We must never allow ourselves to entertain their insanity. They should be dismissed out of hand. Anyone who claims to care, if they’re being honest, would already have figured out that a disarmed population is nothing but an invitation for predators to sweep in and take over. It then becomes obvious that the anti gun rights movement is inspired, funded, directed and maintained by predators.
Lyle
February 28, 2016
Comment to Quote of the day—Citizen1787
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
The funniest kind of coward is a gun nutter nra coward. Their lack of self awareness makes them easy targets. #bok #tinycockclub #gunsense
Bacon @Baconmints
Tweeted on December 23, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
Via a Tweet from BFD @BigFatDave.—Joe]
No one needs to own a semi-automatic rifle for hunting or self-defense. No one. I have never heard a convincing argument why a civilian needs a semi-auto rifle. In nearly every mass shooting there is a common weapon: a semi-auto rifle. They should be banned.
Citizen1787
February 26, 2016
Comment to Kansas gunman served with restraining order just before shooting spree, police say
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
I received an email from Frank G. in Spokane today. He was confused by something he read in the Spokesman-Review (Spokane Washington) newspaper. The Spokesman-Review says:
The Idaho Senate has spiked legislation that would have expanded the list of the worst kind of felons banned from owning firearms.
Senate lawmakers voted 29-6 on Friday to reject including terrorists, criminal gang members, human trafficking and felony riot convictions as qualifiers to lose one’s right to own firearms.
Frank asked:
I don’t know a LOT about gun laws, but I’m pretty certain that federal law prohibits all convicted felons from owning firearms. It doesn’t matter if they were convicted of murder or embezzlement. Felony conviction? No guns for you.
So, is the idea that “the worst kind of felons … terrorists, criminal gang members [and people convicted of] human trafficking and felony riot” would be SUPER DUPER prohibited persons?
The confusion is because under Idaho law a convicted felony who as served there sentence may own a gun unless they have committed certain types of felonies. Basically non-violent crimes, such as embezzlement, do not put you on the Idaho “no guns for life” list. But under Federal law you could be convicted of using the wrong packaging for shipping shellfish and end up prohibited of possessing firearms for life.
The legislature was attempting to add terrorism, arson, theft by extortion, human trafficking, felony riot, hijacking, racketeering, and supplying firearms to a criminal gang as bars to further firearm possession. It failed, as Frank pointed out, in the Senate 29-6.
The question one would ask is, “With Federal law prohibiting all felons from firearms possession how does Idaho restoring firearms rights after completion of their sentence help anyone?”
Perhaps some lawyers can answer this better than I can, but I would say it means these people have to get the attention of a Federal Prosecutor who probably has “bigger fish to fry” then some little old lady who embezzled a few thousand dollars a decade ago who now wants to defend herself in her home with the gun her husband left in the dresser draw when he died.
I would like to suggest it might be a “good first step” to get changes in Federal such that it is similar to Idaho law. It’s just common sense.
* Note, that except for things like murder, after five years a person convicted of other things including counterfeiting, unlawful possession of destructive devices, rape, and kidnapping, may apply to the commission of pardons to get their firearms rights restored.
Jared Keller complains, What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Gun Control Why are Uber and iPhone security more important than solving our national gun problem?
The national conversation has largely moved off of gun control, a trend we’ve seen since the Newtown massacre when support for gun rights increased despite the slaughter of 20 children and six teachers.
This, it seems, is the cycle of our political will when it comes to guns. A mass shooting leads to calls for control from lawmakers, a flurry of reporting from media outlets, and a spate of social media campaigns, then poof: The American public moves on.
After whining a bunch more he quotes Dan Hodges who tweeted the following on June 19, 2015, two and a half years after the Newtown tragedy:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.
I wouldn’t have expressed it that way, but we knew Newtown was the last stand for gun control a few days after it happened. No retrospection required.
Some people just don’t understand markets. If a demand exists then markets will find a way to supply it. Furthermore if, from a legal standpoint, possession of a revolver is no different than owning a grenade someone intent on intimidation and criminal violence might as well get grenades.
Of course the anti-gun people will dismiss such logic as “crazy talk”. But, as is usual, we have the evidence:
Grenades have become the latest “must have” weapons being sold by underworld arms dealers at knockdown prices.
And a special Mirror investigation has found that the terrifying trade is booming.
Following the killing of two unarmed policewomen in a gun and grenade attack on Tuesday, we uncovered the shocking array of firepower available on the streets today.
The death-dealing “shopping list” includes guns for hire for as little as £100 and bullets priced at anything from £5 to £15.
Sources say the evil trade is run “just like any other business” with “gun librarians” setting prices for those looking to rent or buy.
The black market dealings are said to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. And we can reveal that high-level criminals are now turning to grenades to beef up their armoury. The most commonly used are the Swiss-manufactured British Army-issue L109 and the Yugoslavian-made M75.
In the three years to March 2010, there were 14 grenade attacks in the UK – including seven in the North West in just 10 months.
When the anti-freedom people claim they yearn for U.K. style gun control, let them know the reality is that when guns are outlawed, outlaws will have grenades.
The communists were very careful and deliberate in ensuring that the actions of the internal police were made valid through law and rationalized as a part of “class struggle.” Such laws were left so open to interpretation that literally any evil committed could later be vindicated. Man-made law is often a more powerful weapon than any gun, tank, plane or missile, because it triggers apathy within the masses. For some strange reason, when corrupt governments legalize their criminality through legislation or executive decree, the citizenry suddenly treats that criminality as legitimate and excusable.
Incremental prosecution and oppression is effective when the establishment wishes to avoid outright confrontation with a population. Attempt to snatch up a million people at one time, and you will have an immediate rebellion on your hands. Snatch up a million people one man at a time, or small groups at a time, and people do not know what to think or how to respond. They determine to hope that the authorities never get to them, that it will stop after a few initial arrests, or they hope that if they censor themselves completely, they will never be noticed.
Brandon Smith
February 24, 2016
A Warning To The Feds On Incremental Prosecutions Of The Liberty Movement
[I believe Smith is correct about human nature. In Washington State and some others it’s against the law, I-594, to loan your hunting rifle to your life-long friend for the weekend. If you were to assume the claimed motivation for the law is to reduce violence crime is true then it’s an incredibly stupid law. But I suspect many people avoid breaking that law and if they were prosecuted would blame themselves rather than the law and those who voted for it.
As you follow your nature please remember what Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn said:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
It’s entirely natural to follow the law. But sometimes that which is natural is not what is best for you or society as a whole.—Joe]
Like it or not, guns are a necessary evil for maintaining a free and democratic society in which we live. However, when the gun falls in the hands of some problem people, it becomes a weapon to kill. That is the difficult challenge we have to face in an imperfect world in which we live. Of course, some people today tend to think that gun rights are for hunting, recreation and self-defense. Perhaps, but that was the last thing in the framers’ minds when they drafted the Bill of Rights.
Chris Hsu
January 28, 2016
Letters: Gun rights are essential to the freedoms we enjoy in America
[I don’t get the “necessary evil” part but Hsu does reasonably well in the rest of his letter.—Joe]
Interesting. Idaho is state most dependent on gun industry, report finds:
Idaho depends more on the gun industry than any other state, according to a study by the financial website WalletHub. Idaho ranked No. 1 among states and the District of Columbia based on firearms industry activity in the state, gun ownership and overall prevalence, and gun politics — specifically, contributions by gun control and gun rights groups to members of Congress.
Idaho, The Gun State*. I could live with that.
* Idaho’s official nickname is The Gem State.
Do you realize that Obama has more time at the White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s “Rule for Radicals” than he has Trigger Time?
Bubblehead Les
February 2, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Sebastian
[After spending 20+ hours (about 2000 rounds in the Intensive Handgun Skills class) of “trigger time” this last weekend my mind is stuck on “trigger time”. I’m constantly amazed at how fast, and accurately, people can put lead downrange.
At Boomershoot people can and do put bullets into seven inch square targets at 700 yards on nearly every shot. I know people who can hit eight inch steel plates 25 feet away at a rate of six to seven rounds a second—with a 12 gauge shotgun! With a pistol (concealable, as opposed to a long gun) people put bullets into different eight and 12 inch circular targets from 25 feet away at the rate of two to three rounds per second. At conversation distances it’s eight to 10 rounds per second.
Every day of the week during normal wake time hours you can go to the local range here in the Seattle area and see people practicing. On the weekends and many week days you can find competitions where people hone and display their skills to levels that are mind bogglingly sharp even by my standards of being a competition shooter for over 20 years.
There are roughly 80 to 100 million gun owners in this country. That “extremist organization”, the NRA, has “more than five million members”.
People “White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rule for Radicals’” as they plot to destroy our freedom don’t realize just how dangerous a fire they are playing with. As I pointed out in this post about the number of Al Qaeda members:
According to intelligence estimates reported by the New York Times in 2010 the answer is “fewer than 500” in Afghanistan and “more than 300” in Pakistan. A 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal put the number in the range of 200 to 1000 with “affiliated fighters or funders” making up thousands or tens of thousands.
Since allied forces in Afghanistan haven’t “finished the job” after more than a decade against less than 1000 poorly trained and funded fighters which side do you bet on if they were fighting a few million well trained and well funded fighters? If the would-be tyrants push us too far, just how much trigger time do each of five or 10 million people, skilled with the tools of freedom, need to put an end to the threat? Do the arithmetic.—Joe]
If the US government dictating iPhone encryption design sounds ok to you, ask yourself how you’ll feel when China demands the same.
Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green)
Tweeted on February 17, 2016
[H/T to Tyler Durden.
Of course, as I posted before, Lyndon Johnson once said:
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
The problem being that it is difficult for many people to see the “unintended consequences” in foresight. If there is the possibility of a good outcome they will focus on that. In a lot of ways it’s like gun control. “People might be safer if guns are banned because the bad guys won’t have guns to commit crimes with.” Overlooking that the good guys won’t have guns to defend against the bad guys with.
The gun control analogy is an even a better fit when you remember that at one time the U.S. government insisted encryption was a “munition” and was mostly banned from export. It would seem to me that if the Second Amendment were well respected by Congress and the courts then a good lawyer could make the case government resistant encryption is protected by the Second Amendment as much or more so than it is by the First Amendment.—Joe]
@StrippedLower @grassfed_butter For starters, my wiener is bigger then 3 inches so I don’t need a gun.
Joe College (@newguy42)
Tweeted on October 19, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
I think the notion of any private citizen owning guns is absurd.
Kim LaPointe1 @kimoui
Tweeted on February 17, 2016
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.
After having it pointed out that the right to keep and bear arms is a basic human right she followed up with, “can’t take ignorance GO shoot yourself”.
I found this last contribution particularly interesting. She was the one exhibiting the ignorance but insists the person trying to inform her is ignorant and demands the more informed party cause themselves harm. These people have mental problems.—Joe]
I love humor where someone literally interprets something resulting in a completely different message.
From Steve at work who found it on a Facebook page for police officers and former officers (Steve is the latter):
I’m not talking about violent crime, I’m talking about homocides of children. There is quite a diffrent, the shrink can help
Yankeesfan66 @Rangersfan66
Tweeted on February 18, 2016
[In what universe does this guy live such that homicide of innocent children is not a crime?
These people have mental problems and projection issues.—Joe]
Update: I got a response on Twitter from this genius in response to this blog post:
@JoeHuffman Now you know why I remember psychiatrists for you gun addicts…
Starting at Say Uncle I followed a trail of links and found this:
Since President Obama’s election the number of concealed handgun permits has soared, growing from 4.6 million in 2007 to over 12.8 million this year. Among the findings in our report:
- The number of concealed handgun permits is increasing at an ever increasing rate. Over the past year, 1.7 million additional new permits have been issued – a 15.4% increase in just one single year. This is the largest ever single-year increase in the number of concealed handgun permits.
- 5.2% of the total adult population has a permit.
- Five states now have more than 10% of their adult population with concealed handgun permits.
- In ten states, a permit is no longer required to carry in all or virtually all of the state. This is a major reason why legal carrying handguns is growing so much faster than the number of permits.
- Since 2007, permits for women has increased by 270% and for men by 156%.
- Some evidence suggests that permit holding by minorities is increasing more than twice as fast as for whites.
- Between 2007 and 2014, murder rates have fallen from 5.6 to 4.2 (preliminary estimates) per 100,000. This represents a 25% drop in the murder rate at the same time that the percentage of the adult population with permits soared by 178%. Overall violent crime also fell by 25 percent over that period of time.
- Regression estimates show that even after accounting for the per capita number of police and people admitted to prison and demographics, the adult population with permits is significantly associated with a drop in murder and violent crime rates.
- Concealed handgun permit holders are extremely law-abiding. In Florida and Texas, permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors or felonies at one-sixth the rate that police officers are convicted.
Later in the report we find this:
This report will focus on the increase in concealed carry. Obviously, the main focus from a crime prevention point of view is whether people actually do carry guns, not whether they are allowed to do so.
Unsurprisingly, the number of permits has grown faster than the number of states that allow concealed carry. This is because in each state, the longer the law is in effect, more and more people have gradually applied and received permits. But there appears to be another factor: President Obama’s election in 2008. Not only did Obama’s election increase gun sales, it also increased the number of concealed handgun permits.
Initially the increase in permits was slow, growing from roughly 2.7 million permit holders in 1999 to 4.6 million in 2007. But the number of concealed handgun permits literally exploded during the Obama presidency. For December 2011, the federal Government Accountability Office estimated that there were at least 8 million concealed handgun permits. By the June 2014, it was 11.1 million; in 2015, 12.8 million.
In other words, during the eight years from 1999 to 2007, the number of permits increased by about 240,000 per year. During the next four years, the number of permits surged by 850,000 per year. Then from the end of 2011 to 2013 the yearly increase rose by 1,550,000. And during the last year the increase has continued to accelerate to 1,700,000.
Emphasis added. In other words, as others have observed, if Obama and his friends want to reduce the number of guns being sold and carried publically in this country they should resign from politics.
Then there is this which, with a little editing, could be put in a tweet with good effect on certain occasions:
Permit holders on rare occasion violate the law. But in order to truly appreciate how incredibly rare those problems are one needs to remember that there are over 12.8 million permit holders in the US. Indeed, it is impossible to think of any other group in the US who is anywhere near as law--abiding.
One of the best ways to change the culture is to normalize a behavior. The anti-gun people have been trying to convince others we are “extremists” for decades. We are rapidly being able to turn the tables on them.
A couple weeks ago a female coworker told me, wide eyed and with an incredulous tone as if he were crazy, “My dad told I should get a concealed weapons permit!” I responded that another woman we both knew applied for one a week or so previously. Her attitude immediately became subdued and she didn’t continue the “crazy dad” attitude. Last week she told me about some guy in our building who scares her. He stares at her when she is around. She then told me she going to get a concealed pistol license and asked how to go about it. Today I offered to take her to the range at lunch time. She agreed but we haven’t gone yet.
That’s one way to victory. There is another path to culture change in the report I have been quoting above.
The concealed carry permit numbers for all states are included in the report. Alabama has the most with 12.64%. I’m most interested in Washington State, which has 8.83%, and Idaho with a 8.62% rate but we can mine more out of this paper.
The lowest permit rate in the top 26 states is North Carolina where the rate is 5.47%. So when someone expresses concern about people discretely carrying firearms in public you can tell them, “If you live in most states the odds are that at least one in 20 and perhaps as high as one in eight people you meet in public has a permit to carry. How many people did you see in public today?”
In other words the changing concealed carry culture can change the culture further by pointing out how normal it is to carry firearms in public.
But perhaps the strangest indicator the culture is changing I have seen came in the form of an email today. In part it said, “It seems like shooting like you do would be quite a rush. Does that extra adrenaline carry over into the realm of subsequent sex?”
I invited them to the range with me to get some free coaching and see for themselves.
Paul Barrett spent Three Days Behind the Counter at a Vegas Gun Shop.
As usual, Barrett’s article is factually correct with a relatively mild anti-gun tone. But getting the facts to such a wide audience, Bloomberg Businessweek, is generally a good thing.
The State’s Attorney’s Office has made it clear that they will put their collectivist politics over the need for them to perform their job as advocates of the law. Mentioning mass shootings and the fear-based political climates that their collectivist ilk have manufactured to describe how police should interact with law abiding members of the population is the height of propaganda.
Rich Burgess
Connecticut Carry President
February 8, 2016
Press Release
Manual of How to Harass Law Abiding Citizens
State’s Attorneys Release ‘How to Manual’ of Harassment
[Here is a direct link to the actual “manual”.
If you were to imagine making the appropriate substitutions of people peaceably exercising their First Amendment rights, or entering an abortion clinic, or “driving while black” instead of gun owners and treating them as suggested the uproar would make national news. And rightly so. This has to stop. These people should be candidates for prosecution instead of public officials. They are deliberately casting a chilling effect upon a specific enumerated right.—Joe]
This is old news (October 2015) but is good to see. It can be used as a counter to those people who are opposed to our school teachers and other private citizens being armed:
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan on Wednesday approved a number of measures to ease the requirements for firearm permits, as Israel copes with a wave of “lone wolf” terrorism.
“In recent weeks many citizens have helped the Israel Police subdue terrorists who carried out attacks,” he said.
“Citizens with firearms training are a multiplying force for the police in their fight against terrorism and therefore I will take measures to ease the restrictions at this time.”
…
The ministry on Wednesday used the example of allowing the Jerusalem Municipality to give permits to school teachers in the ultra-Orthodox sector, which it referred to as one of the most vulnerable communities.
Israel has been subject to a greater intensity and longer duration of “lone wolf” terrorist attacks than any other nation I know of. Rather than increasing firearms restrictions they are reducing them.
This is so you know the type of people who oppose private gun ownership.
Via a tweet from Linoge I found that at 12:40 PM PST, on November 30, 2015 Chris Tacy tweeted:
@monteiro perhaps they should have to shoot their kids to keep their guns
This is what they think of you and the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.