Permit holders are exceptionally law-abiding — even compared to the police themselves, who he said are six times as likely to be convicted of misdemeanors or felonies as permit holders are. That’s true even for crimes involving firearms; permit-holders are one-seventh as likely to run into such trouble as the police.
Sherfinski and Dinan
July 26, 2016
Concealed carry permits at all-time high
[Via Say Uncle.—Joe]
The study by Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, was published in the journal Violence and Victims in January and has been cited by media outlets — including The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Time magazine. But the study, formally published earlier this year after a draft was released in academic circles, has raised questions about what critics consider dubious methodology.
“The Lankford ‘study’ is nothing more than junk science disguised as research, and never should have been published in a responsible scholarly journal,” Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck told FoxNews.com.
…
Academic peers who have sought to examine the findings say Lankford refuses to share the data and details he used to support his findings.
He refuses to share the data? Why am I not surprised? Oh! That’s right, it happens so frequently when they come up with results which support the anti-gun narrative!
The NRA brings it! Via their YouTube channel:
While the U.S. Supreme Court and our freedoms hang in the balance don’t forget that we are all just pawns the political elite play with for their own amusement:
From a NRA tweet:
This fight is for the Supreme Court. Almost nothing else matters. This is the “hill” gun rights, and freedom, lives or dies on.
Overall, economic inequality and student loans top this issues list with 21 percent each, followed by protecting gun rights, equal pay for women and preserving access to abortion, at 11 percent apiece. Remaining issues tested – lowering taxes and strengthening the military – are in the single digits.
Langer Research Associates
April 2016
ABC News/Refinery29 Poll: Millennial Women
[The wording of questions is critical in polls so I looked it up for this case:
Apart from big issues like terrorism, the economy, health care and immigration, there are other issues that may come up in the presidential campaign. Of the ones I list, please tell me which one is the most important issue to you: protecting gun rights, economic inequality, equal pay for women, preserving access to abortion, student loan debt, strengthening the military, lowering taxes, or something else?
The question appears to be well worded. The answers were:
3/22/16
Protecting gun rights 11
Economic inequality 21
Equal pay for women 11
Preserving access to abortion 11
Student loan debt 21
Strengthening the military 4
Lowering taxes 8
Other (vol.) 11
No opinion 2
Right there is 11% of the young women who will not be voting for Hillary!
Also note that this was in March of this year. Since then, with all the terrors attacks on defenseless private citizens, I would expect the gun rights category would have increased some. Every terrorist attack between now and November is another few percentage points Hillary loses in the election and women are where many of those are going to come from.—Joe]
To those for whom principles and specific enumerated rights are irrelevant we have this which may make an impression:
Via a tweet from the NRA:
Via email from John H.
More women should have guns. And since it’s abundantly clear that they’ll commit less violence than men and be vulnerable to violence committed by men, let’s take all the guns away from men and give them to women. In fact, let’s only give guns to women.
Rae Witte
July 21, 2016
Here’s An Idea: Only Women Should Have Guns
[Here’s an idea: never let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
Anti-gun people must live in some sort of incoherent alternate universe. The most recent example Clinton, Dems Put Gun Control at Center of Convention Stage:
Democrats were to hear Tuesday night from the “Mothers of the Movement,” a group of women who have traveled the country to promote gun control and reforms to make police officers more accountable.
The group includes the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, victims of high-profile police-involved killings. They have campaigned with Clinton, who often refers to them as members of “a club no one wants to be a part of.”
…
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the shifting landscape is the result of several factors: Shootings such as the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, renewed concerns over terrorism and high-profile killings of black men in several cities.
“For the first time, this is a winning issue in the general election,” Murphy said.
So… The police killed Eric Garner with a chokehold, Trayvon Martin was killed with the justified (perhaps even praiseworthy) use of a gun by a private citizen (not a police officer as reported here), and Michael Brown was killed with the certainly praiseworthy use of a gun by a police officer, and somehow this changes the “landscape” such that gun control for private citizens is a winning issue?
This is like someone holding their hands over both eyes and when you ask them why they answer, “The sky is blue and I don’t want to eat.”
These people should be in a psych ward instead of government employees. But then, given the current state of the government and the projected trajectory one could make a convincing case the Federal government is a psych ward with the inmates running the place.
You have to take that sort of moderate, “We just wanna have commmon sense legislation so our children are safe!”
You say shit like that, and then people will buy into it.
Mary Bayer @marybayer3
DNC delegate
July 25, 2016
[See also a shorter version at Say Uncle. I chose this one because it shows her stealing the sign of the people who made the video (the police recovered it from her and returned it to the owners). This demonstrates private property means nothing to her, the First Amendment means nothing to her, and, obviously, the Second Amendment is nothing more than a minor obstacle.
From PVertias Action who made the video:
After being included in a tweet about the video she then contacted the police saying that she is being harassed.
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.
As the video says at the end:
Now we know what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats mean when they say, “Common Sense Gun Legislation”…
We’ve known this for decades, but it’s nice to have them saying it on video.—Joe]
At least 15 people were killed, and up to 45 injured when a knife-wielding man went on a rampage early Tuesday at a facility for the disabled in the Japanese city of Sagmihara, broadcaster NHK reported.
I just finished this book over the weekend and while there are many aspects that I am skeptical about some things resonated well. One thing was that struck me was that the psychology of progressives (r selected populations in his terminology) is in a large part about “equality”. Gun control can be interpreted as government mandated equality of victimization. Everyone must be equally vulnerable. It is “unfair/unjust” that some people be able to protect themselves better than others. It is better than victims of violent crimes be selected at, essentially, random than for some people to be able to avoid and/or defend against criminals. If you are successful in defending your self you must be punished.
The case below via the author, Anonymous Conservative, could be a case in point:
A homeowner in Finland has been sentenced to four years in jail and a hefty fine after fighting off three intruders who attempted to rob his house. The thieves, meanwhile, got lesser prison terms and are to be paid damages by their victim.
In April, a 35-year-old man from Hyvinkää, a town just 50km north of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, heard a knock on the front door of his suburban house and rushed to open it. As soon as he unlocked it, three strangers rushed in and launched at him, toting baseball bats and a gun. The man retreated to the kitchen, where he found a knife and with it was able to overpower the intruders, two men and one woman.
…
The homeowner has been convicted of “excessive self-defense and attempted manslaughter,” Helsinki news reports. He will serve an unconditional sentence for four years and two months, which he has to spend in prison. The man also has to pay damages to his attackers, with the fine totaling €21,000 (US$23,000). The newspaper does not provide information on the severity of injuries sustained by the home-invaders, however, it is known that they survived the event.
…
All three received one-year-and-two-month conditional sentences, which is similar to probation or house arrest in Finland, depending on the case. The offender serves the sentence outside of jail, but has to follow strict jail-like rules.
The trio was also ordered to pay the homeowner damages, but their combined fine was ruled to be €3,000 (US$3,300).
A friend from the U.K. once explained to me that over there you were allowed to defend yourself as long as you used proportional force. If your attacker was using their fists you couldn’t use a knife. If they were using a knife you couldn’t use a gun, that sort of thing. I asked about a large man attacking a much smaller or weaker person. What then? Well, “It depends…”
I totally reject such thinking.
In the free areas of the U.S. if someone is using deadly force against an innocent person then you are allowed to use deadly force, of whatever type, against your attacker. The attacker could have both hands cuffed behind his back but if he has your kid on the ground and kicking them in the head and you would be justified in using a .50 BMG on full auto against him (take care not to hurt innocents yourself).
In my book the home intruders in the case above should have been made to pay for not only the damages done to the home or people, the lost time spent cutting up the bad guys and dealing with the police, and replaced the knife.
Technically, 2,000 can be expressed correctly as “hundreds”. But this was blatant bias to minimize the number of good guys who showed up to protest:
This is more confirmation of what we already knew. They have to lie to get traction. From the DNC email leak (email from Brina Milikowsky, Chief Strategy Officer, Everytown for Gun Safety to Shannon Watts, forwarded to grambuilder@yahoo.com):
Donald Trump has made a lot of promises, but most voters haven’t heard this one yet: He has publicly vowed that on day one of a Donald Trump presidency, he will force every elementary and high school in America to allow guns… [1]
…
1. “Donald Trump: ‘I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools’,” Jenna Johnson. The Washington Post, January 8 2016.
Getting rid of the Federal law mandating “gun free zones” around schools cannot be construed as forcing “every elementary and high school in America to allow guns”. Have they ever heard of the difference between state law and Federal law?
Gun control laws are dangerous because they don’t do a very good job of taking guns away from people who shouldn’t have them. They’re more effective at taking guns out of the hands of people who can and should use them, if they chose to, for lawful protection. And gun control laws are most dangerous because they provide such political distraction from much more important issues on reducing crime, particularly reducing the illegitimacy rate. And as long as the president is up there yakking about the Brady bill and assault weapons, that’s all the less time he’s going to be putting into welfare reform and other things to rebuild the family, and that’s the heart of any real solution to crime.
David Kopel
1995
Does Gun Control Work?
[Don’t ever let anyone tell you we haven’t been having a conversation on gun control or that we haven’t been saying for decades it doesn’t work and in fact it is counter productive. We have also been saying it is also a violation of specific enumerated and natural rights. It’s time for those people to grow up, accept the facts and stop wasting their, and our, money, time, and human resources.—Joe]
Hillary’s entire career has been dedicated to taking things away from you “on behalf of the common good,” to borrow from her rare moment of candor in 2004. It’s the intellectual milieu she’s been steeped in for her entire adult life.
Ed Driscoll
July 18, 2016
HILLARY EMBRACES LIBERAL EXTREMISM
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Maura Healey,attorney general of Massachusetts, wrote an editorial for the Boston Globe and said:
Here in Massachusetts, 10,000 assault weapons were sold just in the last year…
Interesting. In just one year 10k a particular class of guns were sold in the state. Since that class of firearm has been around for well over 20 years there must be something on the order of 100K or more of them in the state. That must mean those type of guns are “in common use” and protected by the Heller Decision, right?
And how many crimes were committed with those firearms? She doesn’t tell us of any in the state of Massachusetts. She mentions just four in the entire country over the span of several years. Commenter Doverham (07/20/16 10:28 AM) tells us:
How many people a year are killed with “assault weapons” in MA – isn’t that a relevant number to know before deciding whether this is actually worthwhile or meaningful? I will give you a hint – that number was 2 in 2013, 1/17th the number killed with handguns, 1/30th the number killed by distracted drivers.
Yet she thinks this is justification for banning all of them. What other specific enumerated right, exercised by 100K+ people in your state, could someone justify the infringement of by four crimes committed in other states and two in your own? If that is all someone has to have for justification for infringement then who knows what she will demand be banned next? If that sort of rational passes logical and constitutional muster then she, or the next attorney general, can easily justify the banning of Islam, Democrats, or people with dark skin.
She also said:
On Wednesday, we are sending a directive to all gun manufacturers and dealers that makes clear that the sale of these copycat assault weapons is illegal in Massachusetts. With this directive, we will ensure we get the full protection intended when lawmakers enacted our assault weapons ban, not the watered-down version of those protections offered by gun manufacturers.
The directive specifically outlines two tests to determine what constitutes a “copy” or “duplicate” of a prohibited weapon. If a gun’s operating system is essentially the same as that of a banned weapon, or if the gun has components that are interchangeable with those of a banned weapon, it’s a “copy” or “duplicate,” and it is illegal. Assault weapons prohibited under our laws cannot be altered in any way to make their sale or possession legal in Massachusetts.
Ahhh… there we have it. She knows she can’t get the law changed through legislative channels so she just dictates her desires. And if a gun “has components that are interchangeable with those of a banned weapon” it will be prohibited. That will be “fun” to determine and enforce. I would if she considers ammunition a “component”. And what about a scope, flashlight, rail, spring, peep sight, or bipod?
Also note that she thinks guns have “operating systems”. Dictators don’t have to know what they are talking about. They just have to have people with guns willing to follow orders.
Update: See also what Sebastian has to say about it.
Update 2: See also John Richardson and Say Uncle.
Update 3: See also Thirdpower.
A ban and complete eradication of assault rifles from the hands of everyday citizens is a reasonable reform.
Shaun King
July 18, 2016
KING: Dallas, Baton Rouge massacres show need for assault rifle ban, can make trained cops think they’re under attack from small army
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.
Banning the most popular type of firearm (I assume he means “assault weapon” rather than “assault rifle”) in the U.S. is “reform”?
Wrong.
It’s called deprivation of rights under color of law and is a felony punishable by death.—Joe]
Via a tweet from Dana Loesch:
@DLoesch very weak sauce Dana. You must have woke up on the opposite side of your gun barrel dildo. Yes, Dana Loesch makes love to her guns
Saucy Minx @SaucyMinxed
Tweeted July 19, 2016
Is this going to be the Markley’s Law equivalent response to women gun ownership?
These people are so clever and classy.
We have SCOTUS decisions. They have Jr. High level insults.