The only benefit to society of guns is population control.
StillLooking
November 24, 2012
Comment to Obama should now push for gun control
[Yes. I’m sure over population was of such concern the authors of the Bill of Rights made sure it was appropriately addressed.—Joe]
Less than 10 days ago the Brady Campaign was saying:
Militant gun advocates and firearms industry lobbies will be surprised to learn that there are indeed limits on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and that there is no fundamental right to carry handguns in public.
Today the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said:
The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside. The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense. Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment therefore compels us to reverse the decisions in the two cases before us…
This is huge! Carry of firearms outside the home has been declared to be a specific enumerated right by a Federal Court. Laws in Washington D.C., California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and other jurisdictions are now target rich environments for lawsuits to strike down restrictions on a fundamental right.
The Brady Campaign is on the wrong side of history. Again.
Update: As pointed out by David Hardy this is a circuit split and it will almost for certain go to the Supreme Court for resolution.
@revenant0202 My apologies to your wife! Is it impotence? Three inch penis? Or just pathetic? @linoge_wotc @moronwatch @nakedaxiom
Nick (@WarriorBanker)
December 1, 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
This is the conversation the gun lobby wants you to be having.
Dan Gross
President of the Brady Campaign
November 2012
In response to the question, “Would you, at a moment when a stranger is shooting at you, prefer to have a gun, or not?”
[I find it very telling that Gross avoids the question. This is especially true because I recently finished listening to (and then purchased the hardcover version) Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception.
This is an excellent book. The title is a bit misleading because the book is about detecting deception which doesn’t necessarily mean lying. But “Spy the Deception” or even “Detect the Deception” just doesn’t have the “ring” to it that “Spy the Lie” does. Also of note is that the authors are former CIA officers.
Gross is being deceptive. He does not want to discuss the truth. In the famous words of Col. Nathan R. Jessup, Mr. Gross, “You can’t handle the truth!” And because Gross cannot handle the truth his organization is, and rightly so, doomed to the dustbin of history.—Joe]
People don’t trust government to do what’s right. They are very attracted to the idea of a nation of individuals, so they don’t think about what’s good for the collective.
Tom Mauser
Gun-control activist.
November 2012
The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)
[It’s good to have him explicitly say it. Mauser (how ironic!) is opposed to a nation of individuals and individual rights. The collective is what is important.
Mauser is opposed to not just a specific enumerated right called out in the Bill of Rights, but the very foundation of this nation. He should move to a country more closely politically aligned with his views. I’m thinking North Korea would be appropriate. The United States Constitution clearly was designed for people totally different from him.—Joe]
“What can we do about gun control?” is an open question on answers.yahoo.com.
Someone with the alias of Sal Paradise says:
Shoot gun owners with their own guns?
I find it difficult to interpret this any other way than this guy is advocating theft and murder of people exercising a specific enumerated right. Typical.
He must be a democrat. They have a very long history of opposition to civil rights:
It’s my first gun show. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the firearm fetishists who frequent these death markets.
Christopher Evans
November 14, 2012
The Plain Dealer
How to buy guns, cheap: Christopher Evans
[H/T to Robb.
Let’s just say I’m “skeptical” of his claim about trying to keep an open mind.—Joe]
There have been several sites (here and here are just two examples and there are many others) posting an alarmist message with the title of “Obama’s Gun Ban List Is Out” attributed to Alan Korwin.
It didn’t sound right to me so I sent an email to Alan asking if he had written it and if he had was it recent or sometime in the past. He replied to his email list and posted on his blog the following denial.
I’m reminded of something Winston Churchill said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Churchill, of course, said that before Al Gore invented the Internet so today it would be more like around the world 10,000 times instead of just halfway.
From Alan Korwin:
CLARIFICATION
I did not write this:
—-
Obama’s Gun Ban List Is OutHere it is, folks, and it is bad news. The framework for legislation is always laid, and the Democrats have the votes to pass anything they want to impose upon us. They really do not believe you need anything more than a brick to defend your home and family. Look at the list and see how many you own. Remember, it is registration, then confiscation. It has happened in the UK, in Australia, in Europe, in China, and what they have found is that for some reason the criminals do not turn in their weapons, but will know that you did.
Remember, the first step in establishing a dictatorship is to disarm the citizens.
—-Where did that email come from?
A lot of people apparently got it before someone sent me a copy.
I’d like to write to whoever decided to create and circulate it.
I finally got it in this link from someone:http://americannationalmilitia.com/obamas-gun-ban-list-is-out
I did not write that inflammatory paragraph and its next sentence,
even though someone has attributed that to me.HOWEVER:
I did indeed post, in January 2009, the huge list of guns to be banned that came with it — which I took directly from a Democrat’s proposed bill, HR 1022, in the 110th Congress. That list is accurate (as it appeared in the link above, and as it remains posted on my website), including the blanket powers to be granted to the Attorney General, amounting to an extraordinarily broad firearms ban.
[“Rifles (or copies or duplicates): M1 Carbine, Sturm Ruger Mini-14, AR-15, Bushmaster XM15, Armalite M15, AR-10, Thompson 1927, Thompson M1; AK, AKM, AKS, AK-47, AK-74, ARM, MAK90, NHM 90, NHM 91…”
the list goes on at great length, including shotguns, handguns, gear, parts and much more, go to my website for the whole list] That part is not invented. It was from Congress. In 2009.
To everyone who wrote to me asking for the source, there it is.No one, including the Democrats, expected that to have a chance of passage at that time,
under President Bush. It simply showed what they wished for, and they introduced it into Congress.It is horrifying from a gun-rights perspective.
Whoever used my name without my permission or knowledge was at least clever.My original posting is here, including the list of guns to be banned, and you can read it:
http://www.gunlaws.com/GunLawUpdate3.htm.
If you own a gun, chances are yours is included, because along with the specific lists,
are features guns have, like grips (you read that right), and anything the AG might decide to add.The Brady Gun-Ban Strategy, issued at the same time at the beginning of Obama’s first term, is here:
http://www.gunlaws.com/BradyStrategy2009.htm
It did not circulate very far outside their own circles.
The lamestream media basically ignored it because it was so incendiary.This is why the left was so disappointed with Obama’s performance:
he failed to act on their astounding rights-removal plans.
Their respect for the fundamental civil and human right to arms is lower than you can dream.Now, as far as I’m aware, no one outside his inner circle has seen his current plans.
Saying “Obama’s Gun Ban List Is Out” — and attributing that to me, is false.
I would sure like to know who did that.
But the list of guns was real, it was proposed in Congress almost four years ago.
Who knows what they’re planning now. Wait and see.
I doubt it will be good, if your rights mean anything.As before, I’ll be watching, and will continue to post these things as I find them.
I read the bills, and describe them in plain English. I get other insider info.
It’s what I do. Get on my list on my home page — http://www.gunlaws.comI have the UN Arms Trade Treaty spelled out in my reports 113, 114 and 116, here:
http://www.gunlaws.com/PageNineIndex.htm
113- How treaties can trump the Constitution; 114- The UN treaty spelled out in plain English;
116- Mexico’s plan to use it against us, from our pro-rights Ambassador Donald Mahley.Get on my list on my home page — http://www.gunlaws.com
Permission to circulate this memo gladly granted.
Alan.
P.S. If that doesn’t worry you enough, scroll down to this item on my New Stuff page:
GUN-RIGHTS LICENSING PLANNED, http://www.gunlaws.com/newstuff.htm
also introduced into Congress, HR 45, at about the same time, the beginning of Obama’s term.
It would require a test to own a gun that no one could pass, plus biometric ID that doesn’t exist.
It also had no chance of passage, but shows how they were thinking. It got no co-sponsors,
was introduced by former Black Panther Bobby Rush, and what’s our Congress come to.
We must repeal the Second Amendment, demand the peaceable surrender of all handguns, and hunt down and destroy all those who do not comply.
Philip Wilson
November 27, 2012
Comment to Gun Control, RIP.
[This is so you know the attitude of those who oppose freedom and the Bill of Rights.
And Wilson, you should take point on that hunt.—Joe]
From Guns Aren’t the Problem, The NRA is the Problem
A fight against the right of Americans to own guns is one that almost certainly can never be won. But a concerted effort to make gun ownership safer by enacting and strengthening common sense efforts to protect public safety through, for example, closing the gun show loophole and banning bullet clips that hold 100 shells, can and must be won if we want to reduce gun violence in the US. And the way to win that fight is to paint the NRA, which takes advantage of its own members in order to promote a reactionary and dangerous agenda of turning the US into a version of the old Wild West, as the out-of-control villain that it is.
Emphasis added.
It might be all from the same source but I have seen several instances where the anti-gun people are advocating restrictions on 100 round magazines with no mention of a 10 round limit as is the usual threshold for demonic possession.
While that is certain to ease the political resistance to capacity restrictions on firearms the statistics where such magazines played a definitive role in the execution of a crime are going to be exceedingly poor. I would be willing to bet that you will find a much higher correlation to crimes committed by people wearing gray hoodies greater than size XL simultaneously with size 12 or greater Nike shoes than you would to 100 round magazines being correlated to crime.
But don’t expect the facts and logic to be important to these people. It’s about the implicitly admitted long term fight “against the right of Americans to own guns.” The 100 round threshold is the camel’s nose.
In Boston, we had a name for the city’s laws about self-defence weapons, from pepper spray on up: “Call 911 and Die.”
danceronice
September 2, 2012
Comment in a forum with the topic of Gun control: you for or against?
[Yup. There is also a book by that name.—Joe]
This battle for ‘common-sense’ gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest, logic loses. So, expect more meaningless, if not harmful, ‘gun control‘ legislation. Good news – if you’re a crook.
Larry Elder
From Thinkexist.com.
[I have been unable to determine when he said this. While true 15 years ago expecting more gun control legislation is less and less a good bet. I’m skeptical it is because logic and reason suddenly are winning contests against emotion and passion. I expect it is because we are accumulating more emotion and passion on our side.—Joe]
Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.
tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.
It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.
I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.
The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.
Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.
One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.
Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.
Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.
At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.
Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]
Paul C. Duffy has the strangest thoughts. And then he shares them with a letter to the editor:
I was disheartened beyond words to read about a program that offers would-be victims of school shootings alternatives to the traditional lock-down reaction to such crimes.
…
Canton police Detective Chip Yeaton, who sounds like a caring citizen and father, spoke in support of the proposed school program, called ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate. Yeaton said that “school shootings continue to happen, and young people are dying. We need to change the philosophy.”
Yeaton is right, but his focus is wrong. Our philosophy does indeed need to change: We need to find the real and moral courage to stand down the gun lobbies — the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment zealots — whose reckless defense of gun rights has led to a society where almost anyone can acquire a Glock 9mm and the ammunition needed to ruin lives and communities in seconds.
What Duffy totally ignores or does not comprehend is that people can acquire a 9mm Glock and the ammunition to defend lives. I realized I’m biased as I have a handgun on my hip as I type this but handguns are designed for and used millions of times each year to defend innocent life. Duffy’s brain is stuck in “prey” mode.
Read Columbine by Dave Cullen. When violent predators attack students at a school cowering under the desk this behavior gives the predator feelings of even greater power and control. They feel justified in killing those who cower beneath them. One of the prime motivators of the Columbine predators was that they believed people were so stupid they didn’t deserve to live. We don’t know what their thoughts were the last couple of hours but it would seem to me their opinions of human intelligence could not have improved as they saw people “hiding” underneath desks and tables and they strolled from person to person and shot them.
I kept wondering if the Boston Globe got the letter writers name wrong. Maybe it was actually “Fluffy” instead of “Duffy”. And the ‘C’ stands for Cottontail.
Duffy advocates being a coward in the face of a single criminal predator but “courage” while advocating people “stand down the gun lobbies”. He should think this through. Suppose he does “stand down the gun lobbies”. Then what? Is he going to start confiscating firearms from people? I would like to point out that Fluffy Duffy should be happy he has the gun lobby. They are what separate him from the 80 million gun owners in this country. Rabbits are no match for hunters.
Update: Sebastian also comments with Oh Noes! Freedom!
I guess since you can’t walk around with your dick hanging out #opencarry is the next best thing. #juvenile
DarthWeiner75
Tweeted on November 17, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.
It’s “interesting” that someone would consider the exercise of a constitutionally protected right “juvenile”. Would he consider exercise of your right to not incriminate yourself “being a sissy”? Or maybe “freedom of speech is for crybabies”.—Joe]
Guns owners are disrespectful of authority. A failure to rely on authorities is an invariable sign of improper and overly independent attitudes. The mere fact that they gather together to talk about guns at gun shops, gun shows, shooting ranges, and on the internet means that they have some plot going against us normal people. A gun owner has no right to associate with another gun owner.
Therefore, to help ensure our right to happiness and safety we must ban and seize all guns from private hands, and forbid NRA-based criticism towards people who are only trying to help. Searching the homes of all NRA members for any guns and pro-gun literature will go a long way towards reducing crime.
jack burton
November 14, 2012
Comment to Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough.
[I’m pretty sure this was sarcasm. But I don’t know for sure.
Regardless, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!—Joe]
For people like myself who are not satisfied with the justifications for carrying dangerous weapons, it sometimes seems that your viewpoint isn’t important when it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Keep in mind, the Constitution has been changed before and can change again as long as you’re willing to put your efforts in the right place in Washington to get laws changed.
Rachel Elmalawany
November 14, 2012
Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough
[Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the constitution can’t be changed “in Washington”. It takes quite a bit more than that.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the entire Bill of Rights was a qualifier for agreeing to the constitution to begin with. If one of those items are nulled out the agreement to form a union is nulled.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, that if you were to successful in repealing the 13th Amendment you would encounter, and rightly so, “stiff resistance” in the implementation. There are probably just as many people that would resist the implementation of a 2nd Amendment repeal as there are that would resist a 13th Amendment repeal implementation.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, there are about 220 million people in the U.S. that don’t own guns. There are about 80 million people who do and who consume about 10 billion rounds of ammo each year. That’s what we do for practice. Please don’t attempt to verify our level of resolve or the quality of our practice.—Joe]
While there is a lot of public pressure to repeal the no duty to retreat and the self-defense immunity provisions, this task force should not bow to the uninformed opinions and allegations being made.
Instead, it should recommend that the Legislature take action to correct the deficiencies in the law and to make clear once and for all that law abiding Floridians and visitors to our state should never be forced to turn their back on a violent criminal attacker and should not have to fear that they will lose their livelihood, their freedom, or their financial future and become a victim twice.
Eric J. Friday
October 16, 2012
10/16/12 Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection
[H/T Robb Allen.
Public pressure frequently has little to do with the facts. Public pressure is often a lot more like a mob. Rumors, inflammatory rhetoric, and high emotions substitute for data and logic.—Joe]
Sorry, my current handgun is black, but if I’m going to murder my wife, it just has to be stainless. She deserves nothing less!
Sebastian
November 13, 2012
Attitudes on Gun Rights
[Yes, of course it’s sarcasm.
One could also turn that around a bit and say something similar about substituting an evil black rifle for a wood-stocked Mini-14.
Mocking the enemies of freedom is good thing.—Joe]