A gun is psychologically a penis-substitute and a symbol of power: the age-range of toy-shop clientele begins at about six or seven, rises sharply just before puberty and declines soon after the discovery of the phallus and its promise of power. From then on, guns are for kids and for the effete freaks and misfits who must seek psycho-orgasmic relief by shooting pheasants.
Adam Hall
The Quiller Memorandum
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
There is not a shadow of doubt, none whatsoever, that the 2nd amendment as written and as intended by the Founders has nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun. That is absolute and not open to the slightest interpretation.
Marc Rubin
August 2, 2010
Supreme Court Ruling on 2nd Amendment Proves Conservative Hypocrisy and Dishonesty
[I wonder if Rubin thinks Alan Dershowitz are Laurence Tribe are conservatives and lesser constitutional scholars than he?
My hypothesis is that Rubin has crap for brains.—Joe]
Can’t we Americans here at home do something to lift the gun terror from our schools, playgrounds, parking lots, malls, post offices, housing projects, highways and the grim reaches of our cities where the police must risk their lives to uphold the law?
Of course we can. What we have to do now is to free ourselves from one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century.
This mighty country stands paralyzed in the face of an ever-spreading plague of guns. This national calamity we owe to the leaders of the National Rifle Association in Washington. With a tenacity and ferocity worthy of a better cause, they have fought every proposal, however moderate, to bring the menace under control.
In this endeavor, their principal weapon has been the Second Amendment to the Constitution — or, rather, their version of the Second Amendment.
That amendment, they have insisted, gives everyone an absolute constitutional right to have every kind of firearm. Brandishing that “right,” spending millions in lobbying and legal maneuvers and threatening doom to politicians who would oppose them, they have killed or stalled gun control initiatives in Congress, state legislatures and city governments.
At last, however, the nation is on the move.
…
Now the great Second Amendment hoax can be nailed once and for all if the rank-and-file of the NRA and other responsible citizens will master one simple truth: The Second Amendment means what the courts say it means. It does not mean what the NRA leaders have been telling the nation all these years.
Wallace Carroll
July 4, 1993
To End the Gun Terror, End the Second Amendment Hoax
[Those were the dark days of gun rights activism. That was the attitude nearly everywhere in the media and many of the politicians. Guns were a terror, a plague, a menace, and a national calamity. The standard view of the Second Amendment was a hoax, a lie, and a fraud.
I agree with one thing he said. The Second Amendment means what the courts say it means.
The problem for Mr. Carroll is that he was, probably deliberately, misreading the Miller decision and ignoring the Cruikshank decision. The Heller decision made things much more difficult for people like Carroll to distort. The question is now that the courts have agreed with the NRA on the meaning of the Second Amendment does Carroll still insist that the meaning of the Second Amendment is what the courts say it is? Or does he now insist that the Supreme Court has perpetuated a fraud on the American people as well?
Or does Carroll now admit it was he that was the hoaxer or at least the one that fell for a fraud?—Joe]
Numerous individuals, known as straw buyers, were recruited to buy AK-47 like semi-automatic firearms. These firearms were then sent to Mexico for use by a drug cartel.
One of the firearms in the hands of the cartel was used in a shooting which resulted in the death of a U.S. law enforcement official.
Sound familiar?
Okay. Well this is probably something you haven’t heard. The perpetrator, Manuel Gomez Barba, of Baytown, Texas, has been sentenced to 100 months for the exportation of the 44 firearms.
The ATF illegally exported something on the order of 2000 firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Does that mean those criminals will receive 2000/44 x 100 months (~380 years) in prison for their crimes?
I don’t think so. Tar and feathers might also be considered appropriate but also have a near zero chance of coming to pass.
I claim retirement at full pay with bonuses will be the most likely outcome.
The administration that took military action in Libya without any authorization from force from Congress, that appointed czars with policymaking authority without Congressional confirmation, and that made ‘recess’ appointments while Congress was not in recess is invoking executive privilege to cover how the Department of Justice reacted when Congress began asking about a gun-trafficking operation that got U.S. law enforcement officers murdered by Mexican drug cartels.
All from a president who railed against a runaway imperial presidency when George W. Bush sat in the office he currently occupies.
Jim Geraghty
February 2, 2012
Eric Holder Should Become a Campaign Issue Today
[H/T to Say Uncle.
I’ve had admitted Marxist’s tell me, “We just need to have the right people in charge.” The problem is that power always attracts the people that can least be trusted with that power.
The only option is to not give anyone that much power. I don’t understand why this lesson has to be taught again and again. People have understood this since at least 1776.—Joe]
Didn’t they fall to the ground?
Robert Mahler
Assistant Crown attorney in Ontario, Canada
January 31, 2012
Court adjourns homeowner’s self-defence trial to clarify confusing gun control law
This was referring to the shell casing from a .38 caliber revolver. Mahler was prosecuting a man for firing three shots to scare off masked men who were throwing “firebombs” (Molotov Cocktails) at his house.
[Not only is the prosecutor so ignorant of firearms that he believed revolvers automatically eject spent shell casings but the government initially attempted to prosecute him for defending himself and his home. The video of the three guys calmly walking around throwing the “firebombs” apparently was going to hinder the case of the prosecution so they dropped that charge. They then charged the victim with “careless storage of a firearm”.
I am of the opinion the prosecutor should be charged with crimes against humanity. Everyone knows you have a right to defend yourself against a violent attack. For the prosecutor to use the force of government to intimidate people who exercise such an obvious natural right warrants an extremely harsh response. And for the prosecutor to base a significant portion of his case on the belief that a revolver automatically ejects it’s shell casings qualifies him for a “Crap for Brains” mention.—Joe]
David Hardy has the story on virulently anti-gun lawyer, Dennis Burke, who has been working on anti-gun projects since at least 1989. He was a driving force behind the “assault weapon” ban of 1994. Operation Fast and Furious was secretly launched just one month after his appointment as U.S. attorney was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Burke predicted, “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons. Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”
I say we should try him for treason and every single illegal gun purchase. When we are done with him extradite him to Mexico and let them try him for all the violations of Mexico laws he is implicated in.
I too dream of that utopian future when we all get along, I really and truly do.
Until then, I’ll be stocking my gun cabinet.
Scott Z.
January 30, 2012
[From the guns discussion list at work.
The thing is there are some people that advocate unilateral disarmament. That too is a utopian fantasy. Unless there is some semblance of power equality very few relationships are stable. That is true at nearly every level from individual to international.
A good example of this at the international level is Switzerland. The Swiss have not been in a state of war internationally since 1815 yet they are well armed and have used those arms upon occasion to keep their neutrality and freedom.
At the individual level you only have to look how the smallest kid in grade school gets picked on unless he receives protection from the adults.
The Gun is Civilization and has been called a Peacemaker for a very long time with good reason.—Joe]
Wearing them in public is like a 10 year old walking around wearing his cowboy hat and six-shooter. It invites trouble as you are daring anyone to pick a fight with you which a lot of people do. If you want/need to carry a weapon/gun on you get a CWP and then you don’t have the need to show that yours are bigger than anyone else’s and you still have your “protection”.
1justguy
Comment to Starbucks’ “Pro-Gun” Policy Prompts Gun Victims’ Advocate Group to Launch Nationwide Boycott on Valentine’s Day 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
John Hardin unintentionally lead me to this guy.
Also worthy of note is that technically 1justguy’s claim of people picking a fight with people who are open carrying is factually unsupported. But my hypothesis is that he is not only incorrect but he has the wrong sign on the correlation coefficient.—Joe]
For our mayors, the tired debate about gun control is over and beside the point. Now that we know the answer, we can sort of put aside the tired debate at the extremes and focus on how you respect the Second Amendment and the rights of law-abiding owners and keep the guns out of hands of people who shouldn’t have it.
The sweet spot is letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want. While tightening the background check system to make sure the next Jared Loughner, the next Virginia Tech massacre doesn’t happen.
Mark Glaze
January 22, 2012
TN gun laws, or lack thereof, under attack
[As Glenn Reynolds said about the first sentence above, “What he means by that is, they lost.”
Yes, they lost but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying. Background checks are teetering on the edge of firearm and/or owner registration which is totally unacceptable. The ability with which a background check system could be turned into a registration system is scary easy. And since there is no evidence background check improve public safety I am of the opinion the system should be scrapped.
But what I find most interesting about this quote is that Glaze is willing to concede “letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want.”
Other anti-gun people and groups need to have that pounded into them in public debate. No “assault weapon” bans and stop the whining about “.50 caliber sniper rifles”.
Removing restrictions on suppressors are next and full-auto firearms are just over the horizon.—Joe]
In some states if two (or more) criminals engage in a felony and someone dies as a result then the surviving criminal(s) can be charged with murder. This can result in strange cases where the intended victim successfully defends themselves with deadly force and a criminal is charged with the death of another criminal. This happens even though the criminal not only didn’t inflict the deadly injury they had no injurious intent against their criminal comrade. They could have been 100 feet away driving the getaway car and yet they are charged with the murder of the masked guy with the gun in the bank.
But how are those numbers tallied in the stats? Will that justified homicide show up as a murder? Will it show up as both a justified self-defense killing and as an illegal murder? Or will it count as a justified homicide?
Does anyone know? Does anyone know how to find out?
This could make a (probably small) difference in some of the statistics we use when defending the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
The peasants who told the fairy tales were superstitious people who were not critical thinkers, and it shows in the stories. Joan Peterson is like that: you expect at least a pseudo logical argument, but instead you get the weird ramblings of a woman with the critical thinking abilities of an 18th century peasant.
Ken
Comment to That is what I am afraid of.
[If the lack of critical thinking skills was something that common it makes me wonder how we ever made it out of the dark ages. And much more important is the answer to this question, “Is the prevalence of Peterson Syndrome evidence we are headed into dark age?” Freedom and enlightenment may have been just a short twinkle in the big picture of human history.—Joe]
Joan Peterson writes, “Rights of gun owners will be placed right along side of the rights of Americans to be safe from senseless shootings.”
You have zero rights “to be safe from senseless shootings” or be safe from someone beating you with a baseball bat, or be safe from someone cutting your liver out with a sharpened credit card.
What you can reasonably expect is such criminals will be punished by our legal system.
Peterson thinking is so scrambled that I don’t think she even understands the concept of a right but this time I think she said something refreshingly honest and almost profoundly revealing. She wants people to have same right to own a firearm as “to be safe from senseless shootings”. That is saying she wants you to have no right to own a firearm.
Thank you Brady Campaign Board Member Joan Peterson for finally saying what we have long claimed and you and your organization have long denied.
Update: Mostly off topic but I left the following comment on her post. I post it here out of fear she will not allow it to be seen on her blog.
Last September at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous I spent many hours talking to Paul Barrett and have continued discussions with him via email since. And he will be attending a shooting event I am hosting in April. He readily admits he is a novice in the field of firearms and still has a lot to learn.
He has also agreed with me with there is no data to indicate a legal limit on the capacity of firearm magazines would result in a net increase in safety of the public. And even in his book he states that efforts to pass such a law would fail and would hence be a waste of time and effort.
I told you if you came back, I was gonna kill you.
Anonymous St. Louis Woman
January 2012
Self-defense shootings to get closer scrutiny
[And she did kill him. She will not be charged.
From reading the article I am strongly inclined to conclude that while her actions were probably within the letter of the law she violated the spirit of the law, and acted immorally.
On the other hand if the backstory been that it was my daughter and she had been beaten by him for years (from the story above this is not known to be true), finally kicked him out, and had a restraining order against him at the time he broke in I would have been strongly inclined to handle it differently. Rather than giving the gun to the woman as the guy in this case did I would have had a strong urge to tell her, “I can shoot better than you. Close your eyes and plug your ears.” Then I would have done my best to empty the gun into him before he dropped to the floor. At close range 18+1 rounds should take on the order of 3.8 seconds and leave a hole on the back side that you could hide a basketball in.
Then the daughter would call the cops (she is the one still be able to hear) and tells them nothing but there has been a shooting and they should send an ambulance. Then she would then call a lawyer who will answer all questions from the police.
Regardless of what really happened in the case above it appears to me this woman made some serious errors. Others should learn from those mistakes.—Joe]
Via email from Brennan at work we get this story from “an award-winning writer”. As Brennan pointed out, “Like all good gun-grabbers the writer knows that there is no such thing as a justified shooting, only ‘extreme self-defense tactics’, ‘settling scores’, ‘vigilantes’ etc.”
Here is a sample:
What didn’t grab the headlines, though, was that more citizens are settling their own scores with criminals.
…
The unabated crime spree even has more residents resorting to extreme self-defense tactics. In 2011, Detroit reported 34 justifiable homicides, according to Fox2 News Reporter Charlie LeDuff – a whopping 80 percent increase over the previous year.
…
This rush to arm and self-administer justice would not be encouraged or condoned under normal circumstances. But in the current lawless environment, it is easy to believe these options have broad public support.
Many residents are apt to nod their heads in approval, glorifying potential victims who get off the first deadly shot against a predator. More than a dangerous precedent for society…
…
The chief’s optimistic crime report does little to restore public confidence in his less than vigilant crime-fighting commitment. So don’t be surprised that frightened, increasingly vigilante-minded residents continue to send the message to City Hall that safe neighborhoods will be restored by any means necessary.
In the comments Sean Sorrentino does an awesome job concluding with, “The writer may be an award winner, but he is clearly incapable of the most basic distinctions between lawful self defense and murder. No one who is that confused should be taken seriously.”
But what really drew my attention in articles was this:
Protection of human life and safety and making neighborhoods safe is the first duty of government.
As pointed out by Frank Clarke in the comments, “Not according to scores (if not hundreds) of cases from every circuit as well as SCOTUS. The police have NO duty to protect any individual before the fact of crime. Their duty is to draw a chalk line around your supine form.”
Furthermore this “award-winning writer” (I keep thinking of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead
But with all the evidence presented in just this one article I’m nearly forced to conclude he has crap for brains and is incapable of being enlightened.
It’s not scary looking guns that frighten me, it’s the thought of an unarmed citizenry at the mercy of a tyrannical government that makes be toss and turn at night.
The one thing that all slaves have in common, they don’t own guns.
John West
January 2012
Comment to RCMP to seize more ‘scary-looking’ guns before registry dies.
[Nor do slaves own weapons of any type.
I have nothing further to add.—Joe]
I’ve met and talked to a lot of anti-gun activists. With perhaps one exception I always got the impression they were generally nice people. Misguided, sometimes ignorant, and frequently not very bright but they were nice and I wouldn’t have minded having one of them as a neighbor or socializing with them if the topic of guns didn’t come up.
That said we sometimes ascribe evil intent to the anti-gun people. In the case of certain politicians such as Chuck Schumer, the Clintons, and President Obama (none of which I have ever met or talked to) this may be true. But generally there is something else going on. The people just aren’t the “evil type”.
But of course just because someone is a “nice” person doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t inadvertently advocate for and enable something terribly evil all the while believing they were doing good. Like I said, a lot of these people aren’t that bright.
Lorne Gunter said something on this topic that struck me as highly likely (emphasis added):
There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)
Typically, gun crime is committed by street criminals using stolen or contraband weapons. The gun registry never had any effect on this class of thug. Some of the 8,000 violent gun crimes no doubt were committed by licensed owners using registered guns — people who might be tracked or even deterred using a registry system. But since no one in Ottawa ever had any idea how many people are in this latter group, they had no way of determining the usefulness of the registry.
A cynic might say that not knowing was the point all along. Backers of the registry knew it would produce very little impact, so they deliberately didn’t bother collecting data that would confirm the database’s uselessness.
I think the truth is less conspiratorial (and far more arrogant): Backers were so sure the registry would produce tangible benefits, they never thought they might need to show proof. After all, they were experts and they had thought it up, so how could it not work?
…
It was purely on blind faith that supporters of the registry — police chiefs, victims’ rights groups, women’s shelter operators and grandstanding politicians — assumed that making Canadians register their guns would magically cut down on violent crime.
Faith, in this context, means believing in something without, or even in spite of, evidence. It was, and is, blind faith motivating these people to continue advocating for gun control. As I have pointed out before and some of them have even agreed, they do not know, or care, how to determine truth from falsity.
As an engineer this is abhorrent to me. When I design a filter using an op-amp, a couple capacitors, and resisters I can predict the frequency response within a fraction of a decibel. But I still test it because it’s possible I made a mistake someplace or a part doesn’t meet the vendor’s specification that I used for the design.
When I design an algorithm for estimating the location of a phone based on the presence of visible Wi-Fi access points and cell towers I know pretty darned close what the accuracy is and how long it will take to do the calculations. But I still test it and there is a test team doing their best to shoot my design and implementation down.
I recognize that human behavior is far more complex and less predictable than electronics and software algorithms. But that just screams that tests have to be done on social experiments. Yet, these people are so stupid (or, granted, in some cases malicious) they not only don’t even bother trying to predict the results or think to do tests but cannot imagine why tests would be needed.
These people deserve all the “respect” of a cargo cult or Heaven’s Gate followers.
Unfortunately this faith is not confined to just gun control. It is my hypothesis that this same blind faith template would match most U.S. government program of the last 100 years.
“Project Gunwalker” was not a “botched” operation–it was a massive crime, perpetrated by our own government, to justify attacking our Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human rights. And now is the time to hold those responsible to account.
Kurt Hofmann
January 23, 2012
Brady Campaign underpants gnome Dennis Henigan missing the news?
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I was a big proponent of patronizing Starbucks after the Brady Campaign attempted to intimidate them two years ago:
I don’t like coffee and haven’t spent all that much at Starbucks recently but wife Barbara does like coffee and visits them sometimes. It appears one of our activities for Valentines Day this year will be to visit Starbucks again to show our appreciation for not submitting to the pressure from the anti-gun groups.
The reason is because a one-day boycott of Starbucks is being advocated by an anti-gun group and our response is a “buycott”.
Other blog posts on the February 14th event:
With all the permit holders, it’s getting to where violent crime isn’t safe anymore.
Dave Hardy
January 23, 2012
CCW customer kills robber
[I’ve been listening to another economics book by Thomas Sowell. He gave many examples where criminals were entirely rational and responded to “economic” pressures. Sowell’s definition of economics is “the study of allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses”. When a violent criminals scarce resource is their body and that it might be reallocated by someone else as worm food most probably come up with the correct answer when they ask themselves the question, “Do I feel lucky?“
That violent crime is going down and the murder rate is at it’s lowest level in 50 (I think, I don’t want to bother looking it up right now) years could be because of the dramatic increase in CCW and the number of gun owners in general.
I may just be that the anti-gun people were wrong and the NRA, SAF, CCRKBA, JPFO, GOA, etc. was right (again).—Joe]