Category Archives: Crap For Brains

People and especially governments do some incredibly stupid stuff. This is about those stupid actions.

It Boggles the Mind

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Reading the swarm of comments over on Oleg’s blog, it seems a lot of military folks, those with real experience, favor keeping people disarmed in barracks and around the base;

It may be hard for some to comprehend, but putting on ACUs doesn’t make you a weapons proficient commando. If they let every cook, clerk, and nurse carry around loaded weapons 24/7 there would be many more “accidental” deaths than this per year.

Exactly what the anti gun rights activists say about the population in general, and it’s been proven wrong.  We have more guns than ever, and the accident rate continues to fall.  Not weapons proficient?  Them train them, then arm them.  In that order.  Takes only a short while.  Put the second amendment back in force and more of them will be proficient, to some degree, when they arrive, which was of course the original idea, wasn’t it, Skippy?

The average “soldier” doesn’t shoot for a living and non-combat arms (the vast majority is support) troops are lucky to even see the range twice a year.

Poor training.  Basing policy on poor training is worse than just poor training alone.  So, we can afford billion-dollar bombers, and gazzillion-dollar satellite networks and all that, but a few extra cartridges for a week of training is out of the freaking question.  Even then, I assume there has to be at least a few in the barracks who know one end of a gun from another.  I know– I just don’t understand.  I’d understand if I were in the military, that you don’t train too many people too well, ’cause that’s “dangerous”, even though I see every day here in the real world that that line of thinking is pure horseshit.  The more people equipped and trained in the use of arms, the safer your whole society, and the more versatile and effective your military.  If you people don’t trust your own, you need to seriously get the f^#K out.  Now.

They would also have to lock the base down from un-verified (without prior clearance) civilian entry as weapons would be too easily accessed.

“Civilian entry”?  Like at my house, where there’s infinitely more firepower than in military barracks?  Like at a gun store or a gun show, or a shooting range, practically anywhere in the country?  So then, it’s fine to just let any stranger onto a military base so long as that base is almost as unarmed as a kindergarten-school-gun-free-zone, and it would be worse to let strangers in if people on the base were mostly all armed and capable of defending themselves?  That’s hippie logic, right there, folks.  It’s right out of Diane Feinstein’s teeny tiny little bird brain.

Somebody (re)educate me here (haul me to a camp or something) ’cause I figure that if you’re training an army, any time, any where, they should all know how to handle a weapon, from the nurse, to the cook, to the electrician, to the floor sweeper, to the truck driver, etc. (just like in the civilian population) all the way through to the actual combat units.  Falling short of that (because you’re in the military and afraid of guns?) I would think that, at the very least, anyone trained in weapon handling should be well-trained, and should be hauling at the very minimum a sidearm around at all times (just like millions of civilians do every day already).

The Tenth Amendment is for cowards

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Wow! It’s almost surreal reading this:

I’ll say the last refuge of cowards in the Tenth Amendment.

The Tenth has been invoked a lot lately. The Tenth has been mentioned as the reason health-care reform is unconstitutional. It’s the way the Speaker of the Tennessee State House says his state can circumvent federal gun laws. It’s the states’ rights argument carried to the extreme.

The amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

What that says, in other words, is that if a power is unclaimed by the federal government — or if that power is not denied to the states — then the states have it. The intent is to clarify the basic point that if the feds aren’t in charge, the states are.

It’s a truism, not a grant of power.

Soon after the framers wrote the original document, it was obvious states couldn’t act independently. When the Constitution was written, there wasn’t much interstate commerce at all. Going from one end of the country to the other end didn’t take five hours — it took five months. So the federal government claimed some powers to tie up loose ends.

If states acted on their own when it came to matters of interstate commerce, it would be to easy for states to grant monopolies to business, and too easy for large businesses to fix prices and destroy smaller competition.

…

Everyone learns at some point in life that there are three remedies to a negative situation: avoid, alter or accept it. Those against health-care legislation or gun-control laws don’t need to accept what they see as bad policy. They should try alter the policy in all the accepted ways.

But reverting to the Tenth Amendment is avoidance. It’s the equivalent of taking your ball and going home. And these issues are too important to do that.

After invoking the Tenth Amendment he goes on (there is more than just that above) to justify the Interstate Commerce clause without even mentioning it as if it were the Tenth Amendment.

And did you notice all the errors in the passages above?

  • The first line says “…in the Tenth…” instead of “…is the Tenth…” but I figure that is just a typo and I give him a pass on that.
  • “It’s a truism, not a grant of power. “? It explicitly states that the Feds are not granted most powers and he turns it around to claim the states are not granted powers.
  • It took five months to travel from one end of the 13 colonies to the other? It’s only about 1500 miles so he is saying the average speed of travel was 10 miles per day. Even with a backpack on and walking on mountain trails I can do better than that.
  • The Tenth Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution and it’s pretty clear the original intent is being violated. Many other Federal laws have been struck down by the courts as violating various parts of the constitution, including the Tenth Amendment, so it’s entirely reasonable to quest whether this law is in violation.

 So it’s the author that is the coward avoiding the issue. He gets it exactly backward and calls people invoking the Tenth Amendment cowards. It’s called “projection” and it just goes to show he either has mental problems or has crap for brains.

How’s that gun ban working out?

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The headline tells the story–London gun crime rises as shootings nearly double.

It must be that someone somewhere needs to have their gun show loophole closed, have one gun a month law passed, or “assault weapons” banned.

Oh yeah. I forgot. They are way past that point with a complete ban on nearly all guns and people increasingly use guns in the commission of violent crimes.

And it’s not just a little bit either:

…[T]he number of actual shootings has almost doubled from 123 to 236 in the last six months compared with the same period last year, a rise of 91.8%. Serious firearms offences have risen by 47% across the capital.

So what’s the reason they want to ban the guns in our country? What do they think the benefit will be? We know it and they know it. It’s not about making people safer. They have some other motivation because the data tells everyone that gun bans do not make people safer.

So what is the real reason for wanting to restrict firearm ownership? After failing to get an answer to Just One Question that should be follow up when they still insist on “common sense” regulation. Either that or just tell the bigots Μολὼν λαβέ.

Speaking of crap for brains

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Crap for brains isn’t just in Seattle. It appears to be far too common these days. There should be a law against it.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. There is a law against it. It’s Darwin’s Law. But we have been helping others violate Darwin’s law for so long that stupid is becoming dominate when, by law, it should become more and more rare.

Other people ignore the law and we have to pay the consequences. Life just isn’t fair.

It must have been an AK-47

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Whenever they smell blood they start dancing to the tunes of AK-47s:

Tragic as it was, the cold-blooded drive-by shooting of Officer Timothy Brenton over the weekend handed supporters of a proposed state assault weapons ban with a compelling case to take to Olympia. Even though police say they have not yet determined what weapon was used, Ralph Fascitelli, president of Washington CeaseFire, says he plans to cite Brenton’s murder when lobbying for the bill in the next legislative session.

“Maybe this particular [police victim] wasn’t killed with an assault weapon, but the next one maybe will be,” Fascitelli says, adding that police safety was a key reason that automatic weapons were banned decades ago and that the International Association of Police Chiefs supports a ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons today.

It doesn’t matter if the band playing doesn’t even have an AK. Heck, I don’t think it would matter if there were even a band.

They apparently live in some sort of alternate reality where their fears of imagined boogie men are sufficient grounds to demand the government infringe upon a specific enumerated right when even their leaders admit they have insufficient evidence to justify their actions. And they call that “a compelling case”.

I call it crap for brains.

CCRKBA has something to say too.

Quote of the day–Tamara K.

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…We circle back around to one of the big problems in our society, which is the idea that line-memorizing clothes horses have anything more valid to say about politics, science, or current events than the hippie on the street corner with a guitar case. The Romans had the right position in society for actors: Above cesspit cleaners, but not as well-respected as a decent whore.

Tamara K.
November 3, 2009
Shame!
[This reminds me of a Robert Heinlein quote:

A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay–such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?

It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.

Lazarus Long
A character in several books by Robert Heinlein.

Getting back to Tamara’s quote…

The problem is that people are still largely driven by some evolutionary advantageous urge to listen to and obey those whose faces are familiar rather than actually think for themselves. But of course that presumes said person is capable of and willing to think for themselves. I’m not convinced the majority of people are up to the task yet we protect them from their own stupidity almost as if they were children who would grow up someday. I sometimes see a future where the system collapses and Darwin collects on a massive debt we have been accumulating for the last 100 years. It would have been far, far better in so many ways to pay off Darwin in regular installments than to have the Grim Reaper swing his scythe in such a broad swath as I sometimes see as plausible.–Joe]

Horrified and fearful

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As our neighbors to the north attempt to regain a little bit of their freedom the anti-freedom people are “horrified and fearful”:

Gun-control advocates say they are horrified and fearful that Canada’s long-gun firearms registry is on the verge this week of being scrapped because the Conservatives may have enough support from the opposition to kill it.

Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, says her organization has been monitoring the progress of a Conservative private member’s bill to abolish the registry and is now bracing for it to clear an important vote in the Commons on Wednesday.

“It is astonishing, just a few months after the opposition parties voted for a Bloc Québécois motion that reiterated support for the firearms registry and against efforts to repeal it, that many of the same MPs will support this Conservative bill,” Cukier said Sunday.

“It not only eliminates the need to register rifles and shotguns but requires that the information contained on seven million registered guns be destroyed.”

I find it very telling they don’t tell us how many crimes the two billion dollar gun registry helped solved. The last time I heard a number it was one. Yes, one crime was solved that would not have been solved without it. Two billion dollars to solve one crime and these people are “horrified and fearful”?

The only conclusion that I can come up with is that it’s not about crime. It’s about control. They are “horrified and fearful” they will have less control.

Quote of the day–Dave Stancliff

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The column achieved what it was supposed to do. It got people thinking about the problems associated with assault weapons.

Whether you believe there’s a problem or not, the reality trumps your rhetoric and your use of conservative/NRA babble trying to pass for the truth.

I don’t have the answers, but if enough people work on it they will come.

Dave Stancliff
September 13, 2009 4:13 PM
Comment to Let’s face it, no one will take the high road to gun control
In response to demonstration that his “facts” in an anti-gun editorial were all wrong.
[“If enough people work on it” they will be able to refute verifiable facts? I suppose if the Ministry of Truth (or is it the Truth Czar these days?) puts enough people on the problem it’s possible.–Joe] 

Insults and distortion

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The numbers and the law don’t support their position so they result to insults, distortion, and copyright violation:

There is an America still stuck in the fifties, isolated from our cities and from each other by virtue and circumstance and the placement of highways and byways.

Where no gangs roam and real gun play is only on TV and children are not killed by stray bullets but by accident and by suicide in flaccid homes, all for the idle dreams of idle men made more flaccid by their flaccid imaginations.

They are white, nice and stuck, flaccid fools clinging to a romantic fantasy that disguises their impotent existence if not their impotence.

Armchair Constitutional scholars between clocking out and passing out.  This is flaccid tea party America.  Heels in the mud, Palin on the tube and loaded gun in good working condition, exceeded only by that of the remote.

For flaccid America, killing is an idea, a fantasy pastime, a friend of boredom, that seems to bear the right not to be.

Here is the original picture:

Quote of the day–Anonymous

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Why can’t people just do what they’re told? When we do our taxes do we ask why line 35 is subtracted from line 22? Do we argue with the judge when he makes a decision or a cop tells us not to stand in a certain place? No.

We are subjects of the government that is supposed to care of us. Whether the rules are stupid or illogical, do what you’re told by authorities. The rules are for your own good.

Life will be a lot simpler if you do what you’re told.

Anonymous
October 24, 2009 7:01 PM
Response to “Bag Check” Cartoon
[I’m just not quite sure if this person was serious or sarcastic. I’m about 80% sure it was serious. And that is extremely scary to me.

And the TSA has a blog? What a hoot! I wish I had the time to go play with them more. I left a comment at the above link but due to moderation it hasn’t shown up yet. I essentially just left a link to What TSA really stands for. So it may be that won’t make it past moderation.–Joe]

Update: The comment made it through moderation and I’m getting hits from it. There is also a automatically generated link to this post as well that is getting a few hits.

Never let facts get in the way of a good soundbite

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The article says:

Officers found 50 rounds of 44-caliber, 240 grain-jacketed Remington hollow point bullets, illegal in some states, including New Jersey, because they can pierce cops’ bullet-resistant armor, said Paul Loriquet, spokesman for the Essex County prosecutor’s office.

The problem is hollow point bullets are less able to penetrate body armor than the more common Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets.

The fact that they probably were for .44 Magnum handgun is more telling. Almost any soft body armor comfortable enough for everyday wear is going to be penetrated by any full power load in that caliber.

But this is law enforcement in New Jersey where facts about guns are irrelevant to their jobs and when dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.

Half-truth Henigan

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Dennis Henigan has a new post about two gun dealers up on the Brady Campaign blog. I find it interesting that much of what he says is only half-true. For example he says:

The Seattle Times reported that Brian Borgelt, the former owner of Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, the notorious Tacoma, Washington gun shop that supplied the gun used in the 2002 D.C.-area sniper shootings, had lost his lawsuit seeking to have his firearms dealer license restored.

This is true as far as it goes but what he doesn’t tell you is the Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply is still open selling guns. The store was purchased by a friend of Borgelt and is doing just fine. Those Seattle Times articles are dated the day before the article linked to by Henigan. My hypothesis is that victories for Henigan are so rare these days that he has to exaggerate something of no consequence into something to celebrate.

Also note that he claims the gun shop “supplied the gun”. That’s interesting wording since Malvo says he shoplifted the gun from the store. That’s like saying you supplied the car used in a bank robbery after it was stolen from your driveway.

Next Henigan says:

Borgelt hit the headlines after the DC snipers, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, were arrested after killing ten and wounding four others during three weeks of horror in October, 2002. Authorities traced their Bushmaster assault rifle to Borgelt’s gun shop, but Borgelt claimed he didn’t even know the gun was missing. Borgelt could produce no record that the gun had been sold, nor that it had been reported missing or stolen (as required by federal law). It turns out that the snipers’ Bushmaster was only one of 238 Bull’s Eye guns mysteriously missing and unaccounted for in the previous three years. Either Bull’s Eye was actively corrupt, or grievously negligent.

Most of those 238 guns were eventually accounted for (I think, I can’t seem to find verification of that right now). I think the final number was something like 80 that were apparently stolen or perhaps sold illegally. To the best of my knowledge there was no evidence any were sold to someone that was not allowed to own a firearm. But that doesn’t fit Henigan’s agenda:

During the period 1997-2001, Bull’s Eye ranked in the top 1% of dealers in guns sold and traced to crime; its guns had been traced to homicides, kidnappings and assaults.

Note the careful wording “traced to crime”? He did not say, “Used in a crime.” That is because the ATF gun traces include guns that were stolen and the police were trying to find the true owner. Hence by choosing his words very carefully Henigan gives a very different impression that what is the complete truth. And that’s just a tiny part of the lie in that sentence.

If you follow his own link you will find the following:

Long before last fall’s sniper slayings, Bull’s Eye was among a minuscule group of problem gun dealers that, willingly or not, “supply the suppliers” who funnel guns to the nation’s criminals, the ATF says. Studies show about 1 percent of gun stores sell the weapons traced to 57 percent of gun crimes.

That does NOT say Bull’s Eye was in the 1%. The Seattle Times is being a little misleading too but Henigan goes into a full blown lie with it.

Here are the raw numbers from the same Seattle Times article:

An analysis of records obtained by The Seattle Times through a freedom-of-information lawsuit against the ATF shows that between 1997 and 2001, guns sold by Bull’s Eye were involved in 52 crimes, including homicides, kidnappings and assaults — a rate the ATF considers alarming.

…

[T]he number of crime guns traced back to Bull’s Eye had been growing from three in 1997 to 10 in 1998, 18 in 1999, and 11 in 2000.

According to the FBI in 2001 there were 1,425,486 violent crimes in the U.S. of which 26.2% were committed with a firearm. That gives us a total of 373,477 violent crimes committed with a firearm. About 10 of those guns came from Bull’s Eye. This is 0.0027%. It’s not possible for Bull’s Eye to have been in the top 1% of the gun shops that supplied 57 percent of gun crimes.

Anytime you see something with Henigan’s name on remember this–at best it is half true.

Quote of the day–Linoge

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Remember – these are the people who would strip us of our rights. These are the people who would turn us into criminals (like them) for daring to exercise those rights. These are the people who aid and abet criminals on a daily basis. These are the people who have no respect or regard for the sanctity of human life or the self-defense measures necessary to preserve it. …People who cannot even tell fact from fiction.

Scary, nyet?

Linoge
October 18, 2009
truth and falsity
[Good stuff, even if I do say so myself.–Joe]

Gun control is patriotic

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Sometimes you have to just shake your head and call for the guys in the white uniforms and the butterfly nets:

The more people own guns, the more likely guns are to be used. If Cody wants to do something genuinely patriotic and helpful to her country, she should support gun control legislation.

I suppose it depends on how you define “patriotic”. If “genuinely patriotic and helpful to your country” means enabling genocide then she is absolutely correct:

Update: Daughter Kim reminded me:

patriot, n. and adj.
 
1. a. A person who loves his or her country, esp. one who is ready to support its freedoms and rights and to defend it against enemies or detractors.
In early use, as in French and Dutch, chiefly with ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘worthy’, or other commendatory adjective: cf. ‘good citizen’. ‘Patriot’ for ‘good patriot’ is rare before 1680. At that time often applied to a person who supported the rights of the country against the King and court.

truth and falsity

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This post originally appeared here but will go away as of June 1, 2015. I am therefore, with permission, making a copy here on my blog.

by Linoge, formerly of ‘walls of the city’ – Sunday, October 18, 2009

Given that Kevin will be forced to upgrade/change his commenting system in the near future, I figured this needed to be preserved for posterity’s sake: MikeB,

I may be getting a glimmer of what it going on here too.

Could you please explain how it is that you determine the difference between truth and falsity?

What is the process you use?

I don’t think you know how to do it. This is a common problem and leads to all sorts of conflicts. Both internal and external. Many of which are exhibiting themselves in your writing.

Joe Huffman | 06.08.09 – 7:37 am | #

——————————————————————————–

Joe, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, truth or falsity. Unix-Jedi pulled my comments apart, exposed a bunch of contradictions and really ripped me a new one. Good for him. But really my points have been simple enough. Maybe I didn’t express them precisely enough.

I say some DGUs are bogus. That’s the whole point. The one’s we’ve highlighted in our blogs are examples of the millions if you believe Prof. Kleck. I don’t, I believe the ones who say they’re more like 100,000 per year. But, in these examples we can see the mechanism by which a shooter can do something wrong and then cover it up.

The truth or falsity of it would only be known to the shooter. For example, let’s say, hypothetically, because I realize none of us knows for sure, but let’s say the OK pharmacist saw that the kid was down and out, but was still so furious with so much adrenalin pumping that he said the hell with it, and shot the kid five more times.

Now comes the trial. His lawyer encourages him to say the kid was shot in the head but was still moving for his gun and was still a threat. The trial ends in acquittal, the DGU list gets one more entry, and only the pharmacist knows the truth.

Do you think that kind of thing doesn’t happen? Do you think it’s so rare as to be negligible? mikeb302000 | 06.09.09 – 3:09 am | #

——————————————————————————–

My question is much more general than just relating to guns. It’s about the basics of your understanding of the world around you, “How do you determine if a statement/hypothesis is true or false? What is the process by which you make this determination?”

If you cannot articulate this then, in the most literal sense, you don’t have a clue as to what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil. This is a common problem with many, many people that I debate guns with. They literally do not know how to figure out if something is true or false. One person said, “It depends on how I feel.” Another said, “Some people figure it out based on logic and facts and others do it based on feelings. Both ways are equally valid–it’s been proven.” So tell us, step by step, how do you determine truth from falsity?

Joe Huffman | 06.09.09 – 7:55 am | #

——————————————————————————–

I’m a little bit offended by the question, Joe. It sounds incredibly condescending of you to speak as if you and your gun buddies are trained logisticians, philosophically speaking, and I and the antigun folks “cannot articulate this” simple idea.

I try to be objective and open minded. I try to inform myself of the necessary information. I take things with a grain of salt, but not excessively so. I use my best common sense and logic.

I guess there’s more, but that’s the idea.

How’d I do? mikeb302000 | 06.10.09 – 5:45 am | #

——————————————————————————-I’m sorry.

You failed.

No expression of the process. Not even the slightest clue.

You might try reading up on the Scientific Method (and here).

Joe Huffman | 06.10.09 – 6:48 am | #

MikeB302000 had some more things to say concerning the nature of truth and falsehood over at Tam’s weblog, but Joe Huffman has that preserved for the future, so I am not too worried about it.

Remember – these are the people who would strip us of our rights. These are the people who would turn us into criminals (like them) for daring to exercise those rights. These are the people who aid and abet criminals on a daily basis. These are the people who have no respect or regard for the sanctity of human life or the self-defense measures necessary to preserve it. …People who cannot even tell fact from fiction.

Scary, nyet?

Quote of the day–Bill Wilson

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The tepid response by Missouri to this episode is frankly appalling. If no record of who produced and approved this trash exists, then the entire leadership who was working at MIAC at the time of this report being drafted and issued should be fired and barred from future law enforcement service.

Bill Wilson
President Americans for Limited Government
October 15, 2009
ALG Blasts Missouri Information Analysis Center For Retaining No Records of Erroneous MIAC “Modern Militia Movement” Report
[H/T to Dave Hardy.

Remember the “Modern Militia Movement” document that came out last February? Well via a Freedom of Information act request they say the don’t know who wrote it or approved it. They don’t even have anything but a draft version of that document.

Typical. I have FOIA requests to Pacific Northwest National Labs that were supposed to be answered within 20 days and it’s been, what, 2+ years and they haven’t done anything but acknowledge receipt of the requests. Then there was the one request I involved my congressman, a lawyer, and the DOE on and documents that I originally wrote which were completely open suddenly became For Official Use Only. But in order to tell my lawyer that they revealed material that was classified as Secret — without telling him it was classified.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Lew Daly

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We’d like to retire that word [redistribute] from the political vocabulary because you can’t redistribute something that is already highly socialized, and wealth and income in the “era of knowledge-based growth” (whoever ends up “owning” it) is indeed highly socialized. Most importantly (and more to the point), individual productivity is increasingly dependent on what can only be described as a collective good, a common inheritance of knowledge. No one deserves to benefit from this common inheritance more than anyone else, by moral definition, because it’s not created by any individual. So, to the extent that inherited knowledge (“technical progress in the broadest sense,” as Solow termed it) is increasingly driving economic growth, the fruits of knowledge—the wealth being generated by knowledge—should be more equally shared. Wealth that is commonly created should be equally, or at least more equally, shared.

Lew Daly
Via AmericanMercenary in the post What the hell is “Social Justice”?
[This is very scary stuff. Strip away just a little bit of the fluff and it’s, From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Just reading the praise for the book you realize these people not only have zero respect for the right to own property but they don’t believe you even have a right to your own thoughts. This is what inspires thoughts of Atlas Shrugged. In this book the people of the mind went on strike. Those that contributed through the power of their creative minds declared those that demanded the product of their minds through the force of government had received their last handout. You can force someone to work but you can’t force them to think.

After reading of people like Daly I don’t just long for a John Galt but a Ragnar Danneskjöld as well.–Joe]

Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!

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From Time magazine:

National Rifle Association v. Chicago / McDonald v. Chicago
At issue: Second Amendment rights to gun ownership.

A pair of cases challenge Chicago’s 27-year-old ban on handgun sales within the city limits. Originally designed to curb violence in the city, the ban has long irked Second Amendment advocates, who take an expansive view of the amendment’s wording that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But the Supreme Court had long held that the Second Amendment pertained only to federal laws, until a 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down a ban on handguns and automatic weapons in Washington, D.C. The ruling marked the first time the Supreme Court acknowledged an individual right to bear arms, and it opened the door for these challenges to the Chicago regulation.

Do you notice anything wrong with that?

Bad question. It would be easier to answer, “Do you notice anything right with that?” But I’ll answer the harder question:

  • It’s not just or even primarily about a ban on handgun sales within the city limits. It a ban on possession within the city limits.
  • D.C. v. Heller had nothing to do with automatic weapons — unless you want to abide by D.C. definition of automatic weapon which included semi-autos.
  • This was not the first time the SC acknowledged an individual right to bear arms. Check out U S v. Cruikshank which said “The right there specified is that of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress.” Or even U S v. Miller which allowed Miller had standing. See also An individual right.

It is very, very rare that when I read an article in the MSM where I know a fair amount about the topic that I don’t see substantial errors in the presentation of the material. I can only conclude the articles where I don’t know all that much about the material are also filled with errors. Hence, I cannot trust the MSM to provide me facts. Facts are apparently irrelevant to them.

Kevin made a post about this in the last year or so with, IIRC, a fancy name. I only had about three hours of sleep last night and am much too tired and cranky to go looking for it. And I still have more work work to do tonight…

Lying is what they know

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We live in an information age now. A incredibly vast amount of information is available so quickly and cheaply that I am amazed they still think they can get away with this crap. But I suppose it’s just what they have always done and it’s how they have won in the past. It’s what they know how to do.

Even though she was not harmed, Colleen Dawson said she wishes she had a handgun when some men tried to break into her Northwest Side home last year.

Dawson, 51, said the court’s action should be a message to Mayor Daley and other gun-control advocates to “begin looking at a handgun as a tool given to us as a birthright by the constitution to defend ourselves.”

Growing up in Englewood, Dawson said her grandmother always kept a handgun in her apron pocket. She’d like the same right.

Chicago Police scoff at the notion that more handguns will lower the city’s crime rate.

“The logic they are using, that homeowners’ homes will not get burglarized, is ridiculous. You usually do not burglarize a home that is occupied,” said Mark Donohue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Interesting. I know one woman living in Chicago who acquired a gun (illegally of course) after waking up to a burglar going through her bedroom. The bugler told her to not worry, she wouldn’t get hurt if she just stayed still. The burglar then went about his “business”. Yes, I know, a single data point does not make a study.

Look at the burglary rates of occupied homes in the U.K. versus the U.S. Read Guns and Violence: the English Experience. The data is overwhelming. Either Donohue is lying or his head is buried very deep in the sand or some other place where the sun doesn’t shine.

Next up is the Brady Campaign representative:

A 1988 Emory University study, Heimke said, showed “if you keep a gun in your home, it’s 21 times more likely to injure you or your family than a bad guy. It gets used by a depressed teen to commit suicide, or you think it’s a burglar but it turns out to be a neighbor or a brother-in-law.”

1988? A 21-year old study? At least it’s not the fully discredited Kellerman study from 1986 which concluded it was “43 times more likely…”. But I find it telling that Helmke overlooked the 1993 revised “study” by Kellerman in which he changed his number to 2.7. Even then he had to “bake” the numbers to get something that looked bad for gun ownership. And the only 1988 Emory study I can find reference to is also from Kellerman (see also here). And Emory is where Kellerman works so I have to conclude that Helmke is attempting to quote Kellerman and perhaps getting the number wrong. Was this carelessness or was it to avoid triggering a flag with the 43 number that we know is false?

Kellerman’s work was so shoddy that in 1995 congress pulled CDC funding for his work. At the hearings he didn’t even bother to show up to defend it.

And also of note is that this Chicago paper misspelled both Helmke’s and Colleen Lawson’s names. I’m glad we have “professional journalists” and their armies of fact checkers to “inform” the public.

I know it’s Lawson instead of Dawson because of the court filing and I because met and talked to her at the 2008 NRA convention:

Update: Some edits were made for legal reasons.

Mom logic isn’t

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Do they think we won’t catch them and rub their noses in their attempted deception? Or are they so stupid that they can’t read the actual numbers? And they have the tag line “Real Stories. Real Honest. Real Moms”.

The lady doth insist too much, methinks.

Here are the scare quotes:

More than 500 children die annually from accidental gunshots. Some shoot themselves, while others kill friends or siblings after discovering a gun.

Here are more scary stats: Americans own 200 million firearms, and 35 percent of homes contain at least one gun. Last year, a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than 1.7 million children live in homes with loaded and unlocked guns.

The problem is that according to the CDC we have this data (2006 is the most recent I found–see table 10):

Cause of death (based on ICD, 2004) All ages Under 1 year 1-4 years 5-14 years 15-24 years 25-34 years 35-44 years 45-54 years 55-64 years 65-74 years 75-84 years 85 years and over
Accidental discharge of firearms (W32-W34) 642 – 13 41 193 113 74 84 49 33 34 8

So in order to arrive at “more than 500 children die annually” you would have to include “children” as old as 54 years old. Sure a lot of people want the government to treat people as children even at this age but it’s lying to actually include them in your children totals.

The real number is 54 children per year instead of “more than 500”. They are only off by a factor of 10.

So, assuming their 1.7 million number is right then the odds of one of those children in homes with loaded and unlocked guns accidentally being killed with a firearm is 54/1,700,000 or 1 in 31,481 (0.0032%) per year.

Gee… I wonder if they have an agenda. If they don’t then why do they inflate the numbers by a factor of 10? Crap for brains and/or the truth is just too inconvenient for them? You decide.