It amuses me to no end that people who faint dead away at the thought of judging someone by their outside appearance have no problem judging the function and intent of an inanimate object by its outside appearance.
Exurban Kevin
November 22, 2011
Comment to SAF/Calguns Suit Against California Assault Weapons Ban
[For some reason it doesn’t amuse me. I’m inclined to call them intolerant, ignorant, bigots.—Joe]
Your facts will not penetrate the rabid gun owners heads. Sad we can’t live in a civilized country with much lower rates of violence all in the name of ‘rights’.
Mark Schaffer
November 24, 2011
Comment to Argument for gun control is flimsy.
[“Rabid gun owners”? The only irrational, nearly foaming at the mouth with lies, people in the gun debate I know of have been on the anti-gun side.
But it’s nice to know what you think of gun owners. After all, we all know what is done with rabid animals.—Joe]
We haven’t given up hope but our impatience is growing with each passing day.
Dennis Henigan
Acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence,
November 24, 2011
Tough politics for Obama on guns as 2012 election approaches
[Impatience? I would have thought it was desperation. And it’s the shrinking bank balance and public support that has to have him worried.
I long, and work toward, the day when he is worried about being prosecuted under 18 USC 241.—Joe]
I find it interesting that the most anti-gun president ever has a strong tendency to run scared from any confrontation with gun owners. The draft regulation to ban shooters from many public lands will apparently be completely dropped (via email from Daniel at work):
The Obama administration says it will not restrict recreational shooting on public lands, reversing a draft policy that had caused an uproar among gun owners and hunters, especially in the West.
In a memo sent Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would direct his agency to “take no further action to develop or implement” the draft policy, which would have restricted target shooting on some public lands near residential areas.
I wonder if Obama has some plan for implementing this “under the radar”. Or is he just going to maintain as low a profile as possible on gun issues?
No response yet from The Brady Campaign, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, or the Violence Policy Center. Perhaps someone should check on them to make sure they don’t start looking longingly at their bottle of whiskey and bottle of sleeping pills.
Many years ago, a young woman lived in Washington DC. Economic circumstances forced her to live in a high crime area & commute to work via metro, as as she couldn’t afford a car. As she walked home one evening she was followed by 2 dirt-bags who attacked her as she unlocked her front door. Over the next few hours she was repeatedly raped, her home ransacked & was beaten so badly her skull was fractured. She spent weeks in the hospital & Many months in rehab. Years later she’s not fully recovered. & never will be. But she’s fit enough to handle a gun which I gave her & now carries it when ever she leaves home. But isn’t this “illegal” in DC you ask? Ask her if she gives a $H1T.
Besides training her to use a gun, I’ve taught her the following:
fr8dog
November 21, 2011
Comment to More women are using guns for fun and protection
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
It isn’t something to rely on but sometimes even a BB gun is better than no gun at all:
Young said after pleading with the man to stop, the boy hit him in the head with a board. At that point, the man stopped assaulting the woman and ran after the boy.
“The suspect believed that the boy had run out of the house and when that happened the mom locked the door,” he said. “The suspect then tried to gain entry through an open window.”
When Paul Newman, 45, threatened to kill the woman and her son, the boy shot him in the face three to four times with his pump-action BB gun.
It’s interesting how the AP reported the same incident. In the AP story the boy shot him “as he grappled with the woman”. There is no mention of the guy leaving the house and then trying to get in through a window.
The NRA’s greatest lie is its talking point that gun violence prevention laws in America are a “slippery slope” that will eventually lead to total confiscation of privately held firearms. What an absurdity that is today — 43 years after the signing of the 1968 Gun Control Act — as demented individuals like Jared Loughner and Nidal Malik Hasan continue to legally buy guns and carry them in our communities.
The reality is that the slippery slope has been running in the opposite direction the entire time — toward a future where even the most violent and deranged individuals can legally buy guns, legally carry them on the street, and legally bring them into churches, schools, daycare centers, public transportation, government buildings and the rest of our most sensitive public spaces.
Josh Horwitz
Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
The Real Slippery Slope of Gun Laws
November 16, 2011
[The government has NO business trying to prevent “gun violence”. If there isn’t a victim or imminent danger of permanent injury or death to an innocent person or serious property damage then the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms must be given precedence. This point is probably the most important one we should be making. It strikes at the very core of the “The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence” and the nearly all of the arguments of people like Horwitz want to make.
If Horwitz believes that since 1968 “the slippery slope has been running in the opposite direction the entire time” then he has crap for brains, he is lying, or he is so ignorant that he missed out on the following major gun bans (does not include hundreds of increased restrictions, registrations, and lawsuits):
And that doesn’t even include the U.S. politicians who said they were trying to ban firearms in the mid 1990s.
So which is it Josh? Are you ignorant, lying, and/or have crap for brains?—Joe]
It’s an insult to be arrested once for violating a law that is so vague and ambiguous that law enforcement officers cannot tell the difference between what is and what is not a legal firearm under this statute but to be arrested and jailed twice for the same offense is an outrage. Brendan Richards’ dilemma is a textbook example of why the California statute should be nullified.
…
This nonsense has to stop and the only way to insure that is to show California’s assault weapon statutes and regulations are unconstitutionally vague and ambiguous. Brendan Richards is not the only citizen faced with this kind of harassment under color of law.
Alan M. Gottlieb
SAF Executive Vice President
November 21, 2011
SAF FILES CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE OF CALIFORNIA ‘ASSAULT WEAPONS’ LAW
[Go SAF and CalGuns!
On my return trip from Reno for the Gun Blogger Rendezvous this year I was strongly advised by a lawyer and others from California to not traverse even a small corner of California even if I did not stop and fully complied with FOPA. I was forcefully told that many California police, prosecutors and judges do not recognize FOPA.
My response was, essentially, does this mean that Alabama and Mississippi don’t have to recognize the 13th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I was told that the Feds enforced those laws with the National Guard and the states backed off. In the case of FOPA the Feds would look the other way. In other words if I got caught with my everyday carry firearm and magazines, unloaded and locked inaccessible to driver and passengers I could spend weeks in jail and months in and out of the courts because the state of California believes it does not have to comply with Federal law.
It’s time the state of California got it’s nanny state tit wound up tight in a wringer.—Joe]
Responsible citizens do not cease to act responsibly merely due to the presence of tools.
Solomon Friedman
November 15, 2011
Testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (Canada).
[You would think this statement is blindly obvious but beliefs to the contrary have been around for centuries and persist to this today in the form of “gun control”.—Joe]
This article (also found here) via email from Jon at work claims:
Later Friday evening, this FSB report continues, the vehicle from which the shots were fired from was located by US Secret Service, FBI and local police authorities with the AK-47 laying across the back seat with a warning note saying “Aquí está uno de los nuestros, no la suya necesitan,” roughly translated from its original Spanish meaning… “Here’s one of ours, we don’t need yours.”
The FSB states that the warning note found on the AK-47 was in direct reference to the Obama regimes gun-running efforts (known as Operation Fast and Furious) to arm the dangerous Sinaloa Cartel as it battles to gain supremacy in a Mexican Drug War that has so far cost nearly 40,000 lives.
The article goes on to invoke the CIA and claims the American people are “not being allowed to know”.
Interesting.
I have to wonder if there isn’t some lead in a tin-foil hat that is getting into the bloodstream of the author.
I spent a lot of time with Paul Barrett of Business Week at Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno a couple months ago.
He has another article on guns up on the web now. This time it is about guns “walking” to Mexico. It was interesting and had some information on the topic I was only dimly aware of (the extent to which the Bush administration was involved in a similar program).
As I told him in email I still have some work to do with the words and phrases he uses. An example:
Detty, the proprietor of Mad Dawg Global Marketing in Tucson, Ariz., is a federally licensed firearm dealer who sells the high-capacity, military-style rifles at gun shows or from the living room of his Spanish colonial-style home on the outskirts of town.
“Military-style” is misleading in a derogatory manner. The original AR-15 was a civilian firearm before it modified and sold to the military as an M-16. And I’m nearly certain there have been just as many if not more AR-15 rifles sold to private citizens as the militarized version have been sold to the military. So “military-style” is inaccurate at best and at worst it is intentionally inflammatory. And what does “high-capacity” mean? Who is the arbitrator of gun accessory descriptions that gets to decide what is “high-capacity” versus “normal-capacity”? “High-capacity” is the inflammatory phrase used by the anti-gun people.
Another example:
Also working for him was the striking ineffectiveness of federal gun laws.
While technically true it again is inflammatory. What is equally true is that any law, be it federal, state, county, or city, is going to be ineffective when it tries to block the exchange the goods or services between willing parties. The country learned that lesson with Prohibition in the 1920’s, the War on Drugs for the last 30 years, and it cannot be a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that an attempted ban on firearms that were exceedingly difficult to legally define would soon be circumvented. And with a few more brain cells one would have little trouble predicting that the sales of such firearms would increase with legal restrictions against them (Forbidden fruit).
The implication of Barrett’s phrase is that if only the federal gun laws were written better or more broad they would have been more effective. Are the laws against recreational drugs effective enough for you?
If someone wants to avoid alienating a large group of people they should avoid using words and phrases that add little or nothing to the topic at hand and are offensive to those same people. I don’t think I’m just being a little thin skinned. Those words and phrases are the same words and phrases used by our political enemies who on a daily basis attempt to restrict and eliminate the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It would be like invoking images of male sexual predators of little boys while advocating prison sentences for consensual homosexuals. It’s misleading and inflammatory with the sole purpose of denying a specific enumerate right (freedom of association in the case of homosexuals).
Update: Forest/trees. Regardless of the inflammatory phrasing it is a very good thing that the bungling and illegal acts of the ATF are getting mainstream media attention.
It’s sort of a meme with Tamara leading the way followed by Say Uncle and Sebastian.
Tamara is correct as far as she goes but doesn’t get into how dark things were on the political side. For a more complete story read my “From the archives” tagged posts (ignore the post with the picture of the beautiful woman). Here are some samples:
I think — you know, we can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles…
Bill Clinton
March 1, 1993And we should — then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them.
Bill Clinton
October 1, 1993Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.
U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden
November 18, 1993Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
November 18, 1993We’re here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true!. We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We’re going to beat guns into submission!
U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer
November 30, 1993If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.
Diane Feinstein
February 5, 1995
If this is a topic of serious interest then you must read The Gun Rights War for the view from the trenches during those days and before. It was very clear that the dark ages were upon us. The lies and broken agreements of our opponents were ignored by the general public. The forces of evil merely cackled and thought us fools to believe the truth and principles would be sufficient to slow let alone stop or reverse them.
When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it’s yellow…
John/az
From his signature line on a The Firing Line post May 4, 2000.
[Via a link from Tamara.—Joe]
I find it interesting that not a *single* member of the opposition to HR822 named the @bradybuzz position as a reason to oppose the bill.
Bloomberg was mentioned by many, but @bradybuzz seems to have become politically irrelevant.
BitterB
November 16, 2011 in two Tweets: here and here.
In regards to the debate over HR822, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act.
[And The Brady Campaign should be politically irrelevant. The KKK and similar anti-civil rights organizations are no longer relevant are they?
Their “membership” is non-existent, their donations are in the tank, and now important people don’t listen to them. They should just give it up, change their names, and rejoin civilized society.—Joe]
John Lott makes a great point:
For decades, treating licenses for guns like those for cars was something that gun control advocates wanted.
And now that congress is debating making states honor other states concealed carry licenses, just like drivers and marriage licenses, gun control advocates are about to have aneurisms.
I say let them have their aneurisms. As crazy, irrational, and inconsistent as they already are the extra brain damage probably wouldn’t be noticed anyway.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop
[It is also true that any excuse will serve those that enable tyrants. Here are some of the many I have come across:
It’s interesting how there are truths which appear to be universal yet people never learn.—Joe]
The headlines say, “Local gun show brings out protesters” and “Protesters fired up about Yakima gun show”. Technically they are correct–but just barely. As near as I could determine there were only three protestors who showed up. They were probably outnumbered 50:1 by the tables at the gun show.
Anti-gun people are members of a dying cult.
There are several misconceptions about CO2, most created because proponents tried to prove the hypothesis rather than the normal scientific practice of disproof.
Dr. Tim Ball
November 9, 2011
Whether It Is Warming or Climate Change, It Cannot be the CO2.
[There is lots of other interesting data in this post. As Ry summarized when telling me about this, “North America and Europe are net absorbers of CO2. South America and Africa are net producers. And it’s all due to natural causes. Human CO2 production is in the noise of measurement error of the natural sources.”
Beyond the point the CO2/global-warming/climate-change fraud I wanted to point out that the “normal scientific practice of disproof” is what has been tripping up the anti-gun people. Their hypothesis that gun control will decrease crime is so easy to disprove that they expose themselves as a religious faith. Their deeply held beliefs persist in the absence of and in despite of evidence. I have no problem with them exercising their First Amendment rights to exercise the the religion of their choice but they do not have the right, nor should they have the power, to force others to worship the same god(s) they do.
If you only need a couple of talking point so to put them in their place point out that since the gun ban in Washington D.C. was thrown out the number of murders (the murder rate would be lower still) has dropped to the lowest in 46 years. Since the gun ban in Chicago was overthrown the number of murders is the lowest in at least 20 years. The gun bans reduce crime hypothesis cannot survive exposure to the normal scientific practice of disproof. This has been well known since at least the mid-1980s when Rossi and Wright published their book.
The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center, and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are nothing more than fading religious cults whose beliefs have killed tens of thousands of people and put millions of lives at risk. They are no more credible and should be given no more political voice than a cult advocating castration to reach an alien spacecraft.—Joe]
The emperor truly has no clothes in the gun control debate and the more that is pointed out, the more people will see the truth.
Jeff Knox
July-August 2011, Volume 8, Issue 4 The Hard Corps Knox Report
[I think this was a critical item in turning the tide in the mid and late 1990’s. The Internet made getting the point out about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-gun movement easier and overcame the MSM bias. It’s like that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote, “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Joe]
I want to be clear: the New York Times editorial board does not oppose gun ownership. We believe the Second Amendment confers a communal right on Americans to own guns – not an individual one. But that’s actually a smaller point than you might think. All we really want are sensible restrictions based on public safety and common sense. I wrote about our position in April, 2009 on our website. You can read it there, but I’ll summarize it here.
Go ahead, buy a gun. Use it to hunt, for target practice, in a collection, or in case you need to defend your home. Just register it and submit to a background check. If you live in a city, then your political leaders have the right to restrict ownership of handguns. In cities, they tend to be used to kill people.
Andrew Rosenthal
November 8, 2011
The Gun Lobby and Military Suicides
[This is so full fail that I could write thousands of words about it. But I don’t have the time and the people in the comments did a pretty fair job and raking him over the coals.
I’ll just give an overview.
Since all nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices disagree with the individual right issue what Rosenthal and the NYT editorial board thinks only has political implications and very few legal implications.
The very words he uses demonstrates he is essentially living in a different universe. We don’t have “political leaders”. We have public servants. Our servants do not have “rights” to regulate anything. They have delegated powers given to them by the people via the U.S., and state constitutions. When our servants start demanding we give up firearms and beg permission from them to own what is a specific enumerated right it is quite clear to me they have either forgotten they are servants or that they intend to change the relationship.
Yes. Handguns are sometimes used to kill people. Sometimes deadly force needs to be legally exercised and sometimes people get killed. Get over it.—Joe]