutions such as this one:
Tracey Eberhart, 41, Augusta, Kan., and her husband, Jeffrey Eberhart, 50, Augusta, were charged in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Wichita. Jeffrey Eberhart was charged with one count of unlawful possession of a firearm after a felony conviction and one count of dealing in firearms without a license. Tracey Eberhart was charged with one count of aiding a felon in possessing firearms and ammunition and one count of providing firearms and ammunition to a convicted felon.
According to an agent’s affidavit, Tracey Eberhart obtained a federal license as a dealer of firearms when she opened Traceys Dream Weavers Salon And Sporting Goods at 431 State Street in Augusta, Kan. She told an investigator her intention was to cater the firearms business to women. During the application process, she made no mention of her husband, Jeffrey Eberhart. Because of prior felony convictions, he was prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.
On Jan. 20, 2012, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives attended a gun show in Topeka, Kan., where they saw Jeffrey Eberhart selling firearms at the Dream Weavers booth. He was wearing a Dream Weavers T-shirt and was heard talking to buyers about guns and laser scopes. Eberhart explained to an undercover agent that his wife and female employees sold guns during the week while he and another man sold firearms at gun shows on weekends. Later, ATF agents purchased ammunition and guns from Jeffrey Eberhart, both at the storefront in Augusta and at gun shows.
Jeffrey Eberhart was pictured with his wife at gun show in a photo on their web site, www.beautyandbullets.com.
If I could go back in time and make a suggestion or two to the founding fathers one of the suggestions I would make is that it should be unconstitional to criminalize victimless behavior.
If the gun is primarily a symbol, then it is a symbol of what?
To some it is a symbol of Man’s cruelty, or generally of evil. To others it is a symbol of the love and protection of life and liberty – a defense against evil.
Why would one person take one view as opposed to the other? It seems to me that the more good person is often trying to point out the differences between good and evil, whereas the more evil person wants to maintain some confusion over the matter.
“Get those guns out of the community” then, might be a reaction to a desire to maintain some of that confusion, to avoid addressing something they want kept hidden in the fog. The “bitter clinger” charge lashes out against guns and religion, both of which tend to draw attention to the differences between good and evil. The “bitter clinger” charge, as I see it, reinforces this guns-as-a-symbol concept to explain the rift between the antis and the pro 2As.
See; isn’t this fun?
This year I endeavored to keep a nice garden. The biggest job, after the soil has been worked and the seeds planted, is weeding. Early on, when the seedlings are all very young, it can be difficult to tell the difference between some weed seedlings and the ones you want, so I tend to let some of them get more established before I pull them. It took a lot of work, but between planting the vegetables on little berms and watering only the berms, I have the garden relatively weed free, except for some morning glory that never goes away unless you blast the whole garden several times with Roundup before planting.
But something struck me along the way. Even now, months into it, I find weeds that are mature, “hiding” among the desirable plants. They have a color or a shape just similar enough that we don’t see them among the vegetables unless we look very carefully. Several of us have taken it upon ourselves to hunt down and pull the weeds, but still a few of them can be found, growing and maturing, feeding off of the water, nutrients and sunlight intended for the vegetables, and producing seeds that will hang around until next spring. Then the battle starts all over again.
Although there are many good techniques for keeping them in check, the weeds still find a way to exist and suck some of the life out of the garden, even if it’s just a little bit. It is a never-ending battle that you never really “win”, see, but it can be rewarding all the same if you keep your eyes open and do what needs to be done.
As the Republicans are frantically trying to figure out just what it is they should pretend to believe during the upcoming election, and while we stand here and complain to each other that “we can’t vote our way out of this” there are organizations already in place already doing something about it and already having a positive effect. Even if “we who uphold the principles of liberty” win and win and win, one election after another, we can never stop tending this garden. There is never any final victory after which you can let your guard down and just live. Life is like that. We can complain about how the weeds have just totally taken over the garden, and yet who’s fault is that?
Weeds are what they are– we know exactly what they are and how they operate. We know that they aren’t going to disappear from the Earth. We also know what the vegetables are and what they need to thrive, right? So…
(Sorry if you don’t like allegory. For some reason I’m seeing it all over the place lately, as though life itself is one big set of metaphors and allegories. I get on a kick like this for a while, and then it’s on to another. It’ll pass)
If the real purpose of guns, as ratified by the Supreme Court, is defense of one’s home, then anything that can be used to fire dozens of rounds a minute, accommodate high-capacity clips of ammunition, or spray bullets, should not be in the hands of civilians. Period. There are no legitimate uses for such weapons in civilian life, regardless of whether you need to pull the trigger once or multiple times. So stop the quibbling and let’s agree on something reasonable on this front.
Sanjay Sanghoee
August 14, 2012
After Three Shootings, America Needs Zero Tolerance on Guns
[He has crap for brains for believing there are guns readily available that “spray bullets” and there are no legitimate uses guns of the type that he attempts to describe. He makes his case worse using the faulty logic that because the Supreme Court explained one of the purposes of the Second Amendment was defense of one’s home that is the only purpose of the Second Amendment.
Furthermore he is indirectly demanding the banning of modern revolvers. Here is a demonstration of a dozen bullets fired from a revolver in under three seconds:
Although the gun probably would get too hot to hold if one were to shoot at this rate for a full minute it is reasonable to claim a rate of fire on the order of 200+ rounds per minute with a revolver. My guess is that with no more than one day of practice nearly any healthy adult could easily shoot “dozens of rounds per minute” with a revolver.
This doesn’t even address the constitutional issues of banning guns “in common use” but now that we have established Sanjay Sanghoee has crap for brains such discussions have zero additional value.—Joe]
I had started writing a essay on learning and the brain and
current understandings about it, and realized as it grew HUGE that it revolved around examining some rhetorical
questions. Here are some of the core questions, with their import and details left
as an exercise to the readers and commenters, unless there is significant
interest in a particular one being addressed in some future essay.
Compare and contrast data,
information, and knowledge.
Why do people use them
interchangeably, and what problems arise when people do?
Compare and contrast school
and education.
Must one imply the other
(or the other, one)?
Compare and contrast smart
and educated.
Why do educated people get
them confused so much more often than smart people (both in themselves and
others)?
Compare and contrast teaching
and learning.
How do you measure the
effectiveness of a teacher?
Compare and contrast knowing,
understanding and wisdom.
How does one get turned
into the other?
Compare and contrast intrinsic
aptitude and interest.
Can one be leveraged into
the other, or are they merely randomly connected?
What is the most important thing a human should learn?
Rank, in order, the top 10
things one should learn by voting age. Why?
How can you tell truth from falsity?
How often do you ask
yourself “how do I know that? What
are my assumptions?”
At its most basic (biological) level, what is learning?
What makes this happen?
How are repetition and strong emotional tagging different?
Is it important for children or young adults to learn how the brain learns and works at some point, before they become an adult?
How could learning this help children in school?
How can a neural connection be strengthened, or made more interconnected
with others?
Compare and contrast a
single, strong connection, with highly interconnected knowledge.
How many strong emotional “tags” are there in a very safe,
nearly risk-free, environment?
Would this present a
challenge to learning?
What makes the brain think something is important enough to
learn (that is, remember and think about enough to apply the knowledge later)?
What is the brain designed to do, and in what sort of
environment?
WHY? HOW? Can we use this to help teach and learn?
This (spelling errors corrected below) should be no surprise to those who use Dr. Joe’s cure for everything:
The study by State University of New York found that semen contains potent “mood-altering chemicals” that can do wonderful things for a woman’s body and mind.
This study was done from a survey of 293 college females from the university’s Albany campus, who agreed to fill out an anonymous questionnaire about various aspects of their sex lives and then they then compared those responses to how the women viewed their mental health.
Earlier research had shown that seminal fluid contains chemicals that elevates mood, increase affection, induces sleep and also contains at least three anti-depressants.
Apparently men were endowed with a nifty combination of mood enhancers that don’t get the credit they deserve. Along with spermatozoa, semen also contains cortisol–which increases affection; estrogen–which makes you happier; and oxytocin, another powerful mood elevator, reports the Daily Mail.
Of course in many ways the study was a waste of money because, as the article points out, the conclusions should be well known to almost everyone:
As if that weren’t enough, semen naturally contains two other antidepressants, including well-known serotonin, and sleep-inducing melatonin. So after you get really happy, you go to sleep. (We needed a study to tell us that?)
How is it people can think communism is viable when even very small children and animals defend their property and territory?
I have to conclude either they are incredibly naïve, stupid, or intend to be the enforcers and hence are incredibly evil.
I believe these facts to be incontrovertible:
People who don’t like guns—who don’t want to own or carry a gun for protection, have the right to rely on the government to do that for them. They do not have the right to require everyone else to do so. The Supreme Court has so decided.
As the State’s Attorney, I have to make a choice. Do I continue to enforce laws that I believe to be unconstitutional, a belief that is supported by decisions of the highest court in the land, or do I continue to prosecute citizens who run afoul of State gun laws but have no evil intent or purpose in mind? Certainly the more cautious approach to such controversial issues is to keep enforcing the law, whenever possible in the least harmful way, until enough higher court cases are resolved against them that the anti-Second Amendment folks are forced to change. I’m not willing to do that anymore—too many good people will be harmed.
…
Our message is this: we will no longer use the power and authority of our office to criminalize and punish decent, otherwise law-abiding citizens who choose to exercise the rights granted to them by the Second Amendment of the United States’ Constitution to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.
Ronald C. Dozier
(Illinois) McLean County State’s Attorney
August 21, 2012
Emphasis in the original news release.
[Contrast this with what Handgun Control, Inc. (now Brady Campaign) had to say about Illinois a few years ago. Illinois was their model for laws on the (prohibition of) carrying of guns.
Brady supporters should read the writing on the wall, the net, and in the courts, and weep.—Joe]
It certainly seems that it is an idea whose time has come; The printable gun.
Here is a news release I received:
Defense Distributed
codywilson@utexas.eduIs Information Firepower? The Wiki Weapon
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Student Outfit Proposes to Release Open Source Printable Gun File to the World.LITTLE ROCK, AR—August 21, 2012: A new technology is ushering a fundamental shift in how material goods are manufactured and distributed. 3D printing continues to become more sophisticated and accessible to the average consumer.
3D plastic printers like the RepRap are approaching the ability to print 100% of their own parts, and as they are, this multiplies both the means and mode of a new method of production. This technology raises many controversial possibilities, as demonstrated by AR-15 forum user HaveBlue’s recent announcement that he had successfully printed and fired rounds with a plastic AR receiver.
Now, a group called Defense Distributed, a grassroots research and development collective whose volunteer engineers and designers span Arkansas and Texas, are utilizing 3D printing for something they say is unprecedented. Defense Distributed is entering phase two of their development of a digital file to print a plastic civilian defense system, the WikiWeapon. “The WikiWeapon will be capable of firing one .22 round. It is both functional and symbolic”.
This breakthrough begs the question, has gun control obsolesced? Defense Distributed will not be producing any physical objects or digital files for sale. The group intends to freely share the files they create for online sharing once fully developed and tested. “When we’re done, seed and hack this file—improve it if you can” they added.
The mission of Defense Distributed is not armament they say, but the liberation of information. “Information wants to be free” a designer tells me, “with the coming prevalence of 3D printers we hope to contribute to collapsing the distinction between digital information and physical objects”. The group hopes to catalyze our society’s conversation about the distribution of all printable commodities.
Two prototypes are entering the second stage of development but the group of students and weekend warriors requires outside funding for a printer upgrade and more materials. Defense Distributed has begun a crowd-funding campaign at http://indiegogo.com/wikiwep.
Learn more about this project at http://Printablegun.com and participate in the conversation on twitter, @DXliberty
It’s game over for gun control. There’s nothing left but the whimpering and the crying.
The path we’re on ends with mountains of corpses when the great experiment fails.
Mark McHugh
August 19, 2012
Shhhh…It’s Even Worse Than The Great Depression
[H/T to Tyler Durden.
One of his main points to support this prophecy is that the velocity of money in this country is lower than even during the Great Depression. That alone is a scary data point.
The prophecy that a lot of people are going to die as a result of government interference with the free market is consistent with what I have been saying for years. The only questions I see unanswered are the relative contribution of economic policy versus social policy and who, in what order, and how high people are stacked.—Joe]
I almost always carry concealed, but Saturday I forgot my Hawaiian shirt as I left the house. “Oh well; I’ll open carry”.
I had my daughter with me in the supermarket, when she said we should get some bananas.
We were discussing the amount of bananas we’d been going though lately when a guy standing very close to us blurted out; “Speaking of bananas…!” and then walked off quickly before I could make sense of it.
“I wonder what that was supposed to mean” I said to my daughter.
“I have no idea” she said with a chuckle. Then I realized that the guy probably was responding to the gun on my hip, and the spare mag carrier on the other. So I’d gotten a drive-by criticism. It was a “drive-by” or a “hit and run” because a charge was made with no possibility of a response.
At the risk of over-analyzing; I’ve often said that the left were cowards, and this response reinforces that assertion. The hit-and-run commenter could make the case that he was afraid of confronting an armed man (but then why say anything at all?) but I say he was afraid of what he himself might do in a straight-up conversation.
Two points then. One; the haters simply cannot help themselves– they’ll blurt out their hate reflexively, without hesitation. Two; they’re afraid, both of themselves (they know they’ll embarrass themselves by their own behavior) and of a fair contest in which their assertions might be challenged and laid bare. When you point out a hater’s hate, they hate you for it. Their hate is projected upon you, so as to make you the source of the hate…
In fact of course he had nothing at all to fear. I would simply have said something like, “Do you keep a fire extinguisher in your home?…”
If we can’t federally mandate new gun laws, I say we pass a federal law that all American males over 18, without prejudice or exception, be required to shave the base of their cocks. Shaving the base of one’s cock is a time-honored, porno-tested method of making one’s penis appear larger than it really is. Will this rid the country of guns? No. And it shouldn’t. But I am convinced it will rid gun-owners of the need for ever bigger, more powerful “weapons,” and their insistence on shoving those compensatory bigger guns down our gagging, metaphoric throats.
Shalom Auslander
August 14, 2012
Guns, God and Other Pricks: Is Pubic Shaving the Solution to the Firearms Epidemic? — An immodest proposal for solving handgun proliferation
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
H/T to David W. and Barron for the first emails. Numerous others also noticed.
Wow! Read the whole thing. This guy really has “a thing” for male genital. No argument for safety. No argument for local control in defiance of the McDonald decision. No argument that people will faint and spill their Starbucks coffee on their lap at the sight of a gun in plain view.
He is “convinced” that a perception of larger penises will “rid gun-owners of the need for ever bigger, more powerful ‘weapons’. I almost wish I had the time and interest to ask him how he determines truth from falsity and how he convinces himself of things in general. But I am nearly certain he doesn’t know himself.—Joe]
Yesterday morning I spent three hours talking with someone who retired after 26 years with the U.S. Navy as a diver and Explosives Ordnance Disposal expert.
We talked about guns and what guns we were carrying (I was carrying my STI Eagle and they had a Ruger LPC in .380) and Boomershoot a little bit. But mostly I listened to story after story of diving, finding, and disposing of unexploded bombs, shells, water heaters, and mines. Detonating 50,000 pounds of explosives in 80 feet of water apparently makes for a nice water column and lots of dead fish for the local natives to harvest. Another story involved a simulated (with conventional explosives) nuclear blast which left a good sized crater as well as making a decent sized wave in the ocean.
After we said good-bye and I was driving away I had this nagging feeling of something that was a little odd. I described the meeting to a friend as “remarkably unremarkable”.
After a half hour or so of thinking about it… Ahhhh ha! I knew what it was.
The stories were told in such a extremely calm, cool voice. There were some smiles, and some facial expressions which indicated they knew the story was interesting but there was barely any change in the pitch or the tempo of the voice. This person was not easily excited and was not particularly emotional.
That is probably a good personality trait to have in your friendly neighborhood EOD specialist.
Why would you need a gun at Dairy Queen?
A masked man wielding a sword tried to rob a central valley Dairy Queen on Sunday afternoon but was shot and killed by an employee, Las Vegas police said.
Oh. That’s why.
This is an actual conversation. It has been slightly modified to enhance comedic effect. Names have been withheld to protect the guilty.
Gal: So what was she wearing?
Guy: Uhh… Clothes?
Gal: Wrong answer!
Guy: I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if she wasn’t wearing clothes. That is one of the things I check for. So I don’t think I got that answer wrong.
Gal: You can do better. Women put a lot of effort into choosing just the right clothes. But I suppose it’s good to know that guys don’t pay any attention.
Guy: I probably shouldn’t say this but I’ve read that women dress to impress and show dominance over other women rather than to get the attention of men. If they were interested in getting the attention of men they wouldn’t bother with clothes.
Gal: You’re right. You shouldn’t have said that.
Update: I have a report on what she was wearing. From top to bottom:
I suppose someone somewhere is happier now.
Drive safe, be safe, carry a gun.
Jacob S.
To my daughter, Kim, every morning before she leaves for work.
[Nice. I want my daughter safe and I know most of the time she has to look out for her own safety. That Jacob is encouraging her to carry tools that enhance her safety is comforting to me.—Joe]
To decide this case, it is enough to acknowledge what has long been established in our legal system: access to fundamental rights does not turn on some official’s whim. No “good and substantial reason” is required to exercise fundamental rights.
…
History, not social science or debatable notions of public policy, determines whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a handgun. And because history determines that it does, the state lacks any legitimate interest in suppressing the right as an end unto itself. The exercise of constitutional rights simply cannot be against the public interest, and the state cannot satisfy any legitimate interest, however compelling, by voiding a fundamental right and forcing individuals to prove a special need to exercise it.
Alan Gura
July 30, 2012
From the appellees’ brief Raymond Woollard and Second Amendment Foundation, Inc. v. Denis Gallagher, Seymour Goldstein, Charles M. Thomas, Jr., Marcus L. Brown, Terrence Sheridan.
[In other words the question of “need” need not be answered in the case of a specific enumerated right.
I would go further and suggest that raising the question of need implies the asker should be put a watch list for potential past or future violations of 18 USC 241 and/or 242.—Joe]