Gov. Jerry Brown announced early Monday that he had outlawed the open carrying of handguns in public in California, a controversial practice that top law enforcement officials had denounced as dangerous.
Combined with the near impossibility of getting a concealed carry license in most of California this will, almost for certain, go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Author Paul Barrett attended the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno last month. I spent several hours talking to him then and have since corresponded some with him. He send me an “Uncorrected Proof” of his new book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun
I liked the book. As he told us in Reno this is the story of how Gaston Glock came to dominate the handgun market in the U.S. It is primarily a book about a business and how success came from not only a great product as the right time but also how anti-gun people were his best salesmen. Paul loves the irony (his next book, unrelated to firearms will have it’s share of irony as well), it shows, and it makes the book all the more pleasurable to read.
Barrett and I come from about as disparate backgrounds as two U.S. citizens could. I grew up on a farm in Idaho with German roots which perhaps go back prior to the the birth of our nation (we are still investigating but it may be one of my great+++ grandfather Huffman’s was on the first U.S. census). I don’t own a Glock and probably have fired less than 50 rounds in a couple different Glock pistols. Barrett lives and works in New York City and his mother is Jewish. She escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. This difference lead to more irony as our discussion dove deeper into the issues around guns and it will surface again in my review of the book.
Our different perspective on things was a stressor during our conversations. Things we both thought were obvious to the most casual observer were, “You can’t possibly be serious!” moments for the other. I struggled with this stress and I’m pretty sure he did too. We both wanted this “relationship” to work.
If you want a one sentence summation of my thoughts on his book it is, “Gun owners as well many others will find the story of Glock fascinating and the irony will make you smile.” As I dig into specifics keep this in mind. I am deeply embedded in the movement to expand of the civil rights of gun ownership. So when the book touches on subjects I am an expert on and I think it is even slightly off base it really gets my attention. My disagreement on these items should not be taken as an overall disparagement of the book. It is a very enjoyable read and I recommend it.
There a lot of things that surprised me in the book. Of course there was the behind the scenes story of the creation of the gun, it’s marketing, the legal issues, and the criminals who embezzled from and even tried to murder Gaston Glock. That was all fascinating. But what surprised me was how thoroughly Barrett researched the topic and got into “the gun culture”. He attended the NRA convention, went to a small arms trade show in Germany. He spent a weekend with Massad Ayob. He shot in an IPDA match. He tells us that most police are not particularly good shooters and practice less than many private citizen gun owners. He refers to “the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9”, Heinlein’s famous quote, “An armed society is a polite society”, John Moses Browning, and tells the Suzanna Gratia Hupp story. He explains how a gun can malfunction by “limp wristing” it. He points out anti-gun advocates and that the New York times in particular tried to get Glock handguns banned by making claims for which there was no evidence. He points out Josh Sugarmann’s deliberate deception about “assault weapons”. He briefly tells the story of the efforts to ban “Saturday Night Specials” giving the reader the anti-gun people view:
… Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”
Then he shoots them down with:
The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns.
He writes of how Glock advertising their pistol was “significantly more powerful with greater firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and true” drew fire from people like Sugarmann who wrote, “The rise of handguns to dominance in the marketplace has corresponded with an increase in their efficiency as killing machines”. And then he shots them down with the well aimed, “This tough rhetoric appeals to many liberal citizens and scholars. But when drained of emotion and set against firearm realities and crime trends, it loses force.”
I saw this again and again in his book and in my discussions with him. He even started to buy his own handgun but the paperwork required by New York City had a rather chilling effect. I was amazed with the details he knew about culture and the battles we have fought against less than ethical opponents.
With all the points he gets right I was occasionally shocked with his conclusions after correctly laying out the facts. Chapter 1 is about the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami. One of the lessons learned there was that a determined bad guy can take many, many hits (Michael Platt absorbed 12 shots before being stopped) and still be a threat. He correctly reports that law enforcement all over the U.S. concluded from this and other events that a six shot revolver wasn’t adequate for officer safety. Yet Barrett says things like, “It’s not obvious why a civilian handgun owner requires seventeen rounds in a magazine of a Glock pistol.” When I read that I wanted to scream at him, “Because if it is going to take 12 rounds to stop him he is going to really pissed off if I only fired ten!” And that doesn’t even get into the situations where there are multiple assailants and not all of your shots are going to be hits on a moving target that is shooting at you.
He refers to “the loophole that remains for private gun transactions” and says, “An estimated 40 percent of handguns are acquired by private transaction, for which no background check—no paperwork at all—is necessary. That makes no sense.”. Again, this guy lost many relatives to the Nazis in WWII. He is smart guy. Even if he has not read the story of the Belgium Corporal surely after digging that deeply into our culture he could formulate an argument about the risks of firearms registration rather than saying, “That makes no sense.” Barrett likes irony and here I, the German (descendent), am making the case to a descendent of a Holocaust survivor that Jews need to protect themselves from tyrannical governments.
He advocates for “ballistic fingerprinting” apparently without doing the usual research. Had he even read the Wikipedia entry he would have realized this scheme had serious and probably fatal flaws which make the database useless for anything other than gun owner registration.
Again and again I saw this. It was as if he had all the facts, he understood the anti-gun people frequently deliberately lied, relied on emotional appeals, and had their hypothesizes discredited. But when it came time to express his own opinion he wasn’t quite ready to give up many of their conclusions.
There are hints of condescension in places but this may have been editors or marketers rather than the author. A flyer included with the book states, “The Glock is a favorite among concealed-carry buffs”. I found that very insulting. Are people who attend church “religious buffs”? Or are people who marry someone of a different skin color “interracial marriage buffs”?
The back of the “UNCORRECTED PROOF : NOT FOR SALE” book includes some small print that looks like the promotion plans:
Why the emphasis on law enforcement and not a single mention of gun owner outreach? There are about 80 million gun owners in the U.S. Far, far more than there are police officers. Don’t they think gun owners can read? In addition to the obvious, to my readers, gun blogs there are many gun magazines which reach millions of readers, and there are even online stores that specialize in gun books.
I also found a minor mistake where he implied the “assault weapon ban” was part of the Brady Act. I reported this to him and he thinks he might still be able to get the “glitch” corrected before the book is released in January 2012.
It is still a good book. That his full time job is as a writer shows. I envy his writing skill. I highly recommend this book.
See also other reviews by Ry, Robert Farago, Jim Shepherd (and here), and my previous comments here, here, and here.
Update: Aaron has a review too.
Update2: Review by BobG.
The most effective means of fighting crime in the United States is to outlaw the possession of any type of firearm by the civilian populace.
Janet Reno
U.S. Attorney General during the Clinton administration
1991
[Ms. Reno was mistaken. Had such a law been passed there would have been a great deal more “crime” than she would have imagined or been able to handle.—Joe]
Feldman is trying to organize a politically moderate gun owners’ association as an alternative to the NRA. So far, he has not had much luck with that project.
Paul M. Barrett
Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun page 267.
[Richard Feldman,Esq. doesn’t have anything on his web site about trying to do this but Barrett knows him personally and perhaps has inside knowledge that I am not privy to. That aside, this would appear to be the worst error I found in the book. I have a lot of good things to say about the book and will do so in another post. I really liked the book so don’t let my disagreement with Barrett about the quote above adversely color your thoughts about the book. That would be very unfair.
The error in the quote above is as follows: I know many people who have left the NRA and having nothing good to say about the organization. All of them left because the NRA was too “moderate”. They felt the NRA compromised when they shouldn’t have. The anti-gun groups try to paint the NRA as extremist but that is certainly not the viewpoint from the majority of gun owners that I know. That Feldman hasn’t “had much luck with that project” would indicate to me that there may be a problem with his vision. Admittedly the “market” for political gun organizations is a bit crowded and it is always difficult to break into a new market even if you do have a lot of money and/or an exceptional product. My impression is that Feldman has neither. The “product” Feldman is selling, if he is in fact trying to do this, is not going to find a very large market. The people that yearn for a more “moderate” NRA either advocate against guns and gun owners or don’t care about the issue. Neither of which would join such an organization.
Barrett has done a very good job with this book. He has done a lot of research and he accurately reports on many subtle points that I would not have expected him to have found. I’m a little surprised he didn’t realize the statement above does not match the reality as I know it. Perhaps he does recognize it as an error on Feldman’s part but he didn’t comment on it beyond the “not had much luck” quip.
I found similar things in the book on other topics. He has all the facts right and then fails to draw the obvious conclusion or sometimes a jarringly different conclusion from what seems obvious to me. But these are mostly little things. I really liked the book and will report about it at length very soon.—Joe]
As outlined in Petitioners’ brief, the Second Amendment is a limit on the national government alone and does not constrain the District of Columbia’s legislative authority. See Br. of Petitioners at 35-40. For analogous reasons, the Second Amendment does not serve as a limit on the States and their political subdivisions. Although the Court need not address this issue in this case—which does not involve a challenge to a law passed by a State or one of its political subdivisions—it is well established that the Second Amendment does not apply to the States.
Legal Community Against Violence
January 11, 2008
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND MAYOR ADRIAN M. FENTY,
Petitioners,
v.
DICK ANTHONY HELLER,
Respondent.
BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES, THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, AND LEGAL COMMUNITY AGAINST VIOLENCE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS
[Sometimes you have to just shake your head in disbelief. D.C. is under the control of the Federal Government! Congress can override any law or act of the D.C. politicians. How did these guys get through high school let alone law school without discovering that the District of Columbia is not a state or one of its political subdivisions? Maybe they are living in the alternate reality where D.C. of those 57 states that Obama said he has visited.
What is for certain is that anti-gun people have very little concern for facts. As near as I can determine they are lying, live in an alternate reality and/or are suffering from Peterson Syndrome.—Joe]
For the NRA, it was not supposed to be this way. After the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted a limited right to have a gun in the home, the NRA bragged that it was just the “opening salvo” in a legal war to use the courts to dismantle the nation’s gun laws.
Yet three years, 400 legal challenges, and “millions of dollars in [NRA] legal bills” later, all the gun lobby has had to show for its efforts is a growing body of case law affirming the right of the people to have strong gun laws short of a total handgun ban. Just last week, the same Texas judge who was previously overruled for ruling that domestic abusers have a right to own guns threw out the NRA’s lawsuit claiming that teens have a right to buy semi-automatic handguns. Never before have so many courts so cogently affirmed the constitutionality of so many strong gun laws in such a short span of time.
Dennis Henigan
October 6, 2011
How Many Second Amendment Cases Will the NRA Lose?
[The NRA is mostly a strawman in this context. SAF is who the Brady Campaign should be (and probably is) worried about.
The total number of victories is a poor metric of how the battle is going. More important is how many Supreme Court victories each side has to their credit. In the last three years, how’s that been going for you Dennis?
Gloat while you can Dennis. I’ll be saving these words for your eating pleasure a few years from now.—Joe]
…[P]olitically motivated entities like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun (formally Handgun Control, Inc.), the oddly named Violence Policy Center, and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Handguns rely on discredited studies that were rejected elsewhere, or by pulling numbers out of thin air to craft an argument while they attempt to smugly and piously stand in the way of continuing reforms. Gun control was a failure. Gun control is dead. It’s time to bury it once and for all.
Richard Samuel Najjar
October 1, 2011
Comment to Cause and effect or coincidence? Gun control scrapped …crime plummets
[The only nit I have to pick with this is I wouldn’t say gun control is dead. As long as there exists an anti-gun organization with fulltime staff or an electable politician that supports gun control we have work to do.—Joe]
There are rumors the ATF is about to be thrown under the bus. Although there are people calling this rumor “a bombshell” (via Say Uncle and son-in-law John) it isn’t really all that new (from almost three months ago):
The unfolding scandal over a gunrunning investigation allegedly botched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could do what years of criticism of the long-beleaguered agency never quite accomplished — result in its demise.
People on both sides of the issue commented on it:
“I think something like that is likely to happen,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
…
Christopher Cox, legislative director for the NRA, the agency’s longtime nemesis, also said arguments for shuttering or breaking up ATF are building.
“Their criminal investigation tactics are going a long way to proving that point,” Cox said. “If they cease to be an effective law enforcement organization, they will cease to be legitimate, and the calls for restructuring or abolishing of ATF are going to become more and more valid.”
Sebastian says, Careful What You Wish For and he has some good points. The concern that the FBI has credibility and respect the ATF doesn’t and we would rather have a money starved easily demonized bunch of screw ups instead of the FBI, the Secret Service, or the U.S. Marshalls enforcing the regulations has been the whisper from behind the scenes since as least the Regan years when the first serious thoughts of disbanding them came up.
Things have changed with the FBI since the 1980’s. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? The ATF created the messes but it was during the FBI “cleanup” that the FBI shot the woman holding the baby and burned down the church with the women and children in it. The FBI has it’s own public relations issues to be concerned about.
I’ll leave making a recommendation on this specific topic at this specific time to others more politically savvy but if we are to make progress trimming down the size and scope of government agencies need to start disappearing. Why is now not as good a time as any to get rid of the ATF? The ATF is heavily involved in a major scandal, the Heller and McDonald decisions imply that many of their duties are constitutionally suspect if not right illegal. Because they are so weak this might be the time to get rid of them simply because it is politically possible.
If now is the time then to “avoid overloading the FBI” with either new tasks and/or the training of large numbers of new personal Congress should simultaneously cut back on a lot of the obsolete laws. Here is my list of gun laws that could be put on the chopping block along with the ATF:
I’m sure there are lots of other nonsensical laws and regulations that could be cut at the same time which our opponents would be hard pressed to defend. And with all the grief the ATF has had because of their “mistakes” perhaps the agencies that take on the remaining functions will “play nice” compared to the ATF.
If we could ban the ATF and “ease the burden” on the FBI at the same time would it be worth taking the risks associated with having the remaining ATF functions divided up among other agencies? I’m thinking it might be.
I am willing to perform the duties of CEO for your organization for minimum wage and a few photos of Sarah Brady in a thong and an unlimited supply of Kleenex.
Kaveman
October 1, 2011
I will be the next CEO at Brady
[I considered applying also but (plagiarizing from Joel) I have minimal experience as a male bovine excrement engineer and zero experience as a equine excrement engineer.
Even if I had the requisite experience and even if she promised to never model her thongs in my presence I would need far more than minimum wage to hang out with Sarah Brady.—Joe]
Both Handgun Control, Inc. and the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the sister organizations sponsoring the symposium, predict a long but ultimately successful battle to reform one of the most dangerous industries in the United States.
Handgun Control, Inc.
October 8, 1997
GUN INDUSTRY EXPERTS PREDICT FAR-REACHING REFORMS; POINT TO TOBACCO AND OTHER INDUSTRIES AS PRECEDENT
[How are those reforms working out for you? It’s been 14 years now. Has it been long enough yet?
Oh, that’s right. It was Handgun Control, Inc. that did the reforming.—Joe]
As we have said for years and years laws restricting access to firearms can be no more effective than the laws that restrict access to recreational drugs. We now have a report that literally says that about California which, according to the Brady Campaign ranks as the top state in the nation with the “strongest gun laws that help combat the illegal gun market, prevent the sale of guns without background checks and reduce risks to children” (plagiarized from here):
Respondents pointed out that getting a gun is “as easy as access to drugs.” This climate of ready gun availability led a service provider to observe that “it seems harder for adults to get legal access to guns than for kids to get illegal access.” This surprising information regarding the ease of youth access to guns is supported by data from the 2007 California Healthy Kids Survey, in which 4.8 percent of San Mateo County 7th, 9th, and 11th graders reported having brought a gun to school, a rate similar to that for the Bay Area overall (5 percent).
Got that? It is harder for adults to legally exercise a specific enumerated right than it is for children to get illegal access.
What if it were more difficult to lawfully purchase a Bible than it was for kids to get a copy of Hustler magazine? Do you think the laws would change?
It’s time most firearm laws were repealed and politicians who defend them sent to prison.
Bigoted members of the public in Sunnyvale California wanted “special attention” given to “Stand-alone Firearm Sales Businesses”. Sporting goods stores that happen to sell guns were okay but if a store was primarily a gun shop they had a problem with it. Something about children walking by it caused them to think for themselves and put the harmony of the collective at risk or something. I have to wonder if they had the same sort of problem with kids walking by a bookstore.
In any case after some “encouragement” from Michel & Associates on Tuesday the city council stood up to the bigots on the issue.
I think you are giving them far too much credit – their generally not well endowed with either a brain or a p…Glock. But there is an assload of money involved. Absolutely.
dogbreath
September 27, 2011
Comment to NRA’s “Single Issue” Is Obama, Not Guns
[Nice! Dogbreath invokes Markley’s Law, says we have small brains while saying “their” instead of “they’re”, and attributes the motivation to protect a specific enumerated right to making money all in just two sentences. That is impressive.—Joe]
Via email from Jonathan H.
One of my Idaho Outfitter friends hunted a group of out-of-state elk archery hunters from the Great Lakes region last week and they called in a pack of 17 wolves by cow calling. None of the hunters had a sidearm or wolf tag and it was a very traumatic experience as the wolves surrounded the hunters! All hunters went home early very disturbed claiming these wolves are very different from the Great Lakes wolves as they claimed these Idaho wolves actually “Hunt” you and were not afraid!
Note she is wearing gloves! We saw almost no gloves 2 years ago!
Archers please pack a sidearm where legal!
—–
This wolf came running toward Rene last night to attack her. She had to drop her bow & pull her pistol. She shot it in the head about 10 feet from her. She had to shoot it a couple more times to actually kill it. CRAZY! This – not even a week after Shane’s dogs were killed by wolves.
It’s not just archers that should carry a sidearm. Wife Barbara saw one while taking pictures near the Selway river last year.
You can’t make Socialists out of individualists — children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.
John Dewey
From Accuracy In Media
[Ahhhh… yes. The collective society. The good of the collective is more important than the good of the individual. The individual must not think for themselves. Except of course the dear, enlightened, leaders who decide what is best for the collective and just happen to live lives of luxury.
What the “intellectuals” need to understand, if history has any lessons to be learned on this topic, is that the “intellectuals” are the first to get the bullet in the back of the neck and occupy the mass graves in the woods. Look at what Stalin, Pol Pot, and communist China did.
It may be that it “won’t happen here”. It may be the government of the collective will put the “intellectuals” in positions of power and that when the shooting starts it will be individualists who first occupy the mass graves. But when the shooting stops it will be because the individualists ran out of collectivist “intellectuals” as targets. Not because we ran out of ammo or individuals.—Joe]
Not only are you stripping the right of the local municipalities to protect safety but you’re also asking them to adhere to gun laws at the state level that don’t even exist.
Brian Malte
Director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
September 27, 2011
Lawyer keeps local gun laws in his sights—Lawsuits against Evansville and Hammond demand communities comply with state measure
[“Protect safety”? “Adhere to gun laws that don’t exit”? What in the world does that even mean?
I suppose it’s possible the reporter had the crap for brains and messed up the quote but I doubt it because the quotes from the other people in the article weren’t just word salads. It could have been deliberate maliciousness by the reporter but usually the bias is against gun owners.
It’s true that we are sometimes our worst enemy but it may be more so for our opponents. We don’t always act as a team and give conflicting messages to the public and the politicians. We have people that sometimes say things that which, while true, can be exploited by our opponents. They have crap for brains and it shows.—Joe]
Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62×39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson. These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of the performance of his official duties. In addition, Special Agent Dodson has not been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. If you have any questions, you may contact me at telephone number 602-605-6501.
David Voth
ATF Group Supervisor
June 1, 2010
Letter implicates ATF in committing straw purchases for Gunwalker 
[These guns, purchased with U.S. taxpayer cash without a 4473 so as to be off the books, were given directly to the drug trafficking organizations by an ATF agent. There was no straw buyer.
I’m a pretty creative guy but I’m at a loss at finding a reason why someone would think this was a good idea unless their sole objective was to create justification for more strict firearm laws. I consider this to be on the same ethical plane as someone committing crimes in face paint such that they appeared to have black skin in order to justify laws against blacks.
The people responsible for these misdeeds need to be brought to justice. They probably wouldn’t pass muster in a constitutional challenge because of the prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” but I have some very creative potential sentences running through my mind right now. —Joe]
From reading James Higham’s post we get this:
All things being equal, the English [and British] population have not been particularly gun-oriented, compared to the Americans and we like to think we can solve everything by negotiation, relying on the friendly bobby on the beat to take care of the occasional naughty person. “Allo, allo, what’s all this then?”
It occurs to me that the liberals in our society have a strong tendency in the same direction. Many liberal politicians insist we should “talk out our differences” rather than utilizing force on both a personal as well as international scale.
While I agree it is much preferable to have a verbal exchange before exchanging blows, bullets, or ballistic missiles the verbal exchange is doomed to failure unless both parties are in positions of some power. That power does not necessarily need to be a physical threat. It doesn’t even need to be a physical action. It could be something as nebulous as “I won’t like you anymore” or something like the shame of violating someone’s trust.
The less power you have during the negotiation the less favorable your outcome. If you are much weaker physically and unable to bring additional forces to the “negotiation” the psychopath wanting to rob or rape you isn’t going to spend a lot of time “talking out the differences” in your two positions.
In tribes of up to a few hundred people physical force isn’t even needed. The community bonds and dependency are so strong and important that violating the rules of your tribe is very rare. Only in intertribal conflict is force a necessary component in conflicts. Crime in societies where individuals and small groups can be anonymous and autonomous is much much higher. The victims have much less power in the “negotiations”.
Many people apparently do not understand, are unaware, or are unconvinced of this fact. It’s easy to hypothesis why they don’t. Humans and proto-humans spent millions of years in small tribes and only a few thousand years in the much larger groups and only a few hundred years in cities with more than a few hundred thousand people. Many of the people advocating individuals give up their arms are feeling the impulses of very primitive urges that evolved millions of years ago. It feels like the right thing to do because the instincts were correct until the last few thousand years. The phrase “it takes a village” is appealing because of this instinct.
Things have changed. It’s time people realized it. This is Why the Gun is Civilization. It brings equilibrium to the negotiations.
If the other side really wants to understand why they continuously lose, they have to understand this: their side can’t get mojo without buying off sympathetic people on the left to shill for their cause. I would not let NRA, or any other gun rights group I believed in, buy words from me. Every penny they spent on that would be money that isn’t going to keep lobbyists on my elected representatives like a pitbull on a poodle. If the gun control extremists want to understand why they can’t get any traction, they need to look no further than the fact that they even need to throw money at people to have a voice at all.
Sebastian
September 23, 2011
What is the Purpose of the Media Matters Tagline?
[It’s also worth noting that traction is difficult to come by when you are nothing but a hot air balloon.—Joe]
There are now controls for Internet control of your heating and the government wants to control your air conditioning, refrigerators, lights, and computers so this is really just a logical extension.
It’s for the children.
Via Gus from work.