Author Archives: Joe

Agenda

Posted on by

It’s as if the NY Times had a conclusion, tried to find evidence to support it, failed, but published it anyway:

Beyond Guns: N.R.A. Expands Agenda

The N.R.A., long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months
also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit
card regulations and Supreme
Court nominees

In the health care debate this year, for instance, the N.R.A.’s lobbyists
worked with the Senate majority leader, Harry
Reid, to include a little-noticed provision banning insurance companies from
charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes.

The N.R.A. worked out a deal last month exempting itself from a proposal
requiring groups active in political spending to disclose their financial
donors. Its push this spring for greater gun rights in the District of Columbia
served to effectively kill a measure — once seemingly assured of passage — to
give the district a voting seat in Congress.

With a push from the N.R.A., a popular bill last year restricting credit card
lenders came with an odd add-on: It also allowed people to carry loaded guns in
national parks. And the gun lobby put potential supporters of the Supreme Court
nominee Elena
Kagan on notice this month that a vote for her would be remembered at the
ballot boxes in November.

The N.R.A.’s expanding portfolio is an outgrowth of its success in the
courts, Congressional officials and political analysts said. With the Supreme
Court ruling last month for the second time since 2008 that the Second Amendment
guarantees an individual the right to have a gun, the N.R.A. now finds that its
defining battle is a matter of settled law, and it has the resources to expand
into other areas.

The NRA had success in the courts? What national level gun rights cases has the NRA won recently? Neither Heller nor McDonald were NRA cases. I suggest you ask the lead attorney for both those cases, Alan Gura, what he thinks of the NRA getting credit for those wins–I would advise that you be prepared to treat your ears for blisters afterward. The NRA certainly supported the decisions (as far as they went). But the organizations that deserve the credit in those cases are the Cato Institute and the Second Amendment Foundation.

The NRA’s defining battle is settled law? The right to keep a handgun in your home for self-defense was the defining battle for the NRA? Not even the GOA sell the NRA that short.

Would it be considered “expanding their agenda” if the NAACP or the ADL pushed through laws that prohibited their members from being discriminated by insurance companies, enabled them to visit National Parks, opposed Supreme Court nominees hostile to them, and fought laws that inhibited their lobbying?

The reporter claims the NRA is expanding their agenda but only supplies facts that support the conclusion they are pursuing their agenda–protecting the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. As we all know, being a bigot means the facts don’t matter when they conflict with your agenda. And here the NY Times clear shows they have an agenda and they are bigots.

Update: Sebastian has similar thoughts.

And your point is?

Posted on by

The following is from Chicago so in some respects it’s understandable:

What is missing in the court’s decision and all the glee among its supporters is
recognition that this ruling accentuates and legitimizes and further establishes
our violent character as a nation. Its premise is that violence is best met with
and countered by violence, that the best way to fend off a violent attack is to
practice violence in turn, including lethal violence. It clearly supposes that
the way to reduce violence is to increase the capacity and means to inflict it.
Moreover, it authorizes the privatization of state-sanctioned violence; each can
now be given the requisite permission to own and carry—and in certain
circumstances, use—a firearm to injure or take the life of another.

Are there any facts from anywhere, anytime, on this planet that counter the claim “violence is best met with
and countered by violence, that the best way to fend off a violent attack is to
practice violence in turn, including lethal violence”?

As far as I can determine this has been an immutable law of nature for about a billion years. For this guy to assume, without any supporting data whatsoever, something different and to expect everyone else to just nod their heads in agreement is arrogance or ignorance on a scale that is seldom seen outside of government.

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

Imagine the effect on the career of the artist that made a similar cartoon targeting the NAACP or the ADL using negative stereotypes of them.

Quote of the day–Barbara Griffith-Wilson

Posted on by

It’s going to be bang, bang, shoot ‘em up on the streets of Flint. In the end, mothers will not be able to do a thing except bury their children.


Barbara Griffith-Wilson
July 12, 2010
Flint City Council postpones gun control ordinance change
[Ahhh yes… The blood in the streets argument. Another person, A.C. Dumas (appropriate name) has this to say, “It’s going to get bad in the city of Flint as you’ve never seen it before. We’re going to open a can of worms that’s never been opened before.”


I’m reminded of something on a t-shirt, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”


They are fully aware the rest of their state allows open carry yet they apparently believe the facts from outside their city limits do not apply to the people that live inside their city limits. This is mind boggling stupid.–Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

For some reason I find this funny even though I find it an offensive statement about gun ownership.

I suppose it might be because it appeals to my appreciation for understated and sick jokes (my collection is here).

Quote of the day–Lee Harris

Posted on by

The same thing is happening today — and that is our true enemy. The poison of the radical Islamic fantasy ideology is being spread all over the Muslim world through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street. In fact, there is no better way to grasp the full horror of the poison than to listen as a Palestinian mother offers her four-year-old son up to be yet another victim of this ghastly fantasy.

Once we understand this, many of our current perplexities will find themselves resolved. Pseudo-issues such as debates over the legitimacy of “racial profiling” would disappear: Does anyone in his right mind object to screening someone entering his country for signs of plague? Or quarantining those who have contracted it? Or closely monitoring precisely those populations within his country that are most at risk?

Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible.

Lee Harris
Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology
[It is a bit long (Kevin Baker excepted) if you think of it as a blog post but as Tamara said it is fascinating.

It can be applied to so many things–gun control, government run health care (probably government run almost anything!), “global warming”, recycling, and probably a thousand other things.–Joe]

Update: The broken link has been fixed.

Middle of Nowhere

Posted on by

Early next month wife Barbara, her sister Susan, and I are going to Sullivan County Missouri. We had ancestors who emigrated west to Idaho from there in the 19th Century. Barb and her sister will be doing some genealogical research. I probably will help them a little bit but I plan to spend quite a bit of time at Middle of Nowhere with my pistol and perhaps a rifle. I wish they had a 1000 (or 1500!) yard range but a couple of plate racks and 100 yard range will keep me busy for a while.

Anyone else in the area with the time and ammo (I plan on shooting up at least 1000 perhaps as much as 2000 rounds) to spend practicing?

Burning books

Posted on by

Imagine the outrage if the U.S. State Department announced moral and monetary support for the United Nations burning books or supporting apartheid. That’s what I feel toward International Small Arms Destruction Day.

That’s our tax money being used to deny others an inalienable right to keep and bear arms.

H/T to NRA-ILA.

Appropriate comparison

Posted on by

Chicago Mayor Daley is compared to former Alabama Governor George Wallace:

Then, as now, a seasoned politician felt his opinion superseded the rights of
citizens and was willing to use the power of their office to deny those rights
to citizens they deemed ‘unworthy.‘

Nice!

General Defensive Rifle class

Posted on by

I took a similar class several years ago and found it very useful. One of the instructors gives an overview of the class given last month and reports on the functionality and reliability of the AR-15 (including piston versions), AK-47, SCAR, Sig 556, and FN FS2000 (mostly useless).

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

Apparently the artist hasn’t spent any time at, or even looked at the crime rates, at gun ranges and stores. Facts are irrelevant to bigots.

Quote of the day–John Lott

Posted on by

A comparison with the First Amendment is useful: If Chicago were to put any tax on a newspaper, even a penny, courts would throw it out as an abridgment of freedom of speech. Why should the Second Amendment be treated any differently?

Apparently, the city of Chicago sees no constitutional problem in imposing a $100 Chicago Firearms Permit fee plus another $15 per firearm (even on the non-operational ones) every three years. A valid Illinois Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card is also required, at a cost of $10, although it seems redundant as the Chicago permit and the Illinois FOID card do the same things. On an annual basis, Chicago’s fees are about 2.5 times the cost for the average concealed handgun permit.

…

Let’s face it, Mayor Richard Daley wants to ban guns, all guns. And he thinks that a complete ban is a “reasonable” regulation. The Supreme Court has ruled that he is not allowed to ban guns, but this is not going to change his mind about guns in the slightest. Daley now wants to place as restrictive rules as he thinks that the courts will let him get away with. Pretending that these rules are anything more than an attempt to limit gun ownership as much as possible is simply dishonest.

John Lott
July 9, 2010
Let’s Face It, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley Wants to Ban Guns, All Guns
[And if he wanted to license or tax religions that too would be throw out. This is all well settled law. This is no different than the poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on blacks to prevent them from exercising their right to vote. Again and again Mayor Daley and his city council are nothing but a bunch of bigots.

Some politicians wanted the National Guard in Chicago and maybe they should be–to enforce the Second Amendment just like the Army was called out to protect students from racists following desegregation of the schools.–Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

This exemplifies the poor stereotype they have of gun owners. I suspect the only reason the artist used a waiter with a tie and a wine bottle instead of some bucked-teeth inbred stereotype opening a bottle of bear was to increase the contrast between the two frames.

Quote of the day–AlanR and Hank Archer

Posted on by

I recommend that this be called “Markley’s Law.”

That has to be some kind of variant of Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion of gun owners’ rights grows longer, the probability of an ad hominem attack involving penis size approaches 1.

AlanR and Hank Archer
July 9, 2010
Comments to Quote of the day–Stephen Markley by AlanR and Hank Archer.
[Therefore, let it be know throughout the entire Internet that henceforth when an anti-gun bigot attributes the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms to the inadequate size or envy of male genital that it be referred to as Markley’s Law, as first articulated by AlanR and named by Hank Archer.

See also further discussion on this topic here.

I started to add it to the Urban Dictionary but they say, “We’ll reject inside jokes and definitions naming non-celebrities”. Someone else want to take a crack at getting it in Wikipedia?–Joe]

Like that will help

Posted on by

Sounds like a good time and place for rival gangs to set up an ambush:

Sanders, senior pastor at the Koinonia House of Worship in Bellevue,
said he hopes the Omaha Police Department’s gun-amnesty program –
scheduled for Saturday at 30th and Spencer Streets in north Omaha –
will help gang members and others end violence.

“One of the
things we’re working on is a gun ceasefire and a truce between the
gangs,” Sanders said. Gang members, he said, are “looking for a way
out.”

People who drop off their guns and ammunition at the
dropoff point between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. will not be questioned, and no
names will be recorded. Omaha police will perform ballistics tests to
determine whether the firearms had been used in crimes, but will not
check for DNA or fingerprints.

If they want “a way out” then why not just leave the area or not associate with other gang members? I don’t see how giving up their arms fundamentally changes their situation unless the “way out” means being defenseless when they get whacked by their rivals.

There is more than a little bit of truth to the bumpersticker that proclaims, “Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who didn’t.”

Respecting the First Amendment through the Second

Posted on by

And people wonder why we don’t want law enforcement to have discretion when we apply for a discreet carry license:



Paul [Dorr] was denied a permit precisely because Sheriff Weber believed that his free speech rights offended the majority of voters in Osceola County….


In denying Paul a concealed weapons permit, Sheriff Weber single handedly hijacked the First Amendment and nullified its freedoms and protections. Ironically, Sheriff Weber, sworn to uphold the Constitution, in fact retaliated against a citizen of his county who used this important freedom of speech and association precisely in the manner envisioned by the founding members of our Nation who ratified the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791.


Imagine how some deep south pot-bellied sheriff would used “discretion” in issuing licenses to the people with dark colored skin in his jurisdiction. There might be a conflict of interest with his duties as the leader of the local chapter of the KKK.


Abuse of discretion is still going on in places like California. This needs to be corrected.


H/T to Ted for the email (and some bloggers for the) pointer.

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

I cannot recall when the U.S. Congress ever approached anything like a NRA “theme store”. Other than getting the regulation against firearms in national parks thrown out (ETA: and being able to check your gun onto Amtrak) what law has the NRA been able to get legislated out of existence in the last 20 years?

Alternate reality. It has to be an alternate reality these people live in.

[This is a set up for a set of cartoons related to a NRA proposed theme restaurant in Times Square. Many people may not realize there was such a proposal.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Stephen Markley

Posted on by

Gun safety and regulation is a battle so lost, it’s barely worth flipping a hand at and saying “bah.” One might have thought following clear demonstrations of why a society awash in cheap, easily purchased handguns is a pretty f***ing stupid idea. Columbine, Virginia Tech, the South Side of Chicago–meh, who cares? Think about how many guys’ penises feel bigger because they’ve fired a gun.


…


But it’s totally not even a subject worth arguing over. Frankly, I don’t even know why I’m writing about it. Even perfectly sane, rational friends of mine are in love with the idea of gun ownership for all (small penises likely being a key ingredient). But this atmosphere of hyperventilation about “gun rights” (what a moronic term) now manifests itself around the country in the form of court challenges to some highly reasonable laws.


…


But again, I don’t care. Guns have permeated our culture so thoroughly, become trafficked in such heavy volumes and have such an ironclad grip on our political class that it’s not even worth thinking about. Have your guns, have your 30,000 gun-related deaths each year, have your fun.

Oh, and have your obviously insufficient penises.


Stephen Markley
July 9, 2010
Gun Control Is a Completely Pointless Battle
[I find his obsession with penis size and telling us how much he doesn’t care “interesting”. The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.–Joe]

More bad news for the Brady Campaign

Posted on by

Roberta reports the Better Business Bureau gives the Brady Campaign a failing grade.

Sebastian reports how the good guys get A’s.

Charity Navigator gives them a score of 43.74 compared the NRA Foundation at 60.85.

In the most blatant example of doublespeak I have seen outside of an Orwellian novel GuideStar categorizes them as “Civil Liberties Advocacy”. “Someone” should write a review for GuideStar on the Brady Campaign.

The Brady Campaign is having financial problems and they have low charity ratings which hurts their fund raising. Sounds like a death spiral to me.

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

Again, limiting the potential “solutions” by misstating the problem.