A forum “for Cops by Cops” responds to the news about Brady Campaign troubles pretty much like what I would expect. HA HA!
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Sensible control measures
From the Washington Post:
Many legal analysts predict that Chicago’s handgun ban is done for. While proponents of gun control may feel discouraged, the actual impact could be minimal, depending on what regulations the court allows Chicago to put on the books instead. New York City, for example, makes it quite difficult for private citizens to obtain handguns through an expensive and drawn-out permitting process that falls short of an outright ban.
Local officials from Dodge City to Chicago have understood that some regulation of firearms within city limits is in the public’s interest, and that regulation and law enforcement are important complements in the effort to reduce gun violence. Even before the repeal of D.C.’s handgun ban, the city’s police reestablished a gun-recovery unit and focused on seizing illegal firearms. The city’s homicide rate has been relatively flat the past several years. If the court decides that Chicago must follow D.C’s lead in getting rid of its handgun ban, we can only hope that it leaves the door open for sensible control measures.
It’s not explicitly stated but the implication seems pretty clear to me that they think NYC making it “quite difficult for private citizens to obtain handguns through an expensive and drawn-out permitting process” are “sensible control measures”.
The courts should no more allow “sensible control measures” for gun owners than they did Jim Crow Laws.
This should be a clue
Someone is asking:
Where can I find “positive” ATF videos?
…
Raw or not, “positive” videos seem nearly impossible to find for the ATF (and even for FEMA,
for that matter).
You have to have positive acts by the ATF before you can have positive videos of it.
Whose business is it?
Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California says, “It’s none of government’s flippin’ business what guns I own, or why I own them.”
Of course the Brady Campaign and their supporters disagree. From the same article we find the claim
“It will make your community safer, and make officers safer,” by Juliet Leftwich of Legal Community Against Violence, which co-sponsored the bill.
Is that all it takes? A claim of increased safety? We know there is no data supporting a claim that weapons restrictions of any type have ever made the average person safer. But suppose there was. Would that be sufficient grounds for tracking and licensing people that engage in activities that sometimes result in injury or even death?
If that were true then government paperwork could be justified for every instance of sexual intercourse. Do you want to live in a world like that?
Just think of the benefits! It would make it easier for health officials to track down all carriers of sexual transmitted diseases. Shouldn’t we make it easier for government officials?
If those that advocate government tracking of gun and ammunition were consistent they would advocate the same for sexual intercourse. But of course registration and tracking of guns can no more reduce violent crime than requiring paperwork for each act of sexual intercourse would help apprehend rapists. And more importantly because we have a specifically enumerated right to keep and bear arms it is even less of their business to track our exercise of that right than it is to track our sexual activities.
You can make money without doing evil
Google is famously known for saying you can make money without doing evil. Aside from my belief this statement betrays an unspoken belief that most earning of money is inherently evil, good intentions are not enough.
The authority revealed that as well as collecting SSID information (the
network’s name) and MAC addresses (the number given to Wi-Fi devices such as a
router), Google had also been collecting payload data such as emails or web page
content being viewed.“The independent audit of the Google system shows that the system used for
the Wi-Fi collection intentionally separated out unencrypted content (payload
data) of communications and systematically wrote this data to hard drives,” said
Simon Davis from Privacy International.…
Google said the error came after a piece of experimental code written in 2006
was included in the software used by its Street View cars by mistake.However, Davis says Google’s explanation “doesn’t add up”.
“This is complex code and it must have been given a budget and been overseen.
Google has asserted that all its projects are rigorously checked,” said
Davies.“It goes to the heart of a systematic failure of management and of duty of
care.”
I’m not going to say it could never happen at Microsoft but if my experience is any indication it would be a very, very safe bet.
I wrote the original code for an internal application used on Windows Mobile 6.x that has collected millions of SSIDs and BSSIDs (also known as MAC addresses). My officemate wrote the code that gathers the same information on Windows Phone 7. I know what we had to go through in terms of review by peers, lawyers, and management. Privacy was of paramount importance. There was never even a suggestion that connection traffic should be considered “fair game”. The information of the type Google is in trouble for storing on hard drives never even gets into RAM let alone is processed enough to hit persistent storage.
I’m not in a position to say that Google had evil intent but I have trouble imagining what they thought they could do with code that stored information gathered in that way that would not be considered “evil” or at least extremely unethical.
Gun cartoon of the day
People on both sides of the issue sometimes attribute evil intent to their opponents. While the evidence is overwhelming that evil intent exists in some cases (see also here) I am of the opinion the majority of the anti-gun people have good intentions. They typically are ignorant and/or have difficulty distinguishing between truth and falsity. This doesn’t mean that their actions don’t enable or cause evil results. Hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
It could be that my sample is biased but examples where anti-gun people acknowledge pro-gun people have good intentions appear to be non-existent. Typically they attribute NRA actions as benefiting the gun manufactures and it being “all about the money”. But many examples, such as the cartoon above, exist which claim the NRA markets guns to kids and works to arm criminals.
This systematic and persistent attribution of evil intent to all gun owners and organizations is no different than attributing evil intent to blacks who demand repeal of curfew laws and laws prohibiting socializing between the races or gays who wish to adopt children.
The VPC does not hide it’s belief that gun owners and gun organizations are evil. But the Brady Campaign does not do this. They are much more moderate in their rhetoric and probably as result of this are a much larger organization. They are aware that extremism in pursuit of their goals is a loosing strategy. While I find it telling that extremism in defense of liberty does not suffer from the same handicap that is a topic for another post (perhaps Lyle would like to take this up).
I can’t help but think that asking anti-gun people what they think the motivation is for pro-gun people would be revealing. I suspect asking them this question would cause them to confront beliefs which are clearly not supported by the evidence.
Quote of the day–Sheriff Richard I. Mack
Any right or freedom not worth fighting for is but a temporary privilege.
Sheriff Richard I. Mack
From My Cold Dead Fingers–Why America Needs Guns, Third Edition (“Final Chapter”), page 212.
[Not only must it be worth fighting for but people must actually go out and do the fighting and voting.–Joe]
Who is Brady’s donor?
After reading Rob Reed’s article I followed the link to Open Secrets and the Brady fund raising info. As Robb noted the other day (but I failed to follow up on) the Brady Campaign has had just one donor this year who gave them $2500.
If they turn off all the lights, turn the heat down really low during the winter, and only use enough air-conditioning to keep the computers from overheating that might be enough to pay the electric bill. I don’t what kind of guns you own, that’s funny.
You know what is even funnier? That one donor…I know who it is. Open Secrets lists them as Michael Wolkowitz.
That name… where have I seen that name before? Could it be some crime family boss wanting to keep their victims unarmed? Or maybe a foreign nation diplomat, the Taliban, or some other subversive? Naw! Too easy. It has to be someone else.
Oh yeah! Now I remember! It is the Brady Campaign Board Chair.
I don’t care who you are. That’s funny right there!
Suicide watch
This is a little different than most suicide watches. In this one they are in the process and we are just watching it happen.
After it completes we should all go to the wake. I’ll sign up to bring my famous cookies and maybe my chemistry set.
Gun cartoon of the day
Had it been “U.S. Constitution” and “Bill of Rights” instead of “gun” and “Smith and thy Wesson” there would be some truth in the cartoon and it would apply to a large percentage of gun owners and NRA members. As it is it only reflects the bigoted, imaginary world of the artist.
Quote of the day–John R. Lott Jr.
When I have been interviewed by foreign journalists, even German ones, they usually start off by asking why multiple-victim public shootings are such an American problem. And of course, they are astonished when I remind them of the attacks in their own countries and point out that this is not an American problem, it is a universal problem, but with a common factor: The attacks occur in public places where civilians are banned from carrying guns.
John R. Lott Jr.
June 11, 2010
Gun Control and Mass Murder
[H/T to Dave Hardy.
I would have said “private citizens” instead of “civilians” but he still gets the point across.–Joe]
Gun cartoon of the day
I’ve been collecting gun cartoons and it’s time to start sharing. Most come from the dark ages of the mid and late 1990s.
Perhaps this will help bring people up to speed on why I think anti-gun people are bigots. Would this cartoon get published in your paper if the target were black, Jewish, or homosexual?
Anti-gun people lying with statistics
One of the books on my shelf is How to Lie with Statistics. I found it very useful to help me identify the errors in the reports from anti-gun people. They apparently subscribe to the claim by the author, “A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s “big Lie”; it misleads,
yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
For example NYC Mayor Bloomberg reported the other day:
The report shows that total crime decreased by 5.1 percent in New York City
during 2009, outpacing national trends. Murders fell by 9.9 percent, compared to
7.2 percent nationwide. According to NYPD Compstat data, crime is down an
additional 1.5 percent citywide for the first five months of the year when
compared to 2009 levels
What is not said is that (as pointed out by Linoge) NYC uses a biased sample for the statistics. They deliberately do not report all the crime.
Of course that is such a brute force approach it doesn’t take any great skill or reading of a book to accomplish.
The Brady Campaign and Violence Policy Center are generally a little more subtle in their statistical lies.
As I wrote in my last paragraph in my post Alan Gura v. Paul Helmke Helmke and company talk about “gun violence” and concentrate on the “one component of violence”. The unmentioned assumption is that violent crime committed with guns is independent of all violent crime. If this were true then you would expect that one could, conceivably, eliminate all the guns in society and have a decrease in violent crime. This isn’t what happens in real life. It tends to be true that the rate of crimes committed with firearms goes down when there are exceedingly strict restriction in place. But other violent crime has a strong tendency to increase when those restrictions occur. The presumed reasons for this are: 1) If criminals cannot get access to a firearm they substitute a different weapons and; 2) Potential victims are disarmed which encourages predators because of the reduced risk of getting hurt and/or caught.
The VPC feeds the press information on “gun death rates” and they eat it up. But the VPC appears to include suicides and justifiable homicide by police and private citizens! According to their numbers it is just as bad for a wheelchair bound elderly woman to kill the man who broke into her home to rape her as it for the home invader to kill an entire family including the toddlers. And they ignore violent crime in general.
Their statistics tells us nothing about whether places with strict gun laws make the average person safer. They do tell us where we can live if you would rather die by being beaten to death than a gunshot wound and where violent predators can find disarmed prey. One should conclude that VPC is more appropriately named the Violent Predator Compendium.
Quote of the day–Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
Sorry! Page Not Found
As you can see we have moved things around. We hope the new structure will make things easier to find on the site. All of the pages on the site are listed below.
Sorry, the page you requested is not in our database. You may have followed a bad external link, or mis-typed a URL.
For now, you may want to load our homepage (www.bradycenter.org) or type your request in the search box above.
Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
June 9, 2010
http://www.bradycenter.org/donate/events/dc
[The link used to go to this content. Searching for Helen Thomas on their site still yields the link above but the page has been removed. I wonder why?
Since they seem to have lost the web page I’m pleased to offer it back to them and even host it on my site at no charge.
The Brady Campaign–The 21st Century social equivalent of the KKK.
Update: Their web page about honoring Helen Thomas works again. Sebastian speculates.
If I were in management of an organization that were embarrassed by someone we honored by giving them an award I think I would do just the opposite of what they did. I think I would leave the web page (the Internet is forever once it hits the tubes–you can’t take it back so why try?) but update it with a statement that you were unaware (assuming that is true) of the persons embarrassing beliefs and have revoked the award.
They appear to have tried to just hide the evidence which is the wrong thing to do. Will they do the right thing now? They haven’t in the past. Let’s hope they continue to fumble along and further confirm my claim they are ordinary bigots who are not ashamed of their beliefs and the people they associate with.–Joe]
Episode one of Top Shot
I watched the first episode of Top Shot last night. Barb watched about 10 minutes and then got bored and went off to do something else.
I liked it far better than I expected to. I don’t care for reality shows. When I first heard about Survivor back in late 1999 I was about to become unemployed as my contract with Microsoft expired. I thought it might be something I could do well at and I got an application and looked into the show concept further. It was completely different than I expected and I was repulsed. I expected something about working together and making conditions better for everyone on the island. I envisioned the winner being the person who did the most to improve the small “society”. I contemplated the skills and innovation I could bring to the situation. What would I bring with me and what sort of things could be accomplished with the materials on hand. It wasn’t going to be anything like that. It was going to be about getting rid of other people not working together with people. What sort of life lesson is this? It’s total crap.
That said it did cross my mind that Top Shot might be something I could participate in–for about 500 mS. I’m not a “Top Shot”. I do okay in the local matches but I’m just a “B” class shooter. I shoot at a level of about 65% (my current USPSA classification is 65.94% with a high of 68.53%) of the worlds best shooters. I could not imagine that would be good enough and didn’t pursue it.
Then I found out Caleb was accepted. What? I’m on par with Caleb! Oh well, it was at a bad time with our current project (Windows Phone Seven) at Microsoft and I had an obligation to complete that work anyway.
I really should have listened to what Caleb said last night on Gun Nuts Radio about it before making the following comments but I have other commitments for tonight and don’t have the time.
After seeing the first episode I again thought I could have had a chance. Mike Seeklander and his spotter’s performance was pathetic. Yes, as Tam pointed out the 100 yard shot Seeklander failed on is not as straightforward as one might think. But assuming the problem was not with the shooter being incompetent then either the spotter and shooter could have solved the problem had they been thinking. Here is how.
One of the shots was on paper. Use the same point of aim and try it again. If it lands on paper in close to the same place then you know offset in both X and Y from point of aim. Use that offset to put the bullet on target. If it doesn’t then the one on paper was random and you need to find the offset. The spotter should have found a nearby spot of bare ground where the bullet strike could be easily seen and directed the shooter there to find the offsets. If no such bare ground was available then systematically try offset in increments of 1/2 the paper width/height. Get a bullet on paper and confirm the offsets! They may have tried that and it was edited before airing but I was extremely annoyed that I didn’t see it happening. I felt the other team members should have put both the spotter and shooter on the chopping block. They both failed.
This episode also confirmed my hypothesis that if someone brags about how good a shooter they are it is near certain proof they are crap. All the great shooters I have personally met are extremely modest or at least silent about how great they think they are.
If you take nothing more from this post remember this. You can do a quick and dirty zero of your gun with one shot. Aim at something and shoot. Then stabilize the gun while aiming at the same place. With the gun still pointed at the same exact spot adjust the sights until the sights point at the place where the bullet hit.
Quote of the day–Theodore Haas
Their ignorance is pitiful — their lives have been too easy. Had they
experienced Dachau, they would have a better idea of how precious freedom is.
These leftist should leave America. These Sarah Brady types must be educated to
understand that because we have an armed citizenry, that a dictatorship has not
yet happened in America. These anti-gun fools are more dangerous to Liberty than
street criminals or foreign spies.
Theodore Haas
Full Interview with Holocaust Survivor, Theodore Haas
[I was reminded of this quote by The Brady Campaign connection with anti-Semite Helen Thomas.–Joe]
Only 300?
I have conflicting data.
On one hand I have data points like this blog post and military officers who have privately told me that 20 well trained and disciplined men could completely change the political make up of this country. They make plausible arguments and I have only one data point to counter that claim.
If it only takes 300 (or 20) then why hasn’t Osama bin Laden (or the Weathermen, or whoever) deployed the 300 and done so? Is it that hard to find that many well trained and disciplined men? Or is it that those groups lack the motivation? Or is it that those claims are wrong. Just what is it?
The two data points are at odds with each other.
.50 caliber myth
AmericanMercenary, a U.S. army solider, gives us data on the effectiveness of .50 caliber rifle fire on aircraft.
That should put the myth propagated by the VPC and Brady Campaign to rest. At least for rational people.
Quote of the day–John Bingham
Privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States … are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution of the United States… . These eight articles … never were limitations upon the power of the states until made so by the Fourteenth Amendment.
John Bingham
1871
Bingham was a primary architect of the 14th Amendment.
[This is something to keep in mind as later this month, after being more than 140 years overdue, the Second Amendment is finally acknowledged as a barrier to state and local governments infringement on a specific enumerated right. Bigots ignore the spirit and the intent of the law. We have a legal system. Not a justice system.
Although I haven’t read all of Alan Gura’s briefs so maybe he did use this but if he didn’t it would seem to me he overlooked powerful support for his approach to incorporation of the Second Amendment.
I found this while reading The Gun Rights War, page 75.–Joe]
How appropriate
It was so obvious I didn’t bother to immediately point it out. It was just a week ago that I posted links to the bigots hanging out together (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are direct links). Their website still has this page up with pictures from their annual event (which, BTW, wouldn’t be big enough for the Boomershoot dinner we have every year).
So many anti-gun people try to paint gun owners as white supremacists, anti-Semitic bigots and now the “the nation’s largest, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence” is embarrassed by having the person they just honored show her true colors by saying the Jews in Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland.
Had this been the NRA who just honored such a person at their annual meeting the connection would have been on the front page of nearly every leftist web site. It would be on television and reporters would be camped out at Wayne LaPierre’s house trying to make the connection all the more damaging.
What do we see now that it was one of the left’s own that is the anti-Semitic bigot and was honored as “legendary” by one of the left’s favorite causes? All I’m picking up on is a few on our side (Sebastian and Kurt).
I would like to remind those that support the Brady Campaign that their silence implies agreement with the Brady’s alliance with Thomas and her bigoted view. But I already knew you guys were bigots. This just makes it more obvious to the rest of the world.