Category Archives: Gun Rights

Quote of the day—Samuel Adams

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It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

Samuel Adams
[There was a time when the defenders of the Second Amendment were in the minority. We fought on, even those many believed it was a losing battle, in part because we believed it was the honorable thing to do. We are now winning.

This quote reminds me of the famous Barry Goldwater quote which is also quite good.—Joe]

Quote of the day—MikeB302000

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I couldn’t care less about truth and falsity or causation and correlation, or all that other double talk the pro-gun crowd like so much.

MikeB302000
November 12, 2010
Austin, Texas Murders Way Up
[We’ve known this for a long time but it’s nice for him to admit it. If only all the anti-gun people would do so it would make things a lot easier.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Robert Farago

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How about we subsidize the gun safe business instead of pissing money down the ATFE-shaped rathole? If the VPC really wants to stop gun violence, offering low-cost gun safes would have more impact than supporting the Agency that Can’t Shoot Straight and/or introducing or tightening gun control legislation.

Robert Farago
November 12, 2010
Violence Policy Center: Great Landing, Wrong Airport
[The reason this approach is not taken is because the people that support the Brady Campaign and/or the VPC have a solution in search of supporting evidence. They are not searching for a solution to a problem.

It’s like someone looked at the crime rate among people with non-white skin compared to white-skin and used that as justification for laws such as curfews, registration, tracking, and even preemptive imprisonment of non-whites all the while claiming they were intended to “prevent colored violence”. Hence the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence would have a sister organization called “The Brady Campaign to Prevent Black Violence.” They don’t seem to understand that “preventing crime” in this manner is akin to claiming someone is “guilty until proven innocent” as well as infringing on a host of other guaranteed rights.—Joe]

Quote of the day–Mahatma Gandhi

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I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.


Mahatma Gandhi
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.LXXXVII, p.394-5
[This was brought to you via email from Ry who was reminded of it via my Philosophy Questions.


The pacifist, or anyone, who claims, “Violence never solves anything.” Or, “Violence is never the answer” enables the murder or enslavement of themselves and/or their followers. Gandhi was smart enough to realize the principles he adhered necessitated this outcome.


The principles of Gandhi do have application in many situations but not in all. The consequence of not having a viable “Plan B” if non-violence fails in the face of violent oppression is the extinction of your society and perhaps your species. In the long run the pure pacifist guarantees the occupation of their place in history and the elimination of their existence in the future.


I am of the opinion there exist certain conditions which trigger a more Heinlein like approach to the situation. The Second Amendment guarantees we have the option available when it is needed.—Joe]

Quote of the Day – Bill Whittle

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…just because something is fun, and scares away weenies, doesn’t mean that it’s stupid.


Bill Whittle
November 4, 2010
What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights
[Freedom is scary for a lot of people, and it means that people who hate you can’t tell you what to do or how to do it, just because they hate you.  It sucks for them, and it makes them angry.  Hence, freedom pisses people off.  Hence, if you love freedom, you have to come to grips with the fact that people are going to hate you.  Embrace it, Little Grasshopper.  Or as Zaphod Beeblebrox said after having a nuclear missile attack launched against his ship; “Man, This is Great!  It means we’re really on to something if they’re trying kill us!”–Lyle]

Quote of the day—H.L. Mencken

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Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H.L. Mencken
Minority Report, 1956
[Also note that security comes in two flavors. You can feel secure and you can actually be secure. Liberty has a strong tendency to make people feel less secure at the expense of true security. For example you can feel secure that the government will provide you with food and housing but your property will not be secure from government takings for redistribution. You can feel secure that the government will be able to find and extract a confession from criminals but the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures may be infringed or you may be compelled to testify against yourself or not have due process.

The vast majority of people have a strong preference for feeling secure. Hence there is a strong tendency to give up liberty for imagined safety and get neither.

I was reminded of this by this video (via Alan and Ry who also points out this relates to Brady Campaign board member Joan Peterson) from Bruce Schneier:

Schneier points out that even when there is lots of data available, such as with cigarette smoking, it takes a long time to get people to change their behavior. It should come as no surprise it has taken us decades to make progress on the gun rights front.–Joe]

Quote of the day—Dave Workman

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The clock is ticking down and this election is very much in play. Those who resign themselves to thinking otherwise are their own worst enemies.

Here it is in simple terms: A vote for someone other than Rossi is a vote for Murray. A vote for Murray is a vote for Schumer.

Any questions?

Dave Workman
October 29, 2010
High stakes for gun owners in Tuesday’s Senate election
[Polls put Murray and Rossi very, very close:

Indeed, Republicans got a good poll in Washington tonight, although it comes with some qualifications. The survey, from Rasmussen Reports, gave Dino Rossi a 1-point lead over Patty Murray, the Democrat. Rasmussen’s previous survey of the state had given Ms. Murray a 3-point lead.

Now for the qualifications: Rasmussen has had a rather different impression of the state than other pollsters. Since Labor Day, Rasmussen and its subsidiary Pulse Opinion Research has polled the state seven times; four of their polls put Mr. Rossi ahead. By contrast, there have been nine polls of the state by companies other that Rasmussen. All nine of them gave Ms. Murray a lead, although usually by small margins.

Murray has never seen a gun control bill she didn’t like. Rossi is a good guy on guns and good on the economic issues as well.

If you are eligible to vote in Washington state please vote for Rossi. Remember how things went for Rossi in his last election. He needs enough votes to make another election theft improbable.—Joe]

Second Amendment Foundation links

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In case you didn’t get the message someplace else…

Even if you don’t have money to donate you can put links on your websites to help the major player in the gun rights legal movement. The Second Amendment Foundation brought you the McDonald decision and is working on many more projects. Some you know about and some are still under wraps. Do what you can to push the anti-gun forces into political and legal oblivion.

Via email (slightly edited for better formatting on this blog):

Fri 10/29/2010 10:56 AM

To all gun-rights bloggers and website managers:

Dear Friends,

The Second Amendment Foundation needs your help. As someone intimately involved in the gun culture, I’m asking for a personal favor. Will you link to our site from yours?

We’re seeking to build our presence on the web. A larger web presence can increase our donor base and help us keep up with the big budgets of the anti-gunners. We rely primarily on grassroots donations to fund our gun rights lawsuits. This project is crucial to our continued success. We’ve been making a lot of progress lately and we want to keep our momentum. 
  
Below are some images with associated html code we have produced for you to use on your site.

Sincerely yours, 
 image
Alan M. Gottlieb
Founder
Second Amendment Foundation


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Logo_big.jpg”/>   


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Banner_big.jpg” />


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Logo_med.jpg” />


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Banner_med.jpg” />


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Logo_sm.jpg” />


http://www.saf.org”>http://www.saf.org/img/Banner_sm.jpg” />

________________________________________
< Please e-mail, distribute, and circulate to friends and family >
Copyright © 2010 Second Amendment Foundation, All Rights Reserved.
Second Amendment Foundation
James Madison Building
12500 N.E. Tenth Place
Bellevue, WA 98005    Voice: 425-454-7012
Toll Free: 800-426-4302
FAX: 425-451-3959
email: InformationRequest@saf.org

Quote of the day—Lyle @ UltiMAK

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Where’s the First Amendment map– one that tells us where in the U.S. we may and may not practice free speech? The First and Second are actual parts of the constitution, but the abortion map is blue all over (to protect the children I guess) and you don’t need a permit.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
October 28, 2010
Comment to My CCW map.
[I like the way he thinks. I wish I had thought of that.

As gun owners are so accustom to tolerating the infringements that we sometimes forget what it would be like to have our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms respected instead of infringed. We still have a lot more work to do.—Joe]

My CCW map

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CcwMap2010

I let my Utah license lapse but I plan to get both Oregon and Utah soon. I wish Nevada was easier to get coverage for.

Build your map using the tool here.

Quote of the day—Alan Korwin

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Government should stay out of the way of businesses trying to make it in these tough economic times, or in any times. Instead, government has become one of the biggest obstacles we face. It’s bad enough Phoenix has attacked our free speech, but now they’re messing with our Second Amendment rights, and right before an election too. People who support this ought to be removed from office and punished for such malfeasance.

Alan Korwin
October 27, 2010
Phoenix Censors “Gun Safety for Kids”
[There is a lot more information on this event that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Korwin has been in contact with Assistant Phoenix city attorney Ted Mariscal to try and clarify what changes need to be made to the message. Mariscal says it needs to be changed to meet his satisfaction but won’t say what would satisfy him.

As Tam said, “So, where do I go vote… for whoever’s gonna fire you?”—Joe]

Guns versus ideas

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The Washington Post has a very interesting article about the ATF and the tracing of guns. But I couldn’t help but think how the entire tone of the article would come across to most people if one were to substitute “book” for “gun” with the ATF becoming the ATB for Alcohol, Tobacco and Books.

The Washington Post just doesn’t get it. The possession of firearms is a specific enumerated right and the government should no more tracking down the tools used to commit a crime than tracking down where someone got the idea to commit a crime. The same goes for people who think a previous gun owner should have some responsibility for what happens to their gun after it leaves their possession. If people and corporations aren’t responsible for the ideas they communicate (except in certain extreme cases) then why should anyone be responsible for tools they used to own?

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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Thank you, Erik Dilan, for calling it a “fine.” You’re making the inevitable multi-million dollar lawsuit against your city that much easier.

Sebastian
October 26, 2010
Bloomberg Looking to Avoid a Lawsuit
[A New York City Councilman says that you need to pay a fine to own a firearm. That is just so awesome! It is like (H/T to Rob B. who sent me an email)  when the gun store opened in Sunnyvale California and the nearby residents said things like, ““I feel as if having [a gun store] in close proximity to many schools is a danger.”

These people just don’t get it. What if you had to pay a fine to be a practicing Jew, Muslim, or Christian? What if the neighbors wanted zoning to keep Jewish Delis and the residences of homosexuals more than one mile from all schools? Feelings are only loosely correlated with reality.

To put these people in their place it’s going to take the same sort of slap down by the courts that it took to put people in their place who said things like, “God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them!”—Joe]

That idea has potential

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Hover your mouse over the image to get the best part of the joke.

And according to my sources it isn’t all that difficult to build a program which can read a few conversation threads on a topic then make short comments that are indistinguishable from a live person on a similar thread. I would write something to do that and haunt the comment sections of the anti-gun websites but they disable comments or we outnumber them about 100 to 1 already. Hence human labor ends up being “cheaper” than automating the task.

It would be even easier to automate the task of responding as an anti-gun person to all the pro-gun websites—so I did:

namespace AntiGunComment
{
    using System;

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string[] commentCollection =
            {
                “ban armor piercing ammo”,
                “ban assault weapons”,
                “ban cop killer bullets”,
                “ban plastic guns”,
                “ban Saturday Night Specials”,
                “ban sniper rifles”,
                “ban the shoulder thing that goes up”,
                “close the gun show loophole”,
                “get illegal guns off the streets”,
                “keep guns out of the hands of children”,
                “license gun owners”,
                “reduce gun availability”,
                “register all guns”,
                “require an arsenal license”,
            };
            const string commentFormat = “We need to {0}. It’s just COMMON SENSE!”;
            Random randomNumberGenerator = new Random();
            int index = randomNumberGenerator.Next(commentCollection.Length);

            Console.Write(string.Format(commentFormat, commentCollection[index]));
        }
    }
}

In case the source code is a little too obscure here is an executable for up to date Windows machines.

It’s a little scary to think someone could be replaced with such a small number of lines of code. With a little more work the capabilities could be enhanced such that it could respond to Bing News alerts by making a blog post. This could replace most of the anti-gun bloggers out there (hmm… maybe I could do that next weekend). I wonder what Joan Peterson and MikeB302000 would think of that… but then, maybe they already have been replaced. That would explain some things.

Quote of the day—Alexis Levinson

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took fellow Justice Elena Kagan out for a lesson in skeet shooting at his shooting club in Virginia last week.

Alexis Levinson
October 25, 2010
Scalia takes Kagan to gun range, sources say
[As Say Uncle said, “Awesome”.

I wonder how I would go about inviting the entire Supreme Court to Boomershoot. Of course the end of April is a very busy time for them. Maybe I would need to do a private party sometime during the summer.

The ideal would be to follow up the next week with the Brady Campaign Board of directors and tell them all the stories of the great fun the SC had.

Hmmm… I just realized I know someone who could get the attention of and invite the SC. I’ll have to run this idea past him sometime…—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thirdpower

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As their public support continues to wane and mergers of the groups continue, it appears they’re having a harder time finding enough people to run even these reduced organizations. It also shows that their agendas are just as similar as we’ve claimed all along. While the Brady Bunch filed a ‘neutral’ brief in McDonald and claimed ‘handgun bans are off the table, all the Joyce groups opposed the ownership of handguns. We’ve seen the Brady’s pick up the ‘insurrectionist’ meme championed by Josh Horwitz.

Gun control advocates like to rant on about the NRA and how they control the opinions and messages of all these blogs and other pro-gun groups. The reality is that there is much more diversity in opinion and leadership among firearm advocates that what is left of the gun control movement.

They are one and the same and we’ll continue to see their extremist viewpoints shrink along w/ their support and budgets.

Thirdpower
October 24, 2010
One and the Same
[This observation also explains the presence of people with obvious mental defects, such as Joan Peterson, on the board of anti-gun groups. They have both a shortage of money and qualified people. This also explains the success of Mary McFate (or Mary Lou Sapone). Sebastian (in a private email) deserves credit for this last observation. And this problem they have can and should be exploited to the maximum possible. We need to press them as fast as we can on as many fronts as we can. We outnumber them at least 100 to one and have ten times (or more) as much disposable money.

Lets crush them and drive them into political extinction.—Joe]

Gaining traction

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Via Say Uncle and Greg.

“Bigots” is used in the MSM to describe those opposed to guns in public:

Despite Florida’s reputation as a gun-crazy state, we actually are like some socialist European country when it comes to bearing our arms. We make people get permits and hide their heat under jackets and coats, lest they offend the sissy gun bigots.

It’s pretty amazing to think how much has changed in the last 10 years. And don’t forget it could have changed that much or more in the other direction. Think of the change in recreational drug use/tolerance from the early 70’s to the 80s’. Think of naked pictures of airplane passengers now versus 10 years ago. Think of Jews in Germany in 1930 versus 1940.

When people say something “could never happen here” tell them to read their history. Attitudes can change very, very fast.

We have gained a lot of traction on the gun rights agenda in the last 10 years. We need to keep the “pedal to the metal” and push the bigots as close to political extermination as we can.

Random thought of the day

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There has been some very good postings about “need” recently. Perhaps a good comeback for the Marxist with the mindset of “to everyone according to their needs” can be expressed a little more succulently.


In this country the people don’t have to justify their needs to the government. The government has to justify their needs to the people.

Quote of the day—John R. Lott Jr.

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The only “evidence” that “screening works” comes from their claim that, in 2008, 1.5 percent of those having a Brady background check were denied from purchasing a gun. What the authors likely are aware of, though they do not tell the readers, is that virtually all these cases represent so-called “false-positives”: In 2006 and 2007 (the latest data years available), a tiny fraction — just 2 percent of those 1.5 percent — involved possible unlawful possession; just 0.2 percent of the 1.5 percent were viewed as prosecutable — 174 cases in 2006 and 122 in 2007. At least a third of the remaining cases didn’t result in convictions. These are the types of errors that an academic journal shouldn’t let in, but if it does, they should fix it. But it is my understanding that the journal has refused to publish a clarification of these numbers.

…

Eventually even the subscribers to the New England Journal of Medicine will learn about these facts. Just look at the changes in the climate debate — not even the most prestigious places can get away with biased research for too long.

John R. Lott Jr.
October 18, 2010
Medical Journal Bias on Guns
[Via Phil.

As I have said before people can appear to be normal functional members of society yet have severe mental defects. Just as people at the Brady Campaign can’t seem to distinguish between a hypothesis and a conclusion some of the “researchers” published in the New England Journal of Medicine have the same problem or are deliberately publishing bad papers. In either case they deserve to have their credentials pulled.—Joe]

Huh?

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This just doesn’t make sense to me. But I guess that is to be expected when you are dealing with journalists and anti-gun people:

Wendy Cukier teaches at a business school, so she understands economic imperatives – and the importance of innovation and prosperity. But for the associate dean of Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, what matters most is preserving core Canadian values around safety, equity and respect for human rights.

This is so full of fail it is mindboggling.

The right to defend oneself is the most basic human right in existence yet she works to restrict it at every opportunity. This endangers and imbalances things. It doesn’t preserve safety and equity.

She understands economic imperatives? Yeah, right. Read the rest of the article. She is all about liberal causes.

An expert in emerging technologies, Prof. Cukier has spent two decades championing workplace diversity and gun control. The unifying themes of her work are innovation and change processes, says the co-author of 2002’s Innovation Nation: Canadian Leadership From Java to Jurassic Park. After spending her early career with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Prof. Cukier became a consultant to organizations such as the Palo Alto, California–based Institute for the Future.

It seems to me it is quite a stretch to connect “emerging technologies” with “championing workplace diversity and gun control”. I wonder if that was Cukier or the writer that came up with that.

Also note:

The Transformational Canadians program celebrates 25 living citizens who have made a difference by immeasurably improving the lives of others. Readers were invited to nominate Canadians who fit this description. Over several weeks, a panel of six judges will select 25 Transformational Canadians from among the nominees.

Nominations remain open until November 26. Submit yours today.

I think some balance to the anti-rights representative needs to made. Know any pro-freedom Canadians that might qualify?