Not just keeping the guns out of the hands of mentally ill people and criminals but I really don’t personally think anyone should have a gun.
Bonnie Schaefer
DNC Platform Committee member in response to testimony by Lucia McBath, a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
June 2016
Woman Shaping DNC Platform: Nobody Should Have a Gun
[Via a tweets from Katie Pavlich and TriggerFinger.
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
Carrying a concealed firearm is about personal protection and safety. It’s a choice that has life-and-death consequences. The purpose of carrying is to save your life and to keep away harm. Unless trust has been established, the personal question of whether a woman carries a concealed firearm and the details surrounding that choice shouldn’t be asked by strangers, and the answer shouldn’t be given to strangers, either.
Katie Pavlich
May 31, 2016
When Strangers Ask if you Carry a Concealed Firearm
[Via an email from Stephanie.
The one edit I would make is that “woman” should be changed to “person”.—Joe]
As a scholar of propaganda, I must agree that history may resemble creative writing more than any sort of historical reality. We live daily with Orwellian revisionism. But just as Haag accuses Winchester and Colt’s of manufacturing a gun culture mythos, Haag appears to be engaged in the business of manufacturing an antipodal Sarah mythos by the decidedly ahistorical methodology of free association.
Brian Anse Patrick
June 2, 2016
Review of “The Gunning of America”
[As Sean D Sorrentino said in the comments, “Ouch!”
See also what Sebastian and Clayton Cramer have to say.—Joe]
California is suffering terrible attacks by the anti-gun politicians. One of the battles is that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for governor in 2018 and has managed to put an initiative on the ballot for this fall which:
Bad stuff.
How do they imagine this cannot be infringing up on the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms? Short answer, they don’t. They intend it to infringe up on the rights of gun owners. That is the entire point.
In response the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA), which is the official state association of the NRA, put up a website asking for money and released this ad:
It’s a very emotional ad, but that is what it takes to reach a lot of people.
Even more so, when white men hold big black guns and shoot power out of the tips of them, it gives them a racial-psychosexual high.
Shaun King @ShaunKing
Tweeted on December 5, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
Via a Tweet from Michael Z Williamson @mzmadmike.—Joe]
Human beings are morally self-governing individuals that are able to make up their mind about the speech of other people and decide how to respond. No politician or public opinion should have the power through criminalization and bans to hide opinions and speech from us, implying that we are not able to handle it in a reasonable and responsible way. It takes away our dignity because it is based on the assumption that we cannot be trusted to listen to certain kinds of speech. As Lincoln assumed in another context, free men should not be free to choose unfreedom for others.
Flemming Rose
May 25, 2016
Notable & Quotable: The Milton Friedman Prize
From remarks by Danish journalist Flemming Rose upon receiving the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, in New York City.
[Via email from Paul Koning who points out, “The same reasoning and the same principles apply to the right to arms.”—Joe]
Another one from Stephanie:
When Soechtig and her team plea to federal charges for violating the nation’s commonsense gun laws, we’ll know they’re serious about cutting down on gun crime. Until then, we’ll know they’re just a bunch of ignorant, gun-trafficking profiteers who want to take away our rights while they violate the very laws they demand with absolute impunity.
Sean Davis
June 3, 2016
Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws
[The laws Soechtig and team committed should not stand up to scrutiny by the courts but other people are still going to jail for them. And as long as other people are going to jail over them it should doubly apply to Soechtig and her gang. Since she wants us to go to jail for violation of nonsensical laws then she needs to understand, first hand, the significance of what she demands.
Update: Image supplied, copyright free and no permission required, by Stephanie.—Joe]
This is a reference to my frequent suggestion that gun owners “come out of the closet”.
Image from an anonymous donor referencing my just one question post.
Update: Bill suggested I put this on a shirt. So I did. Get your shirt here.
I received some images from an anonymous source to share with the suggestion to start a “#OrangeYouGlad” campaign. Here is the first one. Share widely and freely.
“Gun control that works” continues, as always, to not actually work. Like Sasquatch, it’s always out there somewhere—but you never find it.
Daniel Payne
June 1, 2016
No, We Haven’t Discovered ‘Gun Control That Actually Works’
A national gun registry would be just as stupid and ineffective as Washington DC’s gun registry.
[Sasquatch. I like that. Unicorns, leprechauns, and the Great Pumpkin would also be appropriate.
The anti-gun people keep trying to ignore inalienable rights in favor of “security”, or “safety”. But, as I have been saying for years they can’t get traction in that direction either. So the motivation for gun control must be ignorance, irrational, or evil intent.—Joe]
@HarryThetech76 @RuncibleSpoun my hypothesis is that you’re a confederate sister fucker with a small dick, who overcompensates with guns.
Superunknown @TheCatholicBoat
Tweeted on December 16, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
Via a tweet from Linoge.
We have SCOTUS decisions, facts, and rational arguments. They have childish insults.—Joe]
I was reading my RSS feed this morning and Tam informed me Ray Carter died. Last Monday I had read Ray’s Facebook post saying he was in the early stages of liver failure and had at best three to four weeks left. It was the cancer that was discovered in, I think, 2013. He had said Boomershoot was on his list of things he always wanted to do so Ry and I made it happen in 2014. By that time the cancer was in remission and I hoped Ray would attend more Boomershoots but that didn’t happen. Ray was working for the Second Amendment Foundation at the time and I asked if he would be the dinner speaker and he readily agreed.
Oleg Volk attended Boomershoot that year, had a photo session with Ray, and shared his raw images with me. Here are a few of them:
I’ve written about Ray numerous times as has the more well known Seattle Times. Once we were even in the same Seattle Times editorial.
As I explained here I first met Ray when working with Cease Fear which lead to my creation of the Jews In The Attic Test. It was Ray who came up with the name Cease Fear as a play on the name of the main anti-gun group in the state, Washington Cease Fire. You should have seen the looks on their faces when we showed up in Olympia with our signs and shirts to counter their lobbying efforts. It was wonderful.
I still have the shirt someplace. Here is a picture of me wearing it (click on it for a larger version):
Ray did a lot of work to further gun rights. And being gay he could say things and converse with authority to both gun and LGBT people on how we could work together for mutual benefit. He was a huge benefit to the gun rights movement in Seattle, Washington State, and the nation.
His more visible work in the last decade involved a number of fronts. In 2008 Ray went to work for The Second Amendment Foundation. In 2009 Ray was a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit against the city of Seattle for banning guns in city parks. He was also active in the leadership of the Washington Arms Collectors.
I featured him once for my quote of the day:
The police (and paramedics) are dandy when they arrive. But in the immediate moment of attempted felonious or otherwise violent action being committed upon ones self, persons one is responsible for or the imminent threat thereof a more immediate tool is both appropriate and desirable even in this day and age. It is my observation that a .45acp JHP placed center of mass at approximately 900fps will, more often than not, bring such unpleasantry to a swift halt, though on occasion repeated application of the lesson is required.
Ray Carter
November 21, 2014
He will be greatly missed.
I met Stephanie Sailor at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Washington D.C. in 2000. We were both speakers at the event. I was incredibly impressed with what she had done for gun rights in Chicago. But being shy and intimidated by beautiful women I never would have approached her even if I had thought of something important to say to her.
But it turned out she approached me about being a member of the Microsoft Gun Club (now called “Gun Club at Microsoft”). We talked and Boomershoot soon came up. She, being a marketing person, realized more than I did the potential it had for positive media coverage and the implications for gun rights. She was a big reason for the success of Boomershoot (see page 86 of the March 2013 issue of Western Shooting Journal).
After I met Stephanie she ran for U.S. Congress a couple times on the Libertarian ticket, attended a few Boomershoots, and then somewhat mysteriously disappeared from public view. We occasionally had contact via email and phone but she was extremely concerned about remaining hidden. She briefly came out of hiding with an alias and made an appearance at Boomershoot 2012 before going into hiding again. I maintained contact with her for a few months but things were difficult between us and there hasn’t been any contact since then.
Until today. She send me a brief email and a link to her blog and the one post on it. She is using her real name again.
Her blog post is titled Warning: White Bill Cosby Preys at Libertarian Conventions. I knew some of the stuff she wrote about in the post but not all. It’s some really heavy stuff.
She says, “Today I’m in a place of no longer living in fear. This article is cathartic.” That’s really good to hear. I knew things were very difficult for her but I didn’t really understand where the problems were coming from, how to help her, or if she even could be helped. What I see is very good news for her well-being and I hope she continues to improve. Both for her sake and for us. She was a tremendous ally in our fight for gun rights and I hope she is someday able to reenter the fight.
